[geeks] PCI-E video cards

[nate at portents.com]

> Stupid on Apple's part, most certainly, but also stupid on the
> industry's part because the technology to render this issue moot has
> been around since 1994 or so.

ATI briefly shipped a 9600 that had a Mac and PC compatible firmware (so
it could handle both an x86 BIOS and Apple's OpenFirmware).

The current Intel Mac video cards have an EFI firmware on them that also
contains a traditional x86 BIOS compatible firmware, which together need a
128KB EEPROM (most, but not all, PC video cards ship with a 64KB EEPROM). 
Find the right PC video card with a 128KB EEPROM (or solder one on
yourself) and you can flash yourself a video card.

And once the rest of the industry adopts EFI (which they eventually will),
we'll see EFI video cards sold in stores that will most likely work in
Macs without flashing.  I wouldn't expect the PC industry to get it's act
together for another two years or so though (Vista was originally going to
ship with EFI boot capability, but the feature was pulled before it got
shipped, and I'm not sure if it's been brought back for SP1).

- Nate