Positioned as a mainstream graphics card with more power than the inexpensive Radeon 7000 Mac Edition, the Radeon 9000 Mac Edition comes equipped with an AGP interface and 64 MB of Double Data Rate (DDR) RAM. It’s also the first ATI retail graphics card to feature an Apple Display Connector (ADC) interface, making it possible to attach an Apple Studio or Cinema Display without needing a bulky and expensive ADC to DVI connector.
The Radeon 900 Mac Edition also features a second monitor connector — a DVI interface — that you can use to drive a second digital flat panel display. (ATI will also include a DVI to VGA adapter, if you have an older analog display you’d like to attach instead).
The Radeon 9000 Mac Edition card sports myriad features that will appeal to gamers, including programmable vertex and pixel shaders, a quad pipe pixel shader engine with support for up to six textures per pass, and Smoothvision, a full-scene anti-aliasing technology that reduces the appearance of jagged lines on 3D objects.
Although Apple ships an OEM version of the Radeon 9000 Pro card in its Power Mac G4 systems and it’s been shipping in the PC market for a while, the Mac version of the card has thus far been unavailable.
ATI Mac product manager Stan Ossias told MacCentral that his company anticipates the release of the Radeon 9000 Mac Edition card within the next few weeks, so look for it on store shelves soon.
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