Apple 8•24 GC Video Card

The Apple 8•24 GC Video Card was a high-performance NuBus expansion card released by Apple in 1991, designed to bring accelerated 24-bit true-color graphics to Macintosh computers. Featuring a dedicated Weitek W8000 series RISC processor, it significantly boosted QuickDraw performance for…

Key facts

First appeared
1991
Category
technology
Problem solved
The card was created to solve the critical performance bottleneck faced by professional Macintosh users working with 24-bit (16.7 million color) images and complex graphical layouts. Before its introduction, rendering and manipulating true-color graphics using software-only QuickDraw on existing NuBus cards was excruciatingly slow, hindering productivity for graphic designers, desktop publishers, and CAD professionals.
Platforms
Apple Macintosh computers with NuBus slots

Related technologies

Notable users

  • Desktop publishers
  • Scientific visualization researchers
  • CAD professionals
  • Graphic designers