[TheMule]

When the new Power Macs (Mac Pro) come out will you be able to use any GPU that intel supports, or will you have to buy apple GPU’s?

Also, what about having more then one GPU in a Mac Pro?

[wei]

Who knows? it's not even out yet.

[Maflynn]

Too early to tell, Apple hasn't even released the new macs out yet. Since many of the video cards use directx and apple doesn't you can assume that we will continue to buy mac video cards but who knows. Now that Apple has jumped to intel anything is possible.

Mike

[mduell]

Since Apple dumped OpenFirmware for EFI, I think you'll be able to use any "PC" video card.

Maflynn: The Mac and PC video cards support both OpenGL and DirectX; on the Macs they just don't use DirectX, but the GPU is no different.

[P]

The likely answer is that any board with a driver will work. ATi and nVidia do not work for free though - they make Mac drivers if

* Apple pays them
* someone else pays them
* they expect to make the money back from the sale of chips to those boards

Apple pays them for any board they will use, and you will probably get any other board from the same family "for free". If someone else pays them - a OEM board manufacturer, say - they don't want competition from all PC makers that don't have that cost, and the drivers likely won't be free. That nVidia and/or ATi expect to make enough back from board sales is doubtful, when the Powermac - the one upgradeable model - is much less common than iMacs and Mac gaming is a rather small market.

If I were to guess, I'd say that GPUs of the same family as those Apple uses will work, but no others unless it's trivial for ATi and nVidia to fix that as well.