Did nVidia or Apple write the drivers? Apple has traditionally written its
own drivers for the video cards because the manufacturers rarely offered
Mac drivers.
NVIDIA yesterday announced for Mac Pro users its Quadro FX 4800 graphics card, what the company calls “the market’s most advanced professional graphics card.”
Why would it call it that? Well, the 192 processor cores and 1.5GB of memory, for starters.
The card also features a standard 3-pin stereo connector for true 3D stereoscopic imaging; it dynamically allocates compute, geometry, shading and pixel processing power; that 1.5GB frame buffer has memory bandwidth of up to 76.8 GB/sec.; and it offers full-scene antialiasing.
Based on NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture, The Quadro FX 4800 also has two dual-link DVI and stereo connectors and Boot Camp support for Windows fans out there.
Here’s a comparison to its siblings, courtesy of Tom’s Hardware:
| Card | Processor Cores | Memory Size | Memory Bandwidth | Memory Interface | Power Consumption | Price |
| Quadro FX 5800 | 240 | 4 GB | 102 GB/s | 512-bit | 189 W | $3,499 |
| Quadro FX 5600 | 128 | 1.5 GB | 76.8 GB/s | 384-bit | 171 W | $2,999 |
| Quadro FX 4800 | 192 | 1.5 GB | 76.8 GB/s | 384-bit | 150 W | $1,999 |
| Quadro FX 4600 | 112 | 768 GB | 67.2 GB/s | 384-bit | 134 W | $1,999 |
| Quadro FX 3700 | 112 | 512 MB | 51.2 GB/s | 256-bit | 78 W | $799 |
So what’s the damage on this bad boy? $1,799 USD, to be exact, available beginning May 2009. Save your pennies.
