I have been working on restoring my old Power Macintosh G4 “Digital Audio” using all of the components that I have amassed over the years when they were offered at clearance prices. I have been taking pictures for documentation purposes so here are a couple of shots of the graphics cards in play.

The ATI Radeon 9600 256 is probably the nicest old Mac graphics card I ever owned. The computers couldn’t keep up with the card. By the time I could afford a computer that could take the most advantage of it, the aforementioned G4 Digital Audio, everything had moved to Mac OS X and I was back at square one when it came to “official support.” At this point I would like to note that I got this computer years after they were taken off the lineup.

I don’t know anything about the chipset anymore, I’ve had to replace it with other useless knowledge. If not obvious in the name, it had 256 MB of memory and an ATI 3D Application that would show the amount of memory being used which I always thought was neat.

My personal favorite card though is the 3dfx Voodoo 5500 Mac Edition. This PCI card had an an extremely generous 64 MB of memory on it and I think dual graphics chips. This is before we were all throwing the word GPU around with reckless abandon.

Sadly shortly after the release, 3dfx was bought by NVIDIA who then stopped supporting the cards (thus why I was able to afford one at the time) and the drivers never made it past beta in the Mac OS 9 realm and was dead in the water with Mac OS X. This card was not a daily driver at all those GLide supported games like Quake and Unreal / Unreal Tournament really cooked on it.