14 DAY TRIAL // Despite finding it more and more difficult to keep up with rivals Intel and NVIDIA in the computing and graphics chips market, or perhaps in a move to counteract that, Advanced Micro Devices has made a late announcement on Thursday, according to which it is expanding its Radeon for Mac lineup. Mac users, as well as PC users, can now power their desktop systems with one of the company's latest graphics cards, namely the HD 3870.
Probably the most interesting thing about this announcement is that the HD 3870 graphics card can now be used by both Mac and PC users. This is the first card in AMD's 3000-series that can offer support to Macs. On top of that, this is also one of the first cards to explicitly support more than one platform, meaning that users can install the card on either a Mac Pro tower system or a Windows PC, and later swap it to the other platform. Because the HD 3870 is part of the company's new generation lineup, it can provide twice as much performance per watt than the outgoing HD 2900 XT, according to AMD.
As most of you PC users already know, the HD 3870 comes with 320 stream (pixel and vertex) processors and is power efficient. Also, being one of the company's current (the HD 4000 series is due for a release anytime now) high-end offerings, it provides support for Microsoft's DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 2.0, which enhances the visual experience of games and other graphics-demanding applications. And, because the card is meant to provide graphics support to Mac users as well, it comes with a dual-DVI setup that can handle 30-inch displays.
AMD will ship a 512MB version of the card for $219 by the end of June and Mac users should have no problem in finding the card at a number of Mac resellers.