What's up with graphics cards on the Mac side?

[Doc69]

Can someone explain to me why ATI and n'Vidia doesn't make more of their graphics cards available for the Mac and why it usually takes so long to bring them to market? Can it be that hard or expensive really? It's all PCIe.

I recently had to pay more than $350 on eBay for a used AGP X800XT for my aging PowerMac. That's about the same price as they charge for a new X1950XT 512MB for a PC! And a used X800XT for PCs, you can probably get on eBay for about $100!

And why no SLI and Crossfire on the Mac?

With Apple writing more and more software that takes advantage of the GPU with core image, core animation and core video, like Aperture, faster graphics is needed on the Mac as well!

 

[ghall]

Cuz they're too lazy!

Seriously though, as far as I know, only ATI and Nvidia know the answer to that question.

 

[MacSociology]

Can someone explain to me why ATI and n'Vidia doesn't make more of their graphics cards available for the Mac and why it usually takes so long to bring them to market? Can it be that hard or expensive really? It's all PCIe.

GPU´s for the Mac use EFI (with a bigger sized ROM). And there just ain´t a big enough market for ATI and Nvidia to produce them yet. At least not until Windows Vista which is EFI compatible. Windows XP wasn´t compatible with EFI wich pretty much stopped the usage of EFI. As we all know Windows XP PC´s use BIOS instead of EFI.

 

[Sun Baked]

There are no real upgrade card choices for the Mac, because there aren't enough owners of those machines for ATI/Nvidia to do much more than support variants of the OEM card.

If Apple released a consumer tower, the number of buyers likely would make the upgrade market worth it again for card makers.

If you don't like the way things work in a niche market, jump ship to the PC side.

Of course if you likely can have any card you want for the Mac, just pay the price Apple does for card -- offer to buy a couple hundred thousand or pay an astounding price for 1 card.