NVIDIA announces Quadro K5000 for Mac Pro

The Quadro K5000 features a range of innovative features, including SMX for increased per-clock throughput of key graphics operations and bindless textures that enable the GPU to reference textures directly in memory. Plus, it supports up to four displays—ideal for driving large-scale visualization solutions. NVIDIA has announced the Kepler-based Quadro K5000 GPU for Mac Pro users. The Quadro K5000 is positioned as a professional-class GPU for these Mac users due to its high visualization and computation capabilities for digital content creation. We first reported on the Quadro K5000 GPU when NVIDIA announced its next generation Maximus workstation platform in June this year.


By delivering the Quadro K5000 for Mac, NVIDIA has brought cinematic 4K display support as well as a touted speed boost due to its new Kepler GPU architecture. According to NVIDIA, the new Quadro K5000 is capable of running "...key content creation applications up to 2x faster..." with lower power consumption than the previous generation Fermi-based Quadro 4000 for Mac.

The newer Quadro K5000 is capable to driving up to four displays with its updated graphics engine. Hence, a Mac Pro is capable of driving up to eight displays as there is also support for up to two Quadro K5000 GPUs in its single tower. The Quadro K5000 comes with 4GB of GDDR5 video memory, with support for OpenGL, OpenCL and NVIDIA CUDA framework. While Quadro K5000 for Mac has two dual-link DVI ports, its Windows platform counterpart has a dual-link DVI port and a single-link DVI one.

The introduction of this new GPU from NVIDIA breathes new life into the Mac Pro series that has been left languishing by Apple since 2010, save for a quiet update to some models of the series in June this year.

The NVIDIA Quadro K5000 for Mac, for an estimated sum of US$2,249, is planned to be available later this year from Apple resellers and system integrators, including Leadtek for the Asia Pacific region.