14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA has recently introduced what the company calls the most advanced professional graphics solution for Mac at the moment – the Quadro FX 4800. The Quadro FX 4800 GPU for Mac includes a massive 1.5GB frame buffer and a memory bandwidth up to 76.8 GB/sec that deliver a high throughput for an interactive visualization of large models. To do this, the graphics card will need some drivers, and those drivers are present in the Mac OS X 10.5.7 maintenance update from Apple.
With the Quadro FX 4800 launching in May, and May being just over a week away, Mac OS X 10.5.7 should be appearing in our Software Updaters any day now. Of course, this isn't something we didn't know (the latest seed notes also indicated an imminent release), but it never hurts to add more confirmation to a rumor.
According to NVIDIA, “Graphics drivers are included with the Graphics Board for the Leopard OS version 10.5.7 or greater. To check your software version, click on the Apple icon in the upper left corner of your Mac Pro screen and select 'About This Mac,'” the company says. “If your system OS X is not 10.5.7, you need to upgrade. Your system must be running OSX 10.5 (Leopard) in order to upgrade to 10.5.7,” NVIDIA explains, offering instructions to update to the latest version of Leopard.
It is also worth noting that NVIDIA's Quadro FX 4800, due out in May, is actually not the only card requiring 10.5.7. The “ATI Radeon HD 4870 Graphics Upgrade Kit for Mac Pro (Early 2009 or Early 2008)” is also said to be dependent on the Mac OS X 10.5.7 software update.
An older ITWire report said that, “the 'ATI Radeon HD 4870 Graphics Upgrade Kit for Mac Pro (Early 2009 or Early 2008)' is scheduled to ship in 5-7 weeks. Although the product description says the card requires 'Mac OS X v10.5.6 or later,' it is known that the drivers for this family of graphics chips are part of 10.5.7.”