By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Sunday, January 19, 2003 - 11:14 pm:

Apple's next major OS release, 10.3 (Panther), is still some time off. Possibly it'll be released mid-year at MacWorld.

However some iteresting tidbits are reported on Think Secret, regarding graphics cards:

http://www.thinksecret.com/news/macosx1024.html
Apple is planning to support several workstation-quality graphics cards in 10.3, that weren't previously supported, including full support for NVidia Quadro 980, 900, and 750XGL. Support will also be added for ATI's top-end Fire GL series.

It's been a long time coming for these graphics cards to be available on the Mac. Some welcome news!

By Chris W. (Chriswork) (24.123.214.36) on Monday, January 20, 2003 - 07:12 am:

Hopefully "support" will mean high-quality drivers that actually work. The "support" for the GeForce Ti has been disappointing to say the least.

By Michael Linde (Mlinde) (4.64.207.47) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 07:56 am:

This is only partially comforting. These cards require support on two ends, Apple and the manufacturer.

Drivers (which Apple has done poorly with) are the second step, which should not require an OS upgrade (but probably will, knowing Apple), while the first step is the firmware on the GPU of the cards. The manufacturer has to have a firmware version that recognizes and translates commands from a Macintosh video driver. That's one reason you can't just go out and buy a PC video card and drop it in a Mac, even if it's a similar type of card (i.e. GeForce 4 - Win). There is some possibility that ATI and Nvidia are responding to the growth in the Mac 3D sector and working on firmware, but that still leaves us with Apple making half-assed video drivers.

By Scot Walker (Tallscot) (63.196.104.229) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 06:18 pm:

You can buy a PC GeForce 3 or PC GeForce 2 MX card and flash the firmware and use it in a Mac. The directions on how to do this are on xlr8yourmac.com.

According to them, you cann even use this PC GeForce 3 on a 2X AGP Mac even though the Mac version won't.

By Michael Linde (Mlinde) (4.64.204.46) on Friday, January 24, 2003 - 03:46 pm:

Sure, you can flash the firmware and use it. That is no small task, if you've read the instructions or done it before. What I said was you can't buy the card and drop it in your mac, straight out of the box. Even today, with the mid-range/high-end video cards (Nvidia Quadro series and ATI Fire series) you can't make these work on a Mac, because there is no Mac-equivalent to get the ROM off of (ignoring the whole issue with drivers).

Somebody has to write the Mac version of the firmware. If that happens for the professional cards, we can at least HOPE that we can also get decent video drivers.