Cinema displays

Imagination meets its match.

Graphic card

Feast your eyes.

All-new high-performance graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA make Mac Pro graphics technology even more cutting edge. The standard graphics card — an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory, PCI Express 2.0, and two dual-link DVI ports — provides great performance for typical creative applications. And you get dual 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display support out of the box.

For motion graphics, 3D modeling, rendering, or animation, you’ll need the greater graphics horsepower offered by the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of GDDR3 memory and latest-generation NVIDIA GPU technology.

The optional NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 graphics card is the ultimate workstation-class graphics card available, with a massive 1.5GB of GDDR3 memory and a 3D stereo port for stereo-in-a-window applications.

All of these cards feature the latest-generation unified shader model support. Compared to dedicated pixel and vertex shaders, shaders are no longer special-purpose and can now be utilized based on the needs of the graphics application.

PCI Express 2.0.

It’s the latest interface technology available for connecting high-performance graphics cards, and it’s new to the Mac Pro. A 16-lane dedicated graphics slot now features PCI Express 2.0 with up to twice the transfer rate of PCI Express.

Multiple Displays

The even bigger picture.

To create an incredible display wall or large-scale visualization, install up to four graphics cards, each with two dual-link DVI ports. You can run up to eight 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Displays at the same time with just one Mac Pro.

Performance Title Graphicscards20080108

NVIDIA GeForce 3700 GT (previous standard) vs. ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT and NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT

graphic card NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 64 fps
graphic card ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 88 fps
graphic card NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 141 fps

Doom 3 frames per second

Testing conducted by Apple in December 2007 using preproduction 8-core 3.2GHz Mac Pro, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT, and ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT units; and shipping quad-core 2.66GHz Mac Pro NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT units. All systems were configured with 4GB of RAM. Tested using Doom 3 v1.3.1 TimeDemo 1, high video quality, at 1024 by 768. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Mac Pro.

Graphics Card Specifications

  ATI Radeon HD 2600XT NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600
Memory interface 128-bit 256-bit 256-bit
Frame buffer memory 256MB GDDR3 512MB GDDR3 1.5GB GDDR3
Memory bandwidth 25.6GB/s 72.0GB/s 76.8GB/s
Textured triangles per second 700 million 33.6 billion 28.0 billion
Ports 2 dual-link DVI 2 dual-link DVI 2 dual-link DVI, one Stereo 3D
Slots occupied One standard slot One standard slot One double-wide slot
Auxiliary power cables used 0 1 2

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