A new lease of life for the Mac Pro?

Apple Mac Pro

Apple are about to release the latest version of Mountain Lion, OSX 10.8.3, which includes support for high end graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD.

We recently reported on Nvidias new range of Quadro cards, the Quadro K series based on the Kepler chip architecture, and now it seems that Apple are adding support for the K 5000 and AMD's Radeon 7000 series cards to Mountain Lion.

This is very interesting because at the moment the only Apple computer that could use these full size cards is the Mac Pro, which has had a very limited range of graphics cards available up till now.

Replacing the existing Radeon or even a Quadro 4000 in a Mac Pro should give a huge increase in graphics performance, particularly with software that can take advantage of GPU acceleration.

This news also adds fuel to the rumours that Apple are planning a new Mac Pro which presumably will also be able to be fitted with full size PCIe graphics cards.

Also these new cards are built for PCI express 3 bus speeds, whereas the Mac Pro currently has PCIe 2. The cards would still run in the current Mac Pro but not at the speeds they would be capable of in a PCIe 3 system.

Lets hope the new Mac Pro has PCIe 3, more full sized slots, Thunderbolt and USB3, that would make it an ideal platform for an editing or colour grading system. Maybe we'll see it in time for NAB?

At least if you get one of these cards for your existing Mac Pro it should still work in the new model when it arrives :-)