What would happen if I put a PC video card in a Mac?

Just for kicks... what happens if I put a PC video card in a Mac? Seriously, will it simply not function at all? Will it have limited capabilities? Will it totally freak-out and fry?



The reason I ask is because I have a Mac G5 with an AGP video card port. The card I currently have is just okay at best (256mb) but no where near what I'd like. Video cards for Macs (especially for AGP) are pretty hard to find, especially if you want more than a 256mb capacity. However on the PC side you can practically find them anywhere.

So please, without any smart comments on how I need to buy a new machine or ditch my Mac for a PC, I would seriously like to know what would happen if I go and buy a new AGP PC video card and put it in my Mac?|||Nothing. You'd get no video out of it whatsoever. It'll boot up, but you won't be able to do anything. Furthermore, 256MB is the absolute most you're going to get in that thing. The absolute fastest you'd ever find is a 7800GS, and the only way you'll get one of those is on eBay. You CANNOT get anything better than that, period. There were a limited number of cards that were made available for the G5. Heck, the 7800GS was actually a hacked card. Someone tweaked the 7800GTX PCIe ROM from the last line of G5s and made it work when flashed onto an AGP card.



Furthermore, why even bother? What do you need to do on a G5 that would require something with more than 256MB of VRAM? It's not like the G5 can play modern games. It's old and slow by modern standards, perhaps keeping up with low-end Core 2 Duos. Don't bother dumping money into that thing.



You aren't getting it. Unless you want to completely write a ROM and a driver from the ground up (which means a load of reverse engineering), it is NOT POSSIBLE. PERIOD. END OF STORY. It doesn't matter whether you believe it or not. PowerPC drivers/ROMs are very different from the Intel drivers/ROMs. They are not interchangeable. At all. The ATI X1900/Nvidia 7800 lines are as far as Apple went on PowerPCs. You CANNOT go further. To refuse to believe it does nothing but show a vast ignorance of how this sort of thing works. Why the hell would anyone dump that kind of herculean effort into a 6+ year old platform that doesn't even have support from the manufacturer anymore, much less the bulk of software vendors?