Upcoming Macs to offer Radeon 5000, GeForce 400 graphics
Honestly, I don’t much care for digging through boxes, etc in our semi-finished basement — silver fish, centipedes and spiders, oh my! But, there are those who actually enjoy crawling around, flashlight clenched firmly in their teeth, around inside the bowels of every Apple software release. Thanks be to those with these proclivities as they’re always coming up with something new and interesting about the computers we love.
A forum poster — welcome to the news world order — has found indications that Apple’s planning to bring ATI Radeon HD 5000 and nVidia GeForce 400 series to the Mac. The evidence, some partly chewed bones and the associated droppings, were found in a new firmware build of Mac OS X 10.6.4 specific to the Mid-2010 Mac mini, as well as leaked nVidia drivers.
These enterprising souls took these portents as signs they could install retail ATI and nVidia cards in their Mac towers. Thereupon, they did have some success installing and using this new to the platform hardware.
The ATI-oriented code doesn’t identify any chipsets by name but does at least appear to run an aftermarket Radeon HD 5870 on a basic level through some extra work. Others trying to use a Radeon HD 5770, and Mobility Radeon HD chipsets, aren’t having the same success … Some have successfully run third-party [nVidia] cards as well with hardware acceleration, although it shows up as ‘NVIDIA Graphics Card’ in System Profiler.”
Proof positive that these graphical processing units (GPU) will be coming in next-generation Macs? Nope, but Apple’s not one to waste effort on components, especially in a mature product like the Mac, they don’t intend to use…
What’s your take?
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