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Done with homework... got a Master's & a T-Shirt.

I wasn't doing any serious research. It just struck me as odd that they cost so much for what you get (in this particular case anyhow).  Of course in the case of the Mac G4 Ti, Apple makes the actual board. As opposed to everybody & their PC brothers pumping out boards with the same guts. And I know that in the ATI camp there is parity on the high end stuff.

Check this- http://www.macmall.com/macmall/shop/det … 941#scroll

Compare to this - http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.a … amp;DEPA=1

Food for thought, looks like Apple would offer a sale price on older components. Alas, it IS an imperfect world....

I wasn't doing any serious research. It just struck me as odd that they cost so much for what you get (in this particular case anyhow).  Of course in the case of the Mac G4 Ti, Apple makes the actual board.

I doubt Apple produces the boards. Previous nivida cards to have their boards produced by VisionTek for Apple... and they still may be produced by VisionTek for Apple. However, it's kind of hard to tell.

Apple doesn't publicly state it's hardware manufactures, and VisionTek is now owned by Hartford Computer Group, Inc., which doesn't publicly list Apple as a client that purchases nvidia cards.  But, then again, Hartford doesn't really list any other companies as well.



If I had to bet, I say Apple's GeForce 4Ti is probably just a VisionTek with a Mac ROM. VisionTek is produces generic nVidia cards for most hardware manufacturers.  The card could have a slightly different chipset; however the only way to really figure this mess out is to get some PC GeForce 4Ti's and to start dumping Mac ROMs on them.

But that could be an expensive experiment.

None of you have answered the question. It comes to this:

Are MAC ROM's really that freakin' expensive to make? Esqueeze me but wirting some code and sticking it in a chip has been done since the eraly 4004 CPU's. It should be a no=brainer by now.

So to get back on topic?

Why do mac video cards cost more than their pc counterparts? Is it due to:

1. PC hardware has 100's of vendors. Competition forces lower prices.
2. Steve Jobs cocaine and hooker addictions?
3. PC Programmers charge more to click that button that says "Compile for MAC OS."
4. God willed it.

Since Apple likes to make the "whole widget" as it were, I vote for 1.

3. PC Programmers charge more to click that button that says "Compile for MAC OS."

It's not that simple, and since the development cost needs to be born by a smaller market, the retail price is higher.

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From what I've read it IS strictly a ROM issue. On the Mac "tweaker" sites you hear a lot about people replacing ROMs of PC cards with their Mac counterpart and have them work sucessfully....

I'm surprised there isn't an underground "cottage industry" for this.

Almost all the older types of vid card can be flash-ROMed to work on Macs, some new ones are troublesome.  the cards some times can be a few bucks more but oh well

3. PC Programmers charge more to click that button that says "Compile for MAC OS."

It's not that simple, and since the development cost needs to be born by a smaller market, the retail price is higher.

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To me it is that simple. Most good compilers can write for any OS if you know what your are doing. Considering the ROM chip is the same in both versions (minus the actual code which is of course different), I see no excuse for that being a defense of higher prices.

Hiring programmers and debugging for the Mac, could be considering developing for a niche market. However it would be my guess that 90% of the code is the same.

ATI and nVidia (rip ixMicro) develop mainly for the PC, with the Mac as an afterthought. That afterthought costs us ca$h. I can see maybe $10 - $40 more for a Mac video board, however the prices, IMHO, are simply them saying that they feel we are not necessary to their survival. Sad, but os so tru in the business sense of things.

Just wondering.... Why do that faithful have to pay $400 (128Mb NVidia G4 Ti for ex. among others) for a card that uses 2 yr old tech that a PC owner can scoop up for a third of the price?

What a screw job!

Ouch. I just picked up a 128M FX5600 Ultra with all the goodies (VIVO) for $99.00.. to replace the 128M ATI 9200 I got a few months back for about the same.  Keeping the same video card for too long is so 90's.

