AMD has formally announced the ATI Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition graphics card that appeared on the company's website last week. The card is pitched at owners of the old, PowerPC-based Power Mac G5 desktop which originally shipped with lesser-powered cards.

The X1900 isn't exactly AMD's leading-edge desktop GPU, but it has 36 pixel shaders fed by eight vertex shaders and connects to 256MB of video memory over an eight-channel, 256-bit bus. The X1900's spec calls for GDDR 3 memory, but AMD didn't say what kind of memory is featured on the G5 Mac Edition board.

The card has a pair of DVI ports. It supports Avivo, AMD's video processing system, which works with 40-bit colour - handy, since Apple's Cinema Display monitors are among the few available that can operate at that colour depth.

ATI's last after-market Mac card was a Radeon X800-based board.

Available now, the ATI Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition retails for around $349. No European pricing has yet been announced. ®