New Mac Radeons soon?

My nVidia 8800GT died a couple months ago and I've been using the original nVidia 7300GT which is a little sluggish and doesn't have much memory to share between a guest OS and OSX on my 2006 MacPro 1,1. My question is does anyone have any idea when if the new AMD GPUs will be released for Macintosh? I've hear rumors the drivers are in the newest builds of OSX 10.7 (I use 10.6.8).

Also, BareFeats reviewed the Radeon 5770 and the 5870 on the 2006 MacPro 1,1 and the 5870 had barely any benefit so I'm curious if that's because the bus is near or at capacity which would mean waiting for the successor to the 5770 would result in no benefit (other than the 5770 will be cheaper...maybe).

Thanks.

From what I can find, Mountain Lion has incomplete driver support for the Radeon 7000 chips, so they're coming at some point. The answer is most likely "whenever the MP is finally updated".

This is probably the place to watch:

netkas.org

Heh. In one of the other Desktop threads, someone has a Radeon 7000 in his G4. :)

@Waragainstsleep: Thanks for the link, I'll keep my eyes peeled.

OSX 10.8 will be released summer sometime and is not expected to support the following Macs (e.g. arbitrary obsolescence forced on us by Apple):

• Anything with an Intel GMA 950 or x3100 integrated graphics card
• Anything with an ATI Radeon X1600
• MacBook models released prior to 2008
• Mac Mini released prior to 2007
• iMac models released prior to 2007
• Original MacBook Air

Plus add to that any Mac unable to boot into 64-bit Kernel (e.g. my MacPro - find out via Terminal command "uname -a") so the 5770 may be the best of what I can get. Interestingly, people have modded the Developer release of 10.8 and gotten it to run quite easily on a 2006 MacPro 1,1. That 32-bit EFI and Kernal have been the bane of the 2006 MacPro... Where the "shaking fist in air angrily at Apple" emoticon when you need one?

So, at the end of the day, if the 5770 a good deal at $249 or is a wait-and-see attitude better (even though I'm leery it will be supported on 10.6)? Thanks.

BTW, here'e the Barefeats test of the 5770 and 5870 GPUs.

That Radeon 7000 wasn't the "HD" model and was released in 2003. Stupid naming convention...kind of like iPad HD instead of iPad 3...

There is no iPad HD.


It looks like I'm protected just a little while longer. My MacBook Pro has a 256 MB GeForce 9400M... and it actually often feels faster than my Core i7 iMac with 1 GB Radeon HD 5750 for general usage because I stuck an SSD in the MacBook Pro.

Fixed. ;)

You are correct...it was rumored to be called "iPad HD" but I see Apple refers to it as "New iPad"...when added to a shopping cart they call it "iPad 3rd Gen" so that makes more sense.

Obsolescence, yes. Arbitrary, no. IT's about which Macs can run the 64-bit kernel. The stuff about the GPUs is because certain graphics cards do not have 64-bit drivers. Doesn't mean I think it's right to drop support for the first MPs, but it's not arbitrary.

Is is possible to write the drivers as 32-bit? The funny thing is others without Apple's resources have gotten 10.8 to run on the same model Mac as I have. Here's the link to one guy's blog who did it...there are quite a few others.

Thanks.

Well, that guy does it by copying in a 32-bit kernel and drivers from 10.7, it looks like.

The graphics drivers for those old cards are currently 32-bit, which won't work with the 64-bit kernel. It should be possible to write a 64-bit driver, but Apple won't do that. Given how long it took nVidia and AMD to write good 64-bit Windows drivers (for XP x64), I suspect that it might be quite hard to do well.