No, that graphics card is what was quoted on the Boxx system. The G4 has a Geforce MX. I'll probably upgrade to the 9700 ATI card in Sept, along with Maya.
This is referenced from a fellow on the appleinsider forums. I found it interesting, even if it's not true. However, Shake running equally on a Mac with a less capable video card should be saying something.
I read this in a MacNN thread way back in February that was created by a person called "kalico." I thought it was interesting so I saved it, and I hope all of you will find just as enlightening as I did back then (I'll just quote the message instead of rewording it) :
"You can't compare the Mac version of GeForce to a PC version because the
drivers on the PC turn off key performance parameters inside OpenGL while
Apple doesn't. These are hardware accelerated lines, hardware accelerated
antialiased lines/points, two-sided lighting, shared back buffer and depth
buffer, user clipping planes and some other tweaks. Apple doesn't limit the
chip while on the PC side nVidia requires that card makers do because the
GeForce chip is repacked and sold as a Quadro chip with these features
turned on. Here is a website to find out more about this:
http://www.nvworld.ru/docs/sqe.html
and
http://www.geocities.com/tnaw\_xtennis/
ATI does a similiar thing. Look at their site and notice that when you read
about the Radeon 8500 for the PC there is no mention of workstation class
applications such as Maya, but when you read the Mac Edition pages it's
clearly stated that the card is designed for workstation class
applications. Also, read the FAQ for the FireGL 8800 and the first thing
they say is that it's for workstation class applications.
People, in a nutshell on the Mac these so called "Game Cards" are fully
enabled. I've even spoken with the ATI engineeer who's coding the drivers
for Mac and he's told me they fully optimized for OpenGL, no limiters!!!
Read that again, NO LIMITERS!!!
One last point, I use an 867Mhz G4 with a GeForce3 everyday working with
Maya and in our studio we also have a Wildcat II 5100 inside a Dell
workstation and there is no difference in working performacne! This does
not mean that the Wildcat II is slower, but that the GeForce3 in a Mac is
just as fast as this $2000 card. We've also done some test with a PC
GeForce3 and it's noticably slower when working in Maya."
So thats probably why only a desktop graphics card is a requirement for the Mac version and why the PC version needs a Quadro card.
I would question this as well, but after watching the video segments from the aliaswavefront site that has those people using Macs exclusively, it does make you wonder.
