AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS - IBC 2012 - Mac professionals will benefit from dramatically improved graphics performance and productivity with today's announcement of the Pro systems. Based on ™ architecture - the world's fastest, most efficient GPU design - the Quadro K5000 for Mac is the most powerful professional-class GPU ever for the Macintosh, delivering unprecedented visualization and computation capabilities for designers and digital content creators. About NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the AI computing company. Its invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined modern computer graphics and revolutionized parallel computing. More recently, GPU deep learning ignited modern AI — the next era of computing — with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world.
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As, Apple's latest OS X 10.8.3 beta as build 12D76 yesterday contains new drivers for NVIDIA's high-end Quadro K5000 graphics card. NVIDIA for the Mac Pro last September, but has yet to actually release the product. The first developer build of OS X 10.8.3 seeded last November, so it appears that the public release of the operating system update will include support for several high-end graphics options. Just yesterday, we that Sapphire was previewing its Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition graphics card at CeBIT. Apple has not yet revealed when it will be releasing OS X 10.8.3 to the public, but we've heard that the latest build was distributed to company employees as a pre-release version, so it seems that its debut may be very close after over three months of developer testing.
Apple is expected to release a sometime this year, although it is unclear exactly when the company is planning for the workstation to make its debut. Forget Mac Pro. Lets start with the official release of 10.8.3. Appleinsider stopped mentioning the betas because it has become an almost weekly occurrence with no indication of official release. Of all the things to get irked about, this just about takes the biscuit. What possible difference does it make to you whether they release 1 beta or 12, as long as it's well tested before it's released? And since when did Apple ever give you an indication of the official release date in advance?
Yes you are paying for drivers, but its way more than just the stability and certification. The Qaudro and FireGL card drivers have completely different rendering behavior than their gaming equivalents. Workstation cards are for CAD, DCC (3d animation), medical vis, video I suppose. Lots of VRAM to store large data sets (textures, mesh) in memory. Gaming cards are for gaming - 1/2 to 1/3 the mem, and different rendering behavior. A gaming card treats the screen as one big dump of pixels and works to refresh the entire screen at 60hz+ A workstation card breaks the screen into individual graphic layers, and gets its great performance by only having to redraw layers that have been updated. So instead of redrawing the entire screen at 60hz.
Perhaps only one viewport you're tumbling your model in needs redraw so say a 1/4 of the screen needs updating, and all the horsepower can be focused on that. A game is much more chaotic than an application and has elements changing all over the place at teh same time, which is why Workstations cards don't fare as well at drawing games.
Just as a gaming card aren't as efficient in an application because it is constantly redrawing the whole screen instead of just a fraction of it.