[geeks] geeks Digest, Vol 76, Issue 4

[nate at portents.com]

> I don't see a real CAD or 3D rendering card being listed.

Anyone know if Apple actually has a different OpenGL driver for the Quadro
and FireGL stuff on Macs?  On the PC, this is all they are:

NVIDIA Quadro - typically just a consumer GeForce chip, maybe add a 3D
stereo glasses port on the back, change the resistors so the PCIe ID is
different, then bundle a different, optimized (for quality/precsion
rendering, not speed i.e. less corner-cutting) OpenGL driver for use in
"CAD or 3D rendering", charge a lot more money.

ATI FireGL - do the same thing with a consumer Radeon chip, minus the 3D
glasses bit.

NVIDIA Tesla - take the a GeForce chip, don't include the video out bit,
say it's for computation.

So all those "real CAD or 3D rendering cards" on the PC are little more
than product names that people pay for to subsidize the development of a
different driver set.

There have been times in the past when people figured out how to 'softmod'
the 'pro' drivers so they worked on 'consumer' cards, but NVIDIA and ATI
have taken steps to prevent that, and you'd have to desolder/resolder
surface mount resistors at best these days to get around it.

ATI and NVIDIA have effectively killed off the competition, companies like
3DLabs and their Wildcat and Oxygen lines, which had hardware/software
solely oriented toward the OpenGL quality/precision rendering and had no
real consumer application.  So now the high-end is instead re-purposed
consumer hardware with a higher pricetag and different drivers for the PC.
 Not sure about the Mac, which is OpenGL-only anyway, and which I
understand Apple co-develops the drivers for as well (unlike on the PC,
where the entire OpenGL implementation is up to the video card vendor, and
which Microsoft has no involvement in).

- Nate