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[IMG News]

Engadget recently reported that Nvidia's GeForce GTX 285 graphics card will be available for Mac Pro owners in June. The card features 240 processor cores, a 648MHz graphics clock and 1,476MHz processor clock, and can manage a texture fill rate of 51.8 billion per second. The standard configuration of the card comes with 1GB of GDDR3 and two Dual-Link DVI connectors. As of yet Apple has not officially confirmed Engadget's report.

From Macworld:

Benchmarks from PC performance sites show that the GeForce GTX 285 significantly outperforms other graphics cards like those available in the Mac Pro, including the ATI Radeon HD 4870 — the current high-water mark for Mac Pro graphics performance, available as either a $200 configure-to-order option for new Mac Pros or as a $349 add-on for existing systems. Indeed, the GTX 285 seems to match or perform slightly better that the 4870 X2 — a two-GPU variant of that ATI card.

Neither Nvidia nor EVGA, a graphics card maker whose logo appears emblazoned on the image in Engadget’s story, would confirm the news when contacted by Macworld. But the release of such a card in June is plausible given the timing: Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) runs from June 8 - 12, 2009.

What’s more, Apple is expected to release Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” at about the same time. The new operating system will feature support for OpenCL, which leverages the parallel processing capabilities of modern GPUs to speed up computational work for applications beyond games and other graphics-oriented software. OpenCL is expected to gain traction in science and engineering, biotechnology and other markets.

This marks the second time in two weeks that Nvidia’s been in the Mac news — the company recently announced plans to release a Mac version of its Quadro FX 4800 graphics card — it’s a high-end workstation-class card intended for engineering, 3D visualization, medical science and more. By comparison, the GeForce GTX 285 is consumer-oriented and lacks a 3D stereoscopy interface.

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[The Liberator]

Hmmm, finally we will see a better flow of graphics cards coming to the Mac me thinks.

Liberator.

[jackdawsson]

It seems only for high-end Mac Pros so far. I'd like to see better than integrated & GT 120 cards in the lower-priced 24" iMacs.  IMO, for the money they're selling at, it should be GT 130s across the 24" iMac range.

[Riko]

With 'MacPro' they probably mean, recent released MacPro's, right?

Seen in the light how hard it was for Apple to get 1st generation owners a NVIDIA
GeForce 8800 GT and then leaving us out in the cold with crappy drivers, basically
killing bootcamp with it.

Not that I really miss it (shudder) but it sux having no longer (proper) access to it.

[Naman]

Riko, on May 1st 2009, 09:14 PM, said:

With 'MacPro' they probably mean, recent released MacPro's, right?

Seen in the light how hard it was for Apple to get 1st generation owners a NVIDIA
GeForce 8800 GT and then leaving us out in the cold with crappy drivers, basically
killing bootcamp with it.

Not that I really miss it (shudder) but it sux having no longer (proper) access to it.

It might not, it really depends on the firmware drivers. With adequate memory for the firmware, I see no reason they couldn't support both easily enough. IIRC, the main problem with the 8800 GT was that they got a bit overzealous with cost-cutting measures and made the firmware ROM too small to support both models. What's this about killing Boot Camp, though? I have a first-gen Mac Pro, and an 8800 GT, and Boot Camp works for me. Only issues I've had with it were that getting XP to work on it is more trouble than it's worth, and Apple Software Update for Windows has... issues. Vista installed cleanly on it, though, and has been surprisingly stable for me. (Still annoying in many ways, but it's bearable.)