Temetka, you may be able to compile the same code for different operating systems, but when you're writing a driver, something that interacts on a low level with the OS kernel, things get more complicated.  Every OS has different programming interfaces that need to be coded.

Then you get into the differences between win32 API calls and native quartz/cocoa API calls, and you start to see that your position is untenable.

So no, it's not as simple as "recompiling" a driver or program for MacOS.

Correct. To a degree. The hardware costs no more to produce than thier PC counterparts. There might be a discrepancy of +- 5 in hardware costs. However just becuase some code needs to be changed does not neccesitate the higher costs of developing for the mac.

It's up to the game developers and app developers to take advantage of said hardware. Of course their programs should refelect that cost.

However in my book charging nearly 100% more for the same video card is simply ludicrous. They do it because they know we will pay it. IN the business sense of things that is all that really matters.

Until some 3rd chip vendor starts making stuff for the Mac (Permedia, Number Nine, Trident, BotBoysOy...) were stuck with buying mansions for ATI and nVidia execs.

Temetka, you may be able to compile the same code for different operating systems, but when you're writing a driver, something that interacts on a low level with the OS kernel, things get more complicated.  Every OS has different programming interfaces that need to be coded.

Then you get into the differences between win32 API calls and native quartz/cocoa API calls, and you start to see that your position is untenable.

So no, it's not as simple as "recompiling" a driver or program for MacOS.

Correct. To a degree. The hardware costs no more to produce than thier PC counterparts. There might be a discrepancy of +- 5 in hardware costs. However just becuase some code needs to be changed does not neccesitate the higher costs of developing for the mac.

It's up to the game developers and app developers to take advantage of said hardware. Of course their programs should refelect that cost.

However in my book charging nearly 100% more for the same video card is simply ludicrous. They do it because they know we will pay it. IN the business sense of things that is all that really matters.

Until some 3rd chip vendor starts making stuff for the Mac (Permedia, Number Nine, Trident, BotBoysOy...) were stuck with buying mansions for ATI and nVidia execs.

So, the programmers just work for free in your mind, then?

Making these pieces of software costs money, and when the user base is smaller (I'd bet that out of all of the PowerMacs with AGP slots, only the minority wants to actually dig in and upgrade things), the cost per user to maintain a separate codebase goes up. 

In other words, "it's the software."

Ouch. I just picked up a 128M FX5600 Ultra with all the goodies (VIVO) for $99.00.. to replace the 128M ATI 9200 I got a few months back for about the same.  Keeping the same video card for too long is so 90's.

Yeah, and buying a new video card not much better than the "old" one is so cool.

Seriously, out of all the PC users I know, only a very few have anything near top on the line systems, and the ones that do only buy new stuff rarely.

If you look at reviews of modern game, you'll find that the Radeon 9200 lags behind the GeForce 5600 FX. In Microsoft parlance, the R9200 is a DirectX 8.1 part, while the GeForce 5600 FX is a DirectX 9.0 part.

To be certified as a DirectX part, the card is required to support a defined feature set in hardware. Game studios then write games for the new DirectX API, and gamers with older cards may find that their machines emulate the missing functionality in software. Sometimes, this can reduce framerates to below 20 fps...

When these games are ported into OpenGL, for the mac market, the API may not be as well defined--but cards that cards that support a more extensive set of GL_EXTENSIONs will render the models more quickly and with more fidelity.

Don't buy a new card for an extra 20 frames in Quake 3. Buy it for an extra 20 frames in Doom 3.

Let me understand this:

You believe that since the development costs for a niche market are there, the people in said market should pay more? MOst of the code is the same. An opengl call is an opengl call. It's a standard for a reason.

It is standard on the application side. There's hardly anything standard about it on the driver side.

As a programmer, I can write programs for the mac or pc and it's really no big thing to do so. I charge the same rate regardless of what platform my client is on. I feel that is the way it should be. Writing code is just that: writing code.

Yeah, and proting applications is relatively easy. Writing platform-specific code, partly in assembly, isn't. It sure as hell isn't a trivial matter.

,xtG
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