[Webscreamer]

I have an OEM Radeon 9800 Pro 128Mb graphics card stock in my PowerMac G5 2x. I was reading the latest Macworld(Sept 2005) and in there it told you to make sure you have to latest firmware for your graphics card. From past experience, I thought with the stock OEM cards, there is no need to grab updates from ATI because the system updates contain them?

Should I be updating my graphic card's firmware from ATI.com?

[a2daj]

The firmware updates are only for retail cards. It's very rare that Apple releases firmware updates for OEM cards. Most the the time any firmware patches come in the form of a "ROM in RAM" type patch which loads during startup. The firmware updates are the ATIDriver.bundle and ATIRuntimeDriver.bundle in /System/Library/Extensions/AppleNDRV. If you see a file called ATI ROM Xtender, that's the retail version. It doesn't affect OEM cards.

The firmware update won't do anything to an OEM card when you run the update in a PowerMac. A progress bar may pop up but the second progress bar, which is when the firmware update actually occurs, never pops up. There are better ways ATI could have programmed the installer (such as detecting the OEM card and telling the user it's not doing anything) but at least it won't try and write to an OEM card.

[Webscreamer]

Thanks for your response. That's what I thought it was too, but i wanted to just make sure