Suggested Graphics Cards For The Macintosh?

ntac writes "After the recent unveiling of the nVidia cards for the new line of G4's, my graphic design co-workers and I have been debating which card has the most bang for the buck. ATI seems to have burned a lot of bridges within the Mac community. Does the GeForce2 have the juice to replace the ATI Radeon? I've also noticed that Mac drivers are available for the 3dfx Voodoo cards - is this another viable option? As designers, we are looking for high performance in Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, Flash, and Premiere. Any help would be greatly appreciated."

Comments

Here's the thing...

[Millennium]

With 3Dfx now officially pushing up the daisies, your choices have become a lot more limited.

You can still get 3Dfx cards, yes. But there's a catch: for anything higher than Voodoo3 (meaning V4 and V5) you need to get 3Dfx's Mac-specific version of the card (they added some stuff to the Mac cards that you don't get on the PC, like QuickTime acceleration, but they also took some things away, like DVD playback). You also have to find the drivers, which isn't a very simple task now that the 3Dfxgamers site is down.

NVidia has yet to come out with a retail Mac card; at the moment they appear to be OEM-only, though all of their current chips could at least theoretically work in a Mac.

Then, of course, there's ATI. Decent cards, but extremely crappy drivers. You can try this one if you want, but watch your back; they may not be what you'd expected.

Formac makes a very nice Mac-specific card with a nifty little gadget: computer 3-D glasses which Formac claims really enhance the experience (I haven't tried it, but I do know that normal 3-D glasses won't work in this case). However, be prepared to shell out the dough.

I don't know if VillageTronic still makes their MacPicasso stuff, but these were absolutely wonderful cards in their time. Definitely check into this line; the card had a modular design so it could be expanded without replacing the whole card.
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Do you really need a 3D card?

[Mononoke]

If all you are doing is 2-dimensional graphics, then you don't need most of the bells and whistles the fancy 3D-optimized cards offer.

ixMicro made a nice little 2D accelerated PCI vid card that you can get for almost nothing these days. That's what's driving the primary 20" monitor at my office.

I'm running a Voodoo3 for second (although primary) monitor at home, where I do both 2D design and play 3D games. Its 2D accelleration is quite good, almost too good. Scrolling menus zip right by.

Check Xlr8YourMac.com for comparisons of many video cards in many different systems.

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