Why is there not any decent mac graphics cards?

[Combat Fighter]

This question has always puzzled me for years. I've been using mac since 94 for work so seen a few changes over the years. Now they are up to date with the mobo/cpu etc (essentially a pc now) why cant you get the latest graphics cards as well?

It's the one thing that puts me off getting a mac for home use as I do like to play the latest games (BBC2 being one of them).

 

[electric ant]

Because Apple likes to keep hardware under close control and don't provide drivers for the latest graphics cards. They only provide support for whatever graphics cards are already in the mac.
iMacs as far as I know use integrated discrete graphics, at least they used to, so they'd be hard to upgrade.
Mac Pros , I think you can upgrade the graphics card, but it would be unsupported by Apple, plus youd need to find drivers.
Bascially Apple like to keep things simple.

 

[Mattus]

Because there's not any (well, not many) decent Mac games?

 

[QwaF]

Well, they sell a "Mac version" of EVGAs GTX 285 on apple.com.. for the low price of ...£400

 

[Spyhop]

Traditionally they've never really needed them.

As well as games, if the GPGPU / OpenCL business is adopted in a big way by popular applications then that will provide motivation to get high end cards in there.

 

[Aod]

Apple computers use a different binary encoding mechanism than PC's - they're Big-endian (the most significant bit is stored/sent first) unlike all other x86 compatible computers which are Little-endian.

graphics companies need to make their cards completely differently for them to be mac-compatible, and there isn't a large market for it, which is why they don't do it for many cards, and why they're ALL super-expensive.

 

[QwaF]

Apple computers use a different binary encoding mechanism than PC's - they're Big-endian (the most significant bit is stored/sent first) unlike all other x86 compatible computers which are Little-endian.

graphics companies need to make their cards completely differently for them to be mac-compatible, and there isn't a large market for it, which is why they don't do it for many cards, and why they're ALL super-expensive.

I wouldn't say completely different.. they're pretty much the same hardware wise, from what i gather, it is more of a firmware and drivers difference.

 

[electric ant]

Because there's not any (well, not many) decent Mac games?

Yeah, but hopefully the arrival of Steam on Mac will change that !