Okay, you know somebody had to ask it.
Which NVidia marketing idiot thought this would be a funny prank to pull out of his/her a$$?
Who the heck cares about a Mac anyway, and who in their right mind markets a flagship product to a dying system?
(Okay Mac lovers, flame the crap out of me now.)
My god this puts a sour taste in the hearts of all the NVidia enthusiasts.
Siwko
What I noticed is that they didn’t mention the PC release date. That could mean that they release it a day or a week after the Mac release. So it might mean almost nothing to release the GF3 for Mac first.
That said, with this move, nVidia has basically cornered the high-end Mac market (not much of a market, but still…)
They now have their own little monopoly. So if the Mac makes a sudden comeback, they are in perfect position. Even if the market stays small, they won’t be losing money at $600 a card.
j
Originally posted by Siwko:
[b]Okay, you know somebody had to ask it.
Which NVidia marketing idiot thought this would be a funny prank to pull out of his/her a$$?
Who the heck cares about a Mac anyway, and who in their right mind markets a flagship product to a dying system?
(Okay Mac lovers, flame the crap out of me now.)
My god this puts a sour taste in the hearts of all the NVidia enthusiasts.
Siwko[/b]
the Mac is not dying any more. it more or less stopped dying the day they released the G3. if you look at how much their market share has grown over the last few years, you’ll see what i mean.
i’ve never owned a Mac, but i really don’t mind if the GF3 is released for that platform before the PC platform. i’m sure there are quite a few NVIDIA enthusiasts among the Mac users, too.
many people care about the Mac, and NVIDIA, in their right mind, markets a flagship product for a platform that is growing, not dying.
of course, they probably do it only for political reasons – the competition isn’t nearly as hard on the Mac platform when it comes to graphics. the decision makes perfect sense, if you think about it.
btw, have you looked at Mac OS X? it’s quite a lot more impressive than Win2k, imho …
I’ve thought about this a bit myself. I think there could be a couple of reasons.
The obvious - apple is paying them to do so to help their sales and marketing.
Nvidia (and all chip companies) like to make a premium when they first bring something out (look at initial prices of the PIV or Geforce3). Releasing on the Mac platform is more conducive to this because Mac has tight price controls on all its components…there are no third party card makers that can have price wars. They may give Nvidia a larger per-unit share than PC card manufacturers would.
What would be really sweet is if the PC cards based on Geforce3 have DVI out - so that they will work with the apple cinema displays 
.
I assume you guys have seen the video released last night…you can find it at bluesnews or evil3d. What do you think? I was amazed 
by the Doom3 videos, despite the dark, heavily compressed, and low res streaming animation. If they didn’t keep emphasizing it, I wouldn’t believe it was real-time. I hope they don’t have to bump it down for the lowest-common-denominator cards when it’s released.
Carmack’s .plan has a long writeup about his opinions of the Geforce3. Give it a read if you get a chance. As always, it’s well thought out. He gave some nice praise concering the quality of the new nVidia drivers …congrats Matt (and whoever else reading this works on them)!
– Zeno
Yes, it is obvious that Apple is paying for this. But, since the card is going to be a AGP card, that means you can run over to your mac dealer, and buy the card, and stick it in your pc. You might not have all the advanced features until someone leaks the drivers though.
Or just wait 1 day after the mac version comes out, and you will find cards from Hercules, Elsa, and whoever else.
No, you definitely can’t plug Mac cards into PCs, nor PC cards into Macs. Mac cards have the ADC (Apple Display Connector), and they also have a different BIOS (PC BIOS is written in x86 asm, Mac BIOS is written in this crazy Forth-like language, I believe).
If you flashed it, it might work. Might not.
I think all of us are excited about working with Apple on this… it’s not just some “crazy marketing idea”.
[b]
I hope they don’t have to bump it down for the lowest-common-denominator cards when it’s released.
[/b]
I hope to at least have the option to bump it down. What was shown appeared to be stalling every once in a while. That could of just been latency in the stream but I’m not certain. And if it was not an artifact of the streaming video, then I’d wonder how severe that stalling would be on a Geforce 2 or Geforce (assuming it will even run on those).
I’ve heard some rumors about framerates with the new engine. I won’t repeat them, but let’s just say if you’re running on an TNT2 (to say nothing of those folks with i810s!), get ready to play in 320x240 and turn off all of the cool details. If you want 1600x1200 with all details maxed, uhhh, you’d better wait until GF5 or so.
The movies are really nothing compared to the screenshots I’ve seen. You know the engine kicks ass when the static screenshots totally blow you away. I can’t wait to see the real thing in action.
