14 DAY TRIAL // Apple may have upset a bunch of Mac Pro fans recently by refusing to upgrade the Mac Pro to tailor their needs, but there’s nothing NVIDIA can’t fix with an all-new graphics card with 4GB of memory and twice the performance of its predecessor, with other added benefits as well. Don’t think it’s cheap, though.
MarketWatch takes it upon itself to highlight the possibility to boost a current-generation Mac Pro system with the new NVIDIA Quadro K5000 that has been specifically crafted for designers and digital content creators.
“Mac professionals will benefit from dramatically improved graphics performance and productivity with today's announcement of the NVIDIA Quadro K5000 for Mac Pro systems,” said the Dow Jones-owned market research firm.
Aiming to become the world's fastest, most efficient GPU design, the Quadro K5000 for Mac is based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture. Experts say it is currently the most powerful professional-class GPU ever built for the Mac.
It delivers cinema 4K display support (with 4096x2160 resolution), a new display engine that can drive up to four displays at once, 4 GB graphics memory, and 2x faster performance at lower power than the Fermi-based Quadro 4000.
It lets you have up to two Quadro K5000 GPUs in a single workstation, and compatibility for the Apple-supported OpenGL, OpenCL and NVIDIA CUDA technologies.
Grant Petty, chief executive officer, Blackmagic Design, said “The NVIDIA Quadro K5000 has great OpenGL and CUDA performance, so it's ideal to use as a shared GUI and image processing GPU in DaVinci Resolve 9.”
“Like many artists who use DaVinci Resolve, colorists seek the highest performance possible from their systems, and with just one of the new Kepler GPUs our users will be able to work with 4K imagery on their Mac Pros in real time,” said Petty.
NVIDIA has geared the Quadro K5000 towards professional applications such as in video editing, color correction, compositing, GPU-accelerated ray-traced 3D rendering, as well as design visualization.
The US-based graphics solution company has said all of the performance and features are retained when running Microsoft’s Windows OS in Apple’s Boot Camp utility.
The card is yet to be made available, NVIDIA said, but when it does ship, it will cost a wallet-burning $2,249 / €1773 (more than a factory-sealed MacBook Pro with Retina display).
You’ll be able to buy one from several system integrators, authorized distribution partners worldwide, as well as from select Apple resellers.