The K5000 for Mac GPUs from Nvidia, based on Kepler architecture, are twice as fast as the previous chips.
The Quadro K5000 for Mac GPUs is scheduled to be available later this year from select Apple resellers and system integrators and from Nvidia’s roster of authorized distribution partners, according to a company release. Estimated pricing will start at $2,249, according to a company release. The GPU is also designed to retain its full performance and features when using Apple Boot Camp and running Microsoft Windows-based professional PC applications.
“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,” Grant Petty, CEO of Blackmagic Design, said in a prepared statement. “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.”
engadget “As you’ll see in the video below, with 11 streams of 1080p video at 30 fps in Premiere Pro (and one overlay of the NVIDIA logo), GPU acceleration handles the workload seamlessly, letting us add effects in real time without any processing delay. Switching to software rendering mode in the editing program shows a night-and-day difference: video playback is extremely choppy, and processing moves at a crawl. Even with two K5000 chips in this desktop, Premiere Pro utilizes just one, but After Effects takes advantage of both GPUs. In this program, NVIDIA showed us ray-tracing, a computationally intensive 3D imaging feature, which only became available in After Effects with the release of CS6. Like in Premiere Pro, the program runs smoothly enough to let us edit images in real time.”
HDW: This may be a giant leap forward but it’s at a cost, I am not so sure I want to spend £1,390 on my dated MacPro when we are getting new Thunderbolt enabled MacPros early next year.
Well, Intel doesn’t approve of Thunderbolt solutions if they’re not connected directly to an Intel GPU and as the LGA-2011 platform doesn’t support integrated graphics…
That said, Apple seems to get a lot of leeway and it’s possible we’ll see some special solution from Apple that works around Intel’s “PC” limitation for Thunderbolt.
Also, have you considered building a CustoMac/Hackintosh?
With Mountain Lion I can put natively any Nvidia GTX in my Mac Pro with a budget from 200 to 400 euros. I am running GTX 560 and GTX 570 out of the box, others have tried GTX 670 bought from amazon.