NVIDIA Rolls Out Quadro FX 4800 for Mac Users

At the end of March, Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA updated its line of professional graphics cards with the introduction of some new Quadro FX graphics accelerators. Following this release, the graphics card maker has just announced the availability of its new Quadro FX 4800 graphics processing unit for Mac Pro users. According to the company, the new card is specifically designed to meet the performance requirements of all those Mac Pro users.

“Some of the world’s most challenging visual computing problems are solved on the Mac platform,” said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions, NVIDIA. “The Quadro FX 4800 provides the power and speed to meet these demanding requirements.”

NVIDIA's latest Quadro FX 4800 graphics processing unit is now available for both PC and Mac system users. According to the world's leading graphics chip maker, the Mac version of the FX 4800 is featured with a 3-pin stereo connector, enabling users to take advantage of a true 3D stereoscopic imaging. Aside from this feature, the Quadro FX 4800 is designed to dynamically allocate compute, geometry, shading and pixel processing power.

As for technical specifications, the Quadro FX 4800 for Mac Pro users is identical with the original FX 4800 card for PC users. The card is featured with 192 CUDA Parallel cores, a total memory size of 1.5GB of 384-bit memory, delivering a 76.8 GB/s memory bandwidth. The card is featured with a dual-slot cooling solution and is rated with a maximum power consumption of 150W.

Mac users will have to upgrade to Apple's upcoming Leopard OS version 10.5.7 or greater if they want to take advantage of the performance delivered by the latest NVIDIA Quadro card. Price-wise, the Quadro FX 4800 GPU for Mac comes at an MSRP of US$1799 and will be available starting next month, via Apple.com or NVIDIA's channel partners, including PNY Technologies, Leadtek and Elsa.