Apple developing its own graphics card?

simX

simX

Unofficial Mac Genius
Originally from Architosh
Apple is apparently working on a superfast graphics card with twin-engines. Our sources tell us that the card may or may not be co-designed with Nvidia. Each GPU is fitted out with "heaps of ram" our sources say, estimating the amount at 128 MB for DDR-RAM for each engine (GPU). Besides a curious daughter-card slot on the card, our sources say that they no very little about the rest of the card—other than to say its performance on the test box was nothing short of astonishing.
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This rumor is not unsubstantiated, especially coming from a prestigious source like Architosh and not from macrumors.com or spymac.com . Remember how Apple bought Raycer over a year and a half ago? It "specialized in making advanced workstation level graphic engines (GPUs)". Interesting.

Discuss. :D
 
The lack of a "serious" 3D graphics card for the Mac is currently only half the problem. The other half is that Carbon 3D appllications currently suffer from really bad open GL performance. Lightwave and Cinema 4D both have awful OpenGl redraws in the OS X versions. Which is a major shame, because OS X finally gives users of these applications the stability and rendering speed that OS 9 never could. I'm a Lightwave user (with a G4/800DP w/ GF3 card), and the performance is so lame when dealing with high polygon models that it has me seriously considering adding a AMD Box just for Lightwave.

The kicker is that some Carbon applications feature great OpenGL performance, like QuakeIII. It has better frame rates under OS X than under 9. Maybe it's the individual developers (NewTek, Maxon) responsibility to optimize their apps OpenGL perfrormance, but from what I've heard, it needs some serious work under OS X.

(BTW - I had responded to a very similiar thread/discussion over at macrumors.com, so I just cut&pasted my response from there. )
 
Hmmm, might wanna upgrade from GF2:MX soon, this could really be the ting on my Mac putting PCs to shame at LANs...but I won't believe the rumor just like that. Until Steve Jobs say "Until now, graphics cards have not been nearly good enough" I'll stay critical to this rumor.
 
Hm, we could always hope for accelerated Quartz rendering...which up until now is only possible with faster/more CPUs.
 
Please, oh please, oh please be true. So sick of sluggishness. Much desire to crush PC friends in graphics acceleration. Drool.
 
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