Nuxx.net Ati Radeon 4870 Flashed For Mac

Now that Apple shares the same basic architecture found on every personal computer in the world (sans PPC macs still in use), why is there even a seperate 'Mac compitable ATI card'? Beyond the drivers (I know drivers are hard to write, I'm not downplaying the work that goes into that) and the EFI, why make an exclusive card for the mac? Why not provide drivers online at a price?

Or provide them for free. More ATI cards sold of the shelf is a good thing for ATI. Not sure how the economics works out for ATI, or if there is a significant technical difference between mac compatible cards and OEM PC cards. Originally posted by 9600man: Now that Apple shares the same basic architecture found on every personal computer in the world (sans PPC macs still in use), why is there even a seperate 'Mac compitable ATI card'? Beyond the drivers (I know drivers are hard to write, I'm not downplaying the work that goes into that) and the EFI, why make an exclusive card for the mac?

Why not provide drivers online at a price? Or provide them for free. More ATI cards sold of the shelf is a good thing for ATI. Not sure how the economics works out for ATI, or if there is a significant technical difference between mac compatible cards and OEM PC cards. Because they don't use the exact same architecture for the most part, Intel Macs needs some hardware to have EFI instead of standard BIOS support on the hardware.

Hardware manufacturers generally don't include hybrid solutions and if they do it's an extra process that usually requires more money. For the 3870, ATI/AMD provided a Mac/PC card with both BIOS and EFI, hopefully they do the same again for the 4870. IIRC the problem with the nVidia 8800GT when it came out and incompatibility with the 2006 Mac Pro was the ROM only had room for the either the 64bit version or the 32bit version. So instead of making a special card with a bigger ROM to fit them both they shipped each kit as a separate card only differing in the software. I quess it made sense to not bother doing a production run with bigger ROM's.

ATI appears to not have these issues for some reason, maybe they use bigger ROM's in general to make things easier? Originally posted by 9600man: I just did a quick wiki check on EFI and it seems that EFI based computers is not commonly sold (i.e. Major PC OEM's don't sell consumer PC's that use EFI).

So this is an issue of economics for ATI and nVidia. One of my hopes I had when Apple moved to the Intel x86 architecture was a wider choice of third party hardware solutions, i.e. Damn, damn, damn.

Nuxx.net Ati Radeon 4870 Flashed For Macbook Pro

EFI is both a blessing and a curse. It is the future of firmware, but yes, not widely adopted at the mo'.

Nuxx.net Ati Radeon 4870 Flashed For Macbook Pro

It is certainly the reason you can't use all video cards in your macs, but it does enable some neat stuff like ctrl-opt-cmd-8. Originally posted by 9600man: I just did a quick wiki check on EFI and it seems that EFI based computers is not commonly sold (i.e. Major PC OEM's don't sell consumer PC's that use EFI). So this is an issue of economics for ATI and nVidia. One of my hopes I had when Apple moved to the Intel x86 architecture was a wider choice of third party hardware solutions, i.e. Damn, damn, damn. EFI is both a blessing and a curse.

It is the future of firmware, but yes, not widely adopted at the mo'. It is certainly the reason you can't use all video cards in your macs, but it does enable some neat stuff like ctrl-opt-cmd-8.

Plus it isn't a honking peice of crap from the early 80s. It's too bad microsoft isn't doing anything about it, the entire PC industry is trash because of it. It's why you still get PCs today that have PS/2.

I referred to the Clovertown as first generation because Apple refers to it that way in their specifications pages. I understand the WoodCrest was the very first chipset in the Mac Pro. I did personally test the 4870 on the Clovertown.

A close friend has successfully tested it on the Woodcrest as of yesterday. That's great news!!

Nuxx.net Ati Radeon 4870 Flashed For Mac Free

Thanks for the update! I still wonder why Apple would bother to state that the hardware was only compatible with the latest machines.what's the point of that???? They probably didn't want to do all the testing and the support costs involved in guaranteeing compatibility. They no doubt want you to update too. I agree with that analysis.

The problem is that it fosters a black market for flashed 4870s. AppleMacanix already has a flashed 4870 for sale on their eBay store. And one of the most active forums on MacRumors' forum is on dumping and flashing PC 4870s to work on the Mac Pro. Two advantages to the flashed version: It's available now (instead of '4 to 5 weeks') and it has two 'real' DVI ports. These results are so strange. The 8800GT that couldn't outperform the theoretically slower HD3870 on Harpertown Mac Pros suddenly outperforms the supposedly much faster HD4870 on the Nehalem Mac Pros.

Even the HD3870 seems competitive with the HD4870 in Core Image and the GT120 are also strange with them being awfully fast on Nehalem in Imaginator while disproportionatly slower on Harpertown. The HD3870 is also much faster on Harpertown than Nehalem, which is opposite what you'd expect.

I guess Apple finally fixed the Core Image problems that were occurring with NVidia graphics cards. Are there any disadvantages for going with the flashed version? Yup, no warranty, shady dealings on ebay, or having to flash it yourself and potentially bricking your expensive GPU. Also, you might need to track down a specific version of the 4870 from a specific brand in order to have the same board layout and GPU revision etc. So make sure that you really research it, get the right card, get the right ROM, print out the instructions exactly before embarking on what you need to do and double check everything youre doing. But no, not really.

You dont get mini-displayport, but on the upside you do get dual DVI. So thats more compatible with 3rd parties.