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Originally Posted by Luca
1.)Anyway, it's just as much up to the video card companies as it is up to Apple to get PC video cards to work in Macs....
There are only so many Mac video card drivers. And those drivers are intended to work with the exact hardware that was present in the Mac version of the card.
2.)Basically, ATI and NVIDIA have to start writing Mac drivers for all their video cards. They also have to start supplying ROMs for both PC and Mac on their cards, along with a utility to let you flash them back and forth.
3.)I think what you're thinking of is perhaps a way for Apple to modify the OS, or maybe the actual mechanics of their motherboards, to make PC graphics cards actually work natively without any flashing business. I don't know if that is physically possible, though.
4.)EDIT: Wouldn't using standard VGA compliant graphics drivers be really slow? Is that anything like using VGA mode in Windows? If so, then they'd still have to write drivers for basically every PC video card out there, in order to get hardware acceleration.
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I think that there are some things you don't understand about expansion cards in general and video cards specifically. I'll try to address some of the points you made.
1. I disagree. Apple is the odd man out. They should make their computers work with the video cards that 95% of the market uses, in the same way they use the same RAM, hard disks, I/O, etc. The drivers only work with the Apple supplied cards because Apple writes them that way. The OS matches the driver to the card by comparing the name properties, vender-id, class-id., etc. that is contained in the open firmware code contained in the Apple supplied cards. Apple writes the drivers with all this information in mind. ATI does the same with their Mac retail cards, because they want you to buy from them, rather than from one of the card cloners.
2. I agree that ATI and NVIDIA should write their own Mac drivers. ATI does, but only for their retail cards. The drivers should be written to work with all the cards in the family line, in the same way you don't need a specific driver for every manufacturer that makes an ATI cloned video card in the PC world. In this way, the drivers would work even on a card that has no Mac firmware on it. While there would be no video displayed at boot time, once the OS matched and loaded the drivers, then the video could be initialized. But as it currently stands, I don't believe the open firmware will continue the boot process if it does not detect an open firmware compatible video card.
3. Neither the OS nor the mechanics of the motherboard would need to be altered. Except for differences such as the ADC, the cards function electronically in the same way. What does need to happen is the open firmware needs to be modified to load the onboard VGA bios. Then it would be able to recognize PC video cards as such and display video until the OS drivers are loaded and take over. This is possible because it has already been done by another PowerPC motherboard manufacturer that also uses open firmware. This was a feature of the CHRP standard which Apple helped to draft but then never conformed to.
4. The VGA bios provides a simple frame buffer until the high level OS drivers are loaded. Hardware acceleration is not needed at this point.