[rocky2]

Here in Tokyo, the Radeon 9800 Pro for G4 and G5 sells at SofMap (the main non-Apple Store Mac outlet) for 58,900 yen or almost $550! To add insult to injury, I can walk across the street to the nearest PC store and buy the PC version of this card (ATi made) for 24,900 yen and the same generic design from SAPPHIRE for 19,800 yen. Even the crap ATi Radeon 9000 (which is two years out of date on the PC platfrom) for the Mac costs 28,900 yen. Give us a break ATi--this is just outrageous scamming of the Mac market. Even more irritating is that the top of the line nVidia 6800XT (which knocks the 9800 Pro into pulp) costs less (55,800 yen) on the PC platform than the older Mac 9800 Pro.
Some investigative tech journalist need to expose the scandal of Mac/ATi price gouging on after-market GPUs.
I suppose the bright side is now that Apple has abandoned the Apple Digital Connector in favor of the DVI standard on later G5s, it MIGHT be possible to obtain the Mac nVidea 6800 ROM and successfully flash a cheaper PC version of this card when they appear from SAPPHIRE.
Why do we Mac fans always have to put up with late to market and overpriced GPUs for Macs? Does Apple have some power over ATi and nVidea that prevents them selling reasonably priced up to date GPU hardware. Or is it just the relative size of the market?
Discuss!

[davidflas]

The reason that Mac versions of ATI's and Nvidia's cards cost so much more is because we are paying for development of the Mac drivers. On the PC side, many more cards are sold, so development costs are spread amongst far more people. It sucks, but its true.