Quake1 technically impressed me, Quake2/3 never really did. I think Doom3 is seriously going to ROCK.
Don’t get me wrong… I’m not trying to slam Mac’s (hard). But as far as I’m concerned, all that Mac’s have EVERY needed was the fastest rasterizing engine you could get (Photoshop, PageMaker, Etc.).
As far as the Mac sales are concerned… this past year, Mac sales dropped 71%. You tell me… dead end?
I just think it was foolish to launch the GF3 on a Mac instead of unleashing it on the userbase it will have in PC-land.
The only thing that may be of redeeming hope: Nvidia is releasing on Mac minus X-functionality that are currently being finalized for the 10.5 Det3’s on the PC release. This would mean that Mac’s would suffer from slightly inferior performance and be slightly “crippled”.
Thats my thoughts on it. I’m just slightly disappointed right now. I’ve got cash in hand waiting for it to hit the PC shelf… now I have to go beat up all my Mac-junkie friends…
Siwko
whats the purpose of flaming macs? macs are great for graphics applications and design. such as photoshop and flash and stuff like that. the geforce 3 is perfect for 3d modeling apps like bryce and 3d studio max which are commonly used on macs. anyways who cares if they release it on the mac first.
What about they are releasing on the mac first because there is only “one” hardware and it’s easier to get the driver stable.
the new mac os is supposed to be pretty cool.
and apple couldn’t have picked better timing.
everyoen is anti Micro$oft right now, espicially with there plans for an anaul subscription fee.
i sure hope this doesn’t make it’s way into VC7 or i’m going to not upgrade.
stick with VC6.
anyways about other OS’s,
i sure do hope all the extensions get brought over to linux and mac and the general public (developers) get the drivers.
not just the ‘special’ developers.
and what’s up with releasing a new driver for the vertex_program stuff.
the 7 series is really starting to annoy me.
the geforce 3 is amazing
can’t wait to switch back to my old work
laterz,
-akbar A.
It seems fairly obvious to me that nVidia is
having some initial yield problems in their
150 nm process, and hitting uncle Steve up
for some money to be “first” while trimming
in the silicon line to actually be able to
supply the demand when the PC side gets
rolling seems like good business.
Me, I’ll get one if my company pays for it,
or when I need to upgrade my wife’s voodoo3
(i e she gets my GTS 
Oh, and I’m not blaming nVidia for anything;
initial yield issues is quite common at these
fine geometries and large designs. It may
even be that they’re actually not having them
but the marketing plan was already laid,
expecting them.
Well, that sure does suck. When is apple going to learn? They should have already made a mac that can use pc stuff. But nooooo, they want custom this, and custom that. That is one of the main reasons people dislike Apple. I guess to really find out if a mac card will work on a pc or visa-versa, we need to find someone with a rage128, and swap the cards in each machine, and watch what happens. Then they can swap the flash bios, and see if that works.
(or maybe all they need to do is flash the bios…hmmm)
It should be obvious that you need a different BIOS – it’s a different CPU architecture!
It would be like plugging a PC card into an Alpha or Sparc workstation and just magically expecting it to work. Nope, x86 instructions in the BIOS don’t exactly run very well on those CPUs. PCI and AGP standards merely require that cards be electrically compatible, not software-compatible, between different implementations of PCI and AGP.
It looks like the GF3 will be released on the PC and MAC at the same time, read it on http://www.shugashack.com/
The good side of this mac thing, is that it is a booster for OpenGL and an anti-booster for windows and directx.
Originally posted by mfugl:
The good side of this mac thing, is that it is a booster for OpenGL and an anti-booster for windows and directx.
Slick reply there. I like it (Though DX8 ain’t quite as bad anymore).
As far as it is concerned, the GF3 is ALREADY out on Macs, and not available to PC’s, thus a staggered launch.
I’m not trying to start a Mac-PC war out here… I’m just trying to start a GF3 war.
(Really, I was looking for peoples’ comments/attitudes on it - which is what I’m getting. Thanks!)
Have a good one!
Siwko
It’s not that I’m a mac fan, I’m against non-free operating systems. In the long run we do not want a company to monopolize the computer industry. It would end up with something like: if you haven’t paid the monthly fee, you can’t turn on your television or make a phone-call. Either you want the whole package or you can go elsewhere (but there will be no elsewhere). Therefore we need to look a the free alternative solutions where the fast evolving Linux is the best. Take a good look here: http://www.kde.org/screenshots/kde2shots.html
And it’s not good enough isolated to judge eg. directx8, because if you dont want windows you neither want dirctx.
So we should ignore the candy and think in a longer perspective
stop such posts at once, you cant change anything doing this, except getting some enemies…