NVIDIA Introduces Quadro GPU Range to Mac

NVIDIA, a provider of hardware and software solutions for enhanced graphics applications, expanded its NVIDIA (News - Alert) Quadro range of professional graphics solutions to the Apple Mac platform, which will provide the computational and visualization advancements enabled by company’s NVIDIA Fermi architecture to Mac Pro users.

With this launch, the professional users operating on Mac OS X Snow Leopard can now enjoy the benefits of these solutions natively upon their systems. The NVIDIA Quadro 4000 graphics processing unit or ‘GPU’ for Mac has been designed to accelerate workflows and drive a range of top professional applications.

Powered by NVIDIA CUDA, a parallel processing technology, the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 software solution allows the film and video professionals to work in a quick and uninterrupted manner. Apart from it, users of various other visual effects and image processing applications from such as NUKE and STORM from The Foundry, and MATLAB from MathWorks will also benefit from the new solution by NVIDIA.

In the words of Ginna Baldassarre, senior product manager at Adobe, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine, accelerated by NVIDIA Quadro GPUs, have redefined the non-linear editing workflow, delivering huge productivity gains. Baldassarre continued that the company looks forward to working with NVIDIA to help more Mac users reap the benefits of real-time performance and the ability to create compelling, multi-layer projects with multiple HD or higher resolution video clips, all while instantly viewing results.

The Foundry offers visual effects software solutions for film and broadcast. Bruno Nicoletti, founder and chief technological officer at The Foundry, commented that software solutions provided by the company have been used to help create visual effects for many Hollywood blockbusters, including ‘Avatar,’ ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ‘Harry Potter,’ ‘Iron Man,’ ‘Star Trek,’ ‘District 9,’ ‘2012’ and ‘Transformers.’ Nicoletti noted that the Quadro 4000 by NVIDIA is a powerful GPU blockbuster for the Mac.

MATLAB is a sophisticated technical computing language and interactive environment for algorithm development, numeric computation, data analysis, and data visualization offered by MathWorks. The new NVIDIA Quadro 4000 GPU for MAC includes the fast double precision feature, which is significantly helpful in these applications. MATLAB is equipped with a number of graphics features, such as 2D and 3D plotting functions and 3D volume functions that are helpful in visualizing engineering and scientific data.

According to Silvina Grad-Freilich, manager of parallel-computing marketing for MathWorks, the visualization features in the Quadro 4000, coupled with GPU-accelerated computation for algorithm development and deployment with MATLAB and Parallel Computing Toolbox, are a powerful combination of capabilities for the Mac platform. Grad-Freilich noted that the company is pleased that its Mac users will be able to leverage Fermi-grade computational performance in their applications.

In October 2010, NVIDIA announced the availability of its NVIDIA 3DTV Play software, which allows users to connect NVIDIA 3D Vision enabled notebooks and desktops to 3D HDTVs for the ultimate high-definition, big-screen entertainment experience.