Something weird appears to be happening.
The Mac has never garnered much support on the graphics card front but recently there have been a couple of interesting developments.

nVidia has released the Quadro K5000 Mac edition. This, at least, is consistent with their previous work - the Quadro 4000 Mac Edition was available for some time.
Recently Saphire announced the AMD Radeon 7950 Mac edition and today EVGA has announced a nVidia GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition, both for the Mac Pro 2009/2008 onwards models respectively.

I suppose it's just possible that you'd manage to get these to work in a Thuderbolt expansion chassis but the cards would be throttled to within an inch of their capabilities which leaves the MacPro as the only serious market for these cards.

Any thoughts on this flurry (relatively speaking for the MacPro graphics card market anyway) of activity?

My only thought is 'HOW much?????'

It's safe to say there will be a considerable mark-up compared to the equivalent standard PC cards. If you can price gouge Mac users who can you price gouge?

I had a quick dig and even the 'generic' PC versions of those cards are silly money. £400 for a video card? You'll be able to buy a whole next gen console for that. PC gamers must be out of their minds.

I was under the impression that these days, a lot of the generic PC cards worked under Mountain Lion?

In terms of working with EFI, yes. You'd still need to use a card the OS has drivers for though, which means either a card that's been fitted to a Mac by Apple (either as standard or as a BTO option) or one where the suppliers provide drivers with the card. So while you're less limited as to where you get them from, you're still fairly limited as to which chipset you can use.

I thought it was if it's a reference design, the OS drivers will support it.
Certainly was the case with the gold master of ML.

'Reference design' doesn't really mean much in this context. The OS has a set of drivers in, the card has to be one of the ones covered by that. Something that isn't might work to some degree if it's close to one that does, but you'd be a right mug to shell out £400+ on that basis. if it worked at all it'd almost certainly perform worse than a cheaper card that the OS did directly support.

Jon

Correct.

A lot of newer PC cards will work in macs as ML has the drivers built in.

I suspect you could get away with anything listed here - if it'll work with a Hackintosh it'll probably work with a 'real' mac.

I guess it comes down to whether or not you think you'll ever need official support from either the graphics card vendor or Apple in any way shape or form as they'll wash their hands of any problem and simply blame the 'unsupported' configuration.

Final Cut Pro X is telling me that my graphics card on my MBP (which is pretty old,now) is not supported. So no upgrades for me now as the App Store won't update it now. So I have an OK install that works, but I won't be getting any more upgrades.

So just be sure that the card you use and any software you are running will work.

It's looking like the PS4 will be outdated even at launch compared to PC gaming, and the next Xbox is rumoured to be even worse.

Considering what you can knock up for £400 these days in terms of a PC-build, I'm not sure the consoles represent value for money.

I'm also keen to see what Valve manage with the Steam box.

Err.. for 400 quid in this case, you just get a video card. Good luck playing Battlefield on that.

When they start out the consoles cost the companies more than they get in revenue from the sales, it is only as they get economies of scale and does the cost come down in relation to the price.