AnandTech take an interesting look at the world's first universal Mac and PC video card. As the two systems have been growing more and more similar over the years, ATI is currently developing the Radeon 9600 with 256Mb of ram to work in both PCs and Macs.Will we soon be playing Half Life 2 on the Macintosh?
It turns out that making a universal Mac and PC video card isn't that tough. It's just that there are some implementation details that had to be worked out before doing so. One of the biggest problems ended up being Apple's powered ADC connectors that were featured on the previous generation of their Cinema Displays. The ADC standard calls for video, USB as well as power for the monitor to be sent over a single cable from the video card to the monitor. Generally speaking, drawing enough power to drive a 23" Cinema Display takes a little more than what can be delivered over a standard AGP slot, especially if the slot is tasked with powering the GPU as well.
Apple's solution to the problem was to outfit ADC enabled cards with a separate connector to feed a 25V line to power any monitors and USB devices connected to them over the ADC port. The problem is that no PC motherboards feature support for this additional connector and an ADC connector isn't too useful for most PC users. But with Apple's move to DVI for their latest monitors, suddenly there's a lot more in common between PCs and Macs and their video card requirements.
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