OS X Tiger Core Image on a B&W!
I think I've got a first here; maybe the only pre-AGP Mac in
existence to support Core Image ;)
I flashed a PNY PCI FX5200 with a Mac BIOS (from http://littlevampirebites.com/fxflash/) which worked fine on the PCI card
after down-clocking the memory (since PNY used below nVidia-spec RAM on the card).
My willing subject for this experiment was an old B&W Rev. 1, which
prior to 10.4.3 it would only work with the 10.2.8 kernel extensions
(otherwise a kernel dump would happen just after loading video
drivers), and those didn't work very well under 10.3 or at all under
10.4 due to some missing symbols, but since 10.4.3 was released, it
works perfectly (presumably because Apple couldn't lock functionality
...It's not particularly fast, but I think with a CPU upgrade it might
be fun to play with!
(I assume he also used the Mods to Enable Quartz Extreme on PCI Macs - since Quartz Extreme is not enabled for PCI cards without the mod.-Mike)
Oddly enough, no... It just did that out-of-the-box (this was a clean
install of 10.4.3)
My best guess is that since the new G5 Macs are PCIe based, and PCIe
appears to the system as a standard PCI bus they had to stop locking s
Quartz Extreme down to IOAGP class devices? Or just that the NV30
driver always reports to the OS that the video card is an AGP capable
device (since I don't think there are any other NV30 based PCI cards
and NV3x were always meant to be AGP)?
-Jason
Apple System Profiler info screenshot and photos
Other Mac Graphics Card Related Articles:
For other Mac video/card related articles see the
Video topics page.
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