nVIDIA to Take ATI's Seat as Apple's Graphics Chip Supplier

Of all the company's computer offerings, only three configurations of Apple's Power Mac G4 product line currently sport an nVIDIA GeForce2 MX card, or a non-ATI branded graphics card. For years ATI Technologies had been Apple's main partner and supplier of graphics cards for the company's pc offerings. This will all change within the next 12 months, sources tell AppleInsider.com.

As we were first to report back in July of 1999, Apple began to turn away from ATI and took its first steps towards pursuing a deal with nVIDIA after ATI produced yet another set of sub-par Macintosh drivers to ship on Macintosh systems sporting ATI's Rage 128 chipset. Relations between the two companies eventually hit the fan this past summer when ATI released advanced information about forthcoming Apple systems via a press release published on BusinessWire.

nVIDIA, on the other hand, has been widely touted throughout the industry as of late for their product's superior graphics performance. But the company has two other positives to offer Apple that ATI could not. First and foremost, nVIDIA retains an excellent software driver development team with a dedicated number of engineers who work jointly on all of the company's software drivers. Secondly, nVIDIA's graphics cards for the Macintosh will ship as identical units to their PC counterparts, basically eliminating the performance gap between graphics acceleration on the PC and Mac. The latter is something Apple has been craving for some time.

According to reliable sources, if Apple had their choice, all of their current products would be shipping with nVIDIA's graphics accelerators. The transition will take some time, however. Apple's professional PowerBook G4 line is indeed scheduled to pack a flavor of nVIDIA's mobil graphics chips, but not until Apple completes the next version of their PowerBook logic-board.

"Apple has been working on the new PowerBook logic-board for some time now," one source said. "The board is said to support 4X AGP and will be capable of taking full advantage of nVIDIA's high performance mobile graphics cards." While the Apple PowerBook is not expected to receive this boost until sometime next Winter, the company's iMac offerings are soon to sport nVIDIA GeForce2 MX chips, sources said.

The company's consumer iBook, which still features a 66MHz bus, is not expected to sport an nVIDIA chip