NVIDIA

Road to the Mac

Getting an NVIDIA chip in the Mac was no easy task and the Mac development actually began last year. Although the Mac uses the same AGP and PCI interfaces as the PC, the Macintosh uses a different color space for images and requires bi-endian support. The GeForce2 MX (which came after the GTS) was NVIDIA's first chip to incorporate these non-trivial silicon changes required for Mac support. In addition to the changes to the chip, the reference board had to include an "Apple Display Connector" that not only provides DVI-I digital video out and USB, but also the power for the monitor through a single connector.

The GeForce2 MX has both an ADB and a regular VGA connector

The actual Macintosh GeForce2 MX board

For NVIDIA, porting the drivers to the Mac was a much easier task. Most of us see the Detonator driver architecture as an easy way to provide support for older chips such as the TNT2, but the unified design can do more. Using the Detonator code base, NVIDIA only needed to make minor changes to the driver to include support for Apple's unique APIs. Thus, in the very first driver release, the Mac GeForce2 MX supports cube mapping, T&L, and DOT3 bump-mapping support. Suprisingly, although the Radeon hardware supports more features than the GeForce2 MX hardware, ATI's Mac drivers have fewer OpenGL extensions than NVIDIA's implementation.

The only features missing from the first release are Digital Vibrance Control, FSAA, and TwinView. DVC and FSAA are both part of the driver interface, however, there is no control panel application. Although the FSAA control panel will likely be released, it's possible that NVIDIA will choose to go with ColorSync, Apple's own studio-quality color management technology instead. Macintosh's own multi-display technology is incompatible with TwinView.

NVIDIA's meeting room

Sorry for the flash; the room was too dark for a regular shot

Although we did have a chance to try out a system and run timedemos on a system running Quake III Arena, NVIDIA did not have the latest Altivec enabled code or the point release patch so we did not have a chance to take any meaningful benchmarks. That said, the GeForce2 MX is currently faster than the Mac Radeon at lower resolutions such as 800x600 which makes it an ideal card for Mac gamers looking for high framerates in first person shooters. I also had a chance to play with Treemark and a few of the GTS Pixel Shader tech demos on a 1600x1024 Apple Studio LCD and saw good performance and exceptional stability. The QuickTime and DVD acceleration was also working excellently with superb image quality and performance.

What's actually most impressive about these drivers was not only that they were exceptionally stable, but that besides the technical considerations, NVIDIA also had to work with Apple in complete secrecy and develop drivers without the help of Mac software developers. In fact, if you checked the exhibitor list for MacWorld, NVIDIA wasn't listed anywhere. To keep their involvement with Apple secret up until Job's keynote address, NVIDIA had to attend incognito under an alias (Shorty Enterprises).

Shorty