Noiseworks PR - notable for its silence
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Apple upgrades to AMD Radeon graphics
SCURRILOUS RUMOURS that Apple was going to shift back to Nvidia's graphics chips appear to have come to nothing and Jobs' Mob will be using AMD's ATI Radeon graphics in its next Macs.
According to AMD, Apple will use ATI Radeons for its next lines of Apple Imac and Mac Pro tower PCs.
The high-performance AMD ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card features 1GB of GDDR5 memory. It seems that AMD pitched the chips as being good for motion graphics, 3D modeling, rendering or animation. The ATI graphics technology will come as standard. There will be an upgrade for Mac fanbois to an ATI Radeon HD 5870 card if they want more power.
HD 5750 graphics will be available in the new 27-inch Imac. HD 5650 graphics will be available in the new 22-inch and 27-inch Imacs. HD 4670 graphics will also be available in the new 22-inch Imac.
Apple and the Green Goblin were best mates until last year when Nvidia started sending out chips that were broken, in a debacle that we called "bumpgate". That fiasco cost Apple lots of money as it committed to offering unprecedented free replacements for three years if the Nvidia graphics chip went bad.
But these days Apple just offers users a free rubber band if something doesn't work. µ
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Try looking for Mac drivers at the nVidia site, you won't find any. Likewise you don't get a control panel for ANY graphics card (the idea that you'd need one is contrary to Apple's philosophy of hiding technical details from users). You get a settings page to change resolution and calibrate colour. That's your lot for any video card.
Driver updates, unless they are major bug fixes, are part of x.x.1 point releases (something between a patch and a service pack in MS terms). As there are only a limited number of graphics chips that Apple have shipped they can test drivers fully against all of their hardware. Why do you think that this is some kind of problem?
I remember when my friend got a Mac Pro (or whatever they called it back then) when they featured the Radeon 9800 Pro. Unfortunately, for my friend, the Mac Pro used an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro made especially for the Mac Pro.
Unlike the retail version, you could not download drivers from ATI to update them, and not only that, there were no control panels or any video card controls at all for this card. ATI did not have any concept of a "unified driver architecture" like nVidia did at the time, and I'm not sure if that'd even apply on a Mac platform. Apple also neglected to provide any updated drivers, so my friend was stuck with archaic, crippled drivers for his top-of-the-line ATI card.
I guess it didn't really matter since games were not, and still are not, very plentiful on the Macs. Still, I've come to associate Macs + Radeons as a match made in hell.
Why do people like the dearly departed Vanillacide bother posting goodbye messages on websites like these, nobody gives a fuck1 really, not a single soul cares whether you read the inq or el reg.
Why do people post hate messages on these sites, i mean seriously, if you dont like the articles, fine, move on, go read somewhere else, we wont miss you, I promise! when you post messages about how crappy, dull, irritating or otherwise retarded the author is, all you're doing is making yourself look the role you're bitching about!
You dont have to read INQ if you dont like the stories, but something keeps drawing you people back here, but you feel the need to birch about it! just move along. Its not like its a paid subscription and you're getting fucked by INQ with shitty content, like rupert murdoch offers! you're not paying anything, its a free site...
So read it, or not, but shut the fuck up about it!
Bye!!
I used to like The INQ, I used to like it a lot; but since Mike left it's really gone downhill. I've gone back to reading El Reg, which has improved after a few dull years, and even Fuad's site is improving.
So, it's finally time, I am removing INQ from my favourites/shortcuts/links.
KTB
Radeon on iMac and Mac Mini makes sense but it is absolutely stupid to put it into "Mac Pro" Workstation line as it is an end user/consumer/gamer/video watcher card, it is not a professional card which really carries functions like FireGL (FirePro).
It's not news, The inq just found out so it's news to them. Day late and a dollar short.
On my side of the pond we say Apple is offering condoms.
Aren't you talking about the computers that Apple themselves announced last month?
how come no 5830 or 5850's?
good morning Nick
haha.... nice one