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Latest OS X 10.8.3 Beta Adds NVIDIA Quadro K5000 Graphics Card Drivers

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Apr 12, 2001
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As noted in our forums, Apple's latest OS X 10.8.3 beta seeded to developers as build 12D76 yesterday contains new drivers for NVIDIA's high-end Quadro K5000 graphics card. NVIDIA announced the Quadro K5000 for the Mac Pro last September, but has yet to actually release the product.

k5000_drivers_10_8_3.jpg
The first developer build of OS X 10.8.3 seeded last November added AMD Radeon 7000-series drivers, so it appears that the public release of the operating system update will include support for several high-end graphics options. Just yesterday, we noted 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 revamped Mac Pro sometime this year, although it is unclear exactly when the company is planning for the workstation to make its debut.

Article Link: Latest OS X 10.8.3 Beta Adds NVIDIA Quadro K5000 Graphics Card Drivers
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2013/03/06/latest-os-x-10-8-3-beta-adds-nvidia-k5000-graphics-card-drivers/
Nice, looking forward to the K5000 in my Mac Pro...

Anyone know anything about price and availability?
 
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. It's a joke.
 
epelba01 said:
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. It's a joke.
Click to expand...


Yeeesssssss! It want 10.8.3 bootcamp drivers so I can put Windows 8 in my Bootcamp partition.
 
Not a rumor

This one is not a rumor - it's officially on Nvidia's site now.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-k5000-mac.html

Occasionally a new Mac video card comes out. Often with a new Mac Pro, but not always.

Apple puts all available Mac video cards have drivers into the OS. There are so few Mac video cards it's the least they can do.
 
epelba01 said:
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. It's a joke.
Click to expand...
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?
 
Bubba Satori said:
In games, yes. In professional applications, no.
Click to expand...

Not really true. When you buy Quadro cards you are paying for the driver stability. The drivers are typically underclocking the same processors to achieve that stability. The GPU cores usually the same as the consumer cards. That being said... If the drivers are written to optimize certain frameworks like opengl or opencl... the quadro could achieve similar benchmarks as a consumer card (or higher) but perform with more accurate computation. ie. The gtx driver could be written to boost Cuda performance for a game but have no attention paid to opengl or opencl. Where the same gpu processor on a quadro card will perform poorly on games and be far more optimized for opencl and opengl. It all has to do with drivers.

It is a confusing matter, but can be summed up in the simple fact that you (big institutions and production houses) are paying to have quality drivers that don't crash or perform poorly in the high end apps you may need with quadro cards.

Even then though.. You have to take into consideration whether the application you are using takes advantage of the card/drivers to begin with.

I have seen production houses run on consumer grade Nvidia 5xx and 6xx cards and they perform equal or better than quadro cards.

There is also the fact that Quadro cards give you 10-bit (i think up to 30-bit in the FX) color. Do most people need this ... No.
 
Atm the rMBP 15" is more powerful than the Mac Pro... Imagine the power with this card and amazing solid state drives, lots of RAM, 12 cores making 24 virtual ones.... Wow!
 
This bodes well for a Mac Pro refresh...

Now if only Intel could release new workstation processors that would be swell.
 
10.8.3 and 10.9 will both be announced same day... I would assume there's something in there they are trying to keep secret. Mac pros, iLife, iWork, all coming very very soon.
 
The graphics card is making real life look less and less realistic.
 
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.
 
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