NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL
The $599 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL card that Apple introduced on Monday represents a significantly improved graphics card now available to Mac users.
Previously, the best card available to Mac users was the ATI Radeon 9800 XT which adds $300 to the cost of a build-to-order PowerMac G5. The new GeForce 6800 adds another $150 to that cost, but delivers significant performance boosts.
Tom's Hardware provides a review of the PC version of the card. The card appears to represent a generational jump rather than an incremental upgrade:
NVIDIA has seemingly pulled out all stops in an attempt to deliver cutting edge graphics with its GeForce 6800 Ultra. After gamers for too long have had to be content with mere incremental improvements to graphics performance, NVIDIA new card delivers a performance jump not seen for a long time. The device is also solidly engineered as well as insanely fast.
Halo Benchmarks at Tom's Hardware show impressive improvements over the ATI Radeon 9800 XT.
The specially engineered Mac version of the card also provides support for Dual DVI connectors -- providing support for the new 30" Apple Display. In fact, it comes with two Dual DVI connectors, allowing users to drive two 30" Apple Displays.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...