As stated in another thread, graphics cards can be initialized without firmware.
This is not a new development.

If you doubt me, plug a PC Voodoo3 card into your Mac and boot MorphOS.

But there are disadvantages.
First, you would no longer have access to OpenFirmware, the card could not be initialized until the OS booted.
Further, you would probably have to select/setup the driver before the card was installed requiring an alternate video card for set up.
Second, a card without OpenFirmware will never work with OSX, so dual booting goes out the window.

Still, there are two more cards we haven't adopted yet, the X800XT and the X1900GT (AGP and PCI-E respectively) have Apple specific versions.

And the SAM460 can support virtually any PC PCI-E video card.


[ Edited by Jim 05.03.2014 - 11:58 ]