Are you one of those lucky dinks waiting for a brand-spankin'-new Power Mac G4 complete with a groundbreaking nVIDIA GeForce3 graphics card? Please believe us when we tell you that delivering the following bad news brings us no pleasure: according to MacGamer, you're going to be waiting a while longer before you can witness the glory of reducing virtual opponents to bloody chunks at 800 billion operations per second. Delays in GeForce3 chip production have pushed Apple's expected ship date from this month to "late May."

Now, the reason why giving you that bad news brings us no pleasure is not because we're high-minded and noble individuals who take no pleasure in others' misfortunes; heck, "schadenfreude" is one of our all-time favorite words, and not just because it sounds like a cool German car. The real reason our bad news doesn't give us a petty little thrill is that it's followed immediately by some good news for you: Apple has given you three choices when it comes to handling your order. The first two-- cancel it, or just wait until the GeForce3 finally ships-- aren't particularly noteworthy, but the third is something else. Apparently you can have your Power Mac shipped immediately with a GeForce2 MX card installed, and Apple will ship you a GeForce3 separately when they become available. How's that for service?

What's more, that last deal isn't even a swap-out; you can pound on that GeForce2 all month, and when the GeForce3 shows up, you don't even have to send the original card back. You can hold onto it as a back-up, stick it in another AGP computer you may have sitting around, sell it on eBay for a few bucks, or satisfy your basest repressed Luddite tendencies and smash the bejeezus out of it with a meat tenderizer. Just about the only thing you can't do with it, unfortunately, is use it alongside the GeForce3 to drive two monitors, since the Power Mac only has one AGP slot. Still, we think that's a heckuva deal.

In fact, the only situation we can imagine in which you'd be better off waiting instead of going for the "GeForce2 now, GeForce3 later" option is if you're squeamish about installing cards in your hardware. We're guessing that's probably a relatively tiny subset of the "I'll gladly pay $600 for the opportunity to see R0CKITT_D00D's viscera more realistically portrayed as I gut him with a chainsaw" crowd. In any event, one way or another, the GeForce3 is coming to the Mac as promised-- just not when promised. Perhaps in light of the delay, Apple as since dropped the price of the GeForce3 by $100 at the Apple Store, so the dream of higher-polygon disembowelings is now more affordable than ever before. Enjoy!