The development of GPUs never ceases to amaze me - they keep pulling some crazy speed increases out of the bag. It's the usage/market side that pisses me off - continually horrible integrated graphics in all but the high end systems and Apple continuing to rip us off to get a decent graphics card in the Mac Pro.. eugh (£280 for a Mac HD 4870 in the UK.. $460ish).
I bit the bullet and paid almost that much for a reflashed PC ATI 4870, but with 1GB of VRAM as opposed to the Apple stock card's 512.
I resent all the obstacles I encountered getting a decent graphics card & Windows 7 64-bit on my Mac Pro 1,1, but now that it is done I'm quite happy with it. The card performs very well in both Windows & OS X.
The whole "no 64 bit SL kernel on EFI32" however is more than I can deal with.
I can work around 64 bit Windows not booting properly & and the Boot Camp drivers denying installation on a 1,1 Mac Pro. I can pay a stupid amount for a decent graphics card because Apple provides NO upgrade option for 1,1 owners, not even an expensive one.
But as it stands, there is simply no way to work around the 64 bit kernel problem.
I'm not interested in using it now, but from the way things look I'll never be able to use it on this machine, even when Apple makes it default.
The moral of this is never trust Apple to be reasonable or care at all about a product they can't hype up or sell to millions of people. Upgrades fall into this category.
Only buy a Mac if you really like OS X. If you are looking for the absolute best of both worlds, Apple will cripple you intentionally & unintentionally along the way in ways you can't even predict.
I'm not defending it, I hate it & it sucks. But its true. Good thing I really like OS X.
Oh and if you do buy the card, do tell me if it still causes your mouse to freeze every 3 seconds with dual 3rd party monitors. Thats a fun one to troubleshoot, especially right after a 400 dollar purchase!
Funny, SGI used to use racy colours for all their boxen too. Yesterday's announcement of the plain-Jane Octane III was such a disappointment in that respect.
I don't know this for sure, but I heard you can put a consumer video card in a Mac Pro. You cannot boot from it, nor use it in OS X (due to both lack of drivers and EFI support), but it will work in Windows via Boot Camp.
Yeah, you're right, although I've looked into it and it's often far from easy (especially with power cable and slot requirements for PCIx channels and double width cards).
I was going to get the ridiculously expensive HD 4870 from Apple but there were a lot of complaints about it simply not working in Windows under Boot Camp which freaked me out a bit. Supposedly Apple's response to that was they don't "support" that..
