The events and controversies of the Macintosh world in the last few months have tended to resemble a TV soap opera, so much so that As The Apple Turns has plenty of material to justify the name of the site. There has been plenty to keep any web writer busy and guessing, and most of the time any of us trying to figure out what will happen usually don't quite hit the mark. I certainly have wound up with enough egg on my own face. However, I have noticed that one very interesting series of events seem to have escaped close scrutiny as we all stare in awe at the Cube, wonder when Motorola will finally produce something faster than a 500 MHz G4 chip, feel thankful that the stupid hockey puck mouse has been replaced with that "buttonless" marvel and so forth.

"What events?" I hear someone out there ask. After all, hasn't everything that Apple has been doing of late been examined by the media so thoroughly that Apple execs must feel as if they have all suffered a collective prostate exam?

Well, there is this business about the graphics cards used by Apple. Currently, Apple uses the ATI RAGE 128 as the installed graphics card and chip in most models, and the mobile versions in the PowerBooks. In fact, ATI replaced IX Micro as the previous preferred graphics card maker a few years ago and up until recently Apple really didn't have a lot of choices here. Until the last few months one of the few hardware advantages the Wintel crowd had over the Mac was in the area of affordable high performance graphics cards. The Wintel types could smugly point to the 3dfx VooDoo cards and the NVIDIA GeForce cards. Apple still stuck to ATI partly because at least the ATI cards properly supported Apple graphics technology and was capable of good pro level performance for Apple's main market in prepress and publishing. However, although the GeForce and Voodoo cards were somewhat limited in the needs of the professional graphics market, the ATI cards were always behind the Wintel competition in game performance.

Then some interesting things started to happen. First, some Mac gamers were able to get Voodoo cards to function on Macs by using shareware drivers. Although performance wasn't perfect, it was certainly better than the ATI RAGE PRO cards. Perhaps that's when the 3dfx people began to realize that they may have a potential to get a piece of that $85+ billion prepress and graphics market that Apple dominates. Also, a few months ago NVIDIA approached Apple with an offer they hoped Apple could not refuse and proposed a Mac specific version of the GeForce cards. Apple was reported to have declined the offer, possibly out of some loyalty to ATI, and possibly because reports of ATI's RADEON chip's performance, first announced publicly by ATI in a press release on April 25, 2000, looked pretty good on paper.

On the other hand, Apple noticed that they had two other up and coming choices from both NVIDIA and 3dfx, both of which made faster performing graphics cards than ATI and both of which had some new technology that could at least compete with the RADEON. In short, Apple realized that for the first time in years they actually had real choices.

That is when Apple seems to have started to collect the cards together and start playing the Card Game. Of course, it may have started out being a bit like poker, but perhaps it has become something more like 3 Card Monte. With ATI, NVIDIA, 3dfx, and more recently, Formac joining into the arena to sell graphics cards to Mac people, Apple would have to be run by blind fools not to notice. The only question now is, what kind of a hand is Apple holding, what bluffs are they playing and how much are they putting on the table? Perhaps that little blow up at MacWorld in New York was a handy excuse to put some pressure on ATI for a better deal. After all Apple is still one of the biggest clients they have, even though ATI often acts as if Apple was only some toilet paper sticking to the bottoms of their shoes.

The only notable news items about the Card Game have been when Steve Jobs blew a cork over ATI's press release that appeared two days before MacWorld NY that mentioned new Macintosh models that would be using its new RADEON chip. Of course, Jobs does not like having his surprise announcements compromised by errant press releases from 3rd party suppliers, even if they are currently major OEM suppliers of critical components such as the RAGE 128 chip and up to now, supposedly the ATI RADEON chip based graphics cards. Ordinarily things should have cooled off within a few days to a week or two, but given the fact that NVIDIA, 3dfx and Formac were getting serious about producing Mac specific graphics/video cards, perhaps the time was right to put some pressure on ATI for a better deal.

Curiously, although there were reports that ATI was planning to make RADEON cards for Mac using the new ADC digital connector, a more recent report at The Mac Resource Page on September 8, 2000 said ATI was planning no card for retail. The text of the report says:

According to ATI's Jeff Willis (via reader Mark Smith) "ATI has no plans at this time to come out with a retail Mac card that will have the Apple ADC display connector on it."

Of course, the keywords here are "retail card". ATI apparently still may produce an OEM card for new Macs, but no card for previous Macs. Nonetheless, this seems to indicate some trouble may ahead between ATI and Apple.

ATI would ordinarily want to sell as many of the new cards with the new technology as possible, but either their don't feel it is worth producing a retail version or Apple has pressured them to not support the ADC digital connector on older Macs.

On the other hand, MacWorld U.K. reported on August 21, 2000 that 3dfx will produce a retail card for Macs that does support the ADC digital connector. Then on August 31, 2000, David Reynolds of MacAddict reported in his article Seybold: 3Dfx Touts New Card that 3dfx will produce the Voodoo 4 4500 card with font and picture caching. These technologies aren't of much use to a gamer, but to someone using Quark Express it would drastically speed up the work, especially when scrolling through a large and complex document with many fonts and pictures. Obviously this card was being positioned as the graphics card of choice for serious prepress work, and if the technology works it would become the card of choice whether Apple chose it for inclusion as original equipment not.

Of course, I can only assume that the lawsuit that NVIDIA filed against 3dfx claiming patent violations shortly after the new hustle to get the Mac market for themselves is purely a coincidence, but then again, I am not much of a believer in convenient coincidences. Then again, these kinds of lawsuits whether valid or not are part of the game in the computer world to hurt the competition, and what better way to hurt 3dfx's efforts to horn in on the Mac market than to claim that they stole their ideas from NVIDIA? Par for the course in this industry.

As it now stands, I would not want to place a bet on whether Apple will continue to use ATI technology and whether or not they will use the RADEON chips or perhaps switch to the promising new Voodoo 4 cards that support specialized technologies of great interest to prepress and graphics types. I suppose we will have to wait and see what happens. We may see some indications at the Paris Expo, and then again, perhaps not.

Apple, you see, is still holding those cards close to the chest.

joecarson@applelust.com

Related Links

Voodoo for Macintosh
(3dfx)

NVIDIA
(www.Nvidia.com)

ATI Launches RADEON 256™
(ATI Technologies)

ATI unveils new RADEON 256 chipset
(MacCentral)

ATI Unveils New Graphics Processor
(Go2Mac)

ATI Readying RADEON Products For Macintosh
(AppleInsider)

ATI Radeon Available for Pre-Order
(Inside Mac Games)

Apple says Store RADEON info was a mistake
(MacCentral)

No ADC on Radeon!
September 8, 2000
(Mac Resource Page)

3dfx to support Apple Display Connector
(Macworld)

Seybold: 3Dfx Touts New Card
(MacAddict)

nVidia takes aim at 3dfx in court over patents
(Insanely Great Mac)