NVIDIA Corporation today announced that its most advanced professional graphics solution, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 graphics processing unit (GPU), is now available as an option in the new Apple Power Mac G5. The NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 graphics card drives up to two high resolution 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Displays and accelerates applications used in industries such as digital content creation, scientific research, and 3D visualization. "The Power Mac is one of the premier platforms for those looking to design, develop and create some of the most eye-catching graphics and video," said Dan Vivoli, executive vice president of marketing at NVIDIA. "In rolling out this advanced professional graphics board for the Power Mac G5, NVIDIA and Apple are bringing the most powerful NVIDIA workstation solution to an entirely new customer base." "The Power Mac G5 Quad is the most powerful system we've ever made," said David Moody, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Mac Product Marketing. "The combination of quad-core processing and the fastest workstation class NVIDIA Quadro graphics gives our creative and scientific customers unprecedented performance." NVIDIA Quadro solutions, certified for the leading computer aided design, video, content creation and scientific visualizations applications, are widely considered by industry professionals as the benchmark for performance and quality. Alias Maya, an integrated modeling, animation, visual effects, and rendering solution widely used in the film, video, game development, and design markets, is the first application to be fully certified for use on the Power Mac G5 with the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500. "Alias and NVIDIA work closely together to enable our software and hardware products compliment each other, enabling our customers to realize increased productivity in their work," said Kevin Tureski, director of engineering for Maya at Alias. "Maya is a very demanding application with very demanding users. We were very pleased to be able to fully qualify the Power Mac G5 with the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 on the same day it was announced. This is an ideal platform for content creation and editing." The NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 GPU offers a number of features Power Mac G5 users have been looking for in a workstation-class platform. IEEE 32-bit floating point color precision and 512MB of dedicated graphics memory deliver exceptional image quality without compromising on performance. System bottlenecks are further eliminated using the latest PCI Express bus interface, which can transfer over 4GB data per second, and hardware accelerated pixel readback performance of more than 2.0GB per second. Output capabilities include support for two high resolution (dual-link) Apple Cinema HD Displays, and a feature new to Power Mac G5 users, quad buffered OpenGL stereo viewing capability for professional applications. In addition to the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 GPU, targeted primarily at professional application users, Apple is offering Power Mac G5 customers the advanced NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT graphics card, designed to deliver blazing frame rates and outstanding image quality for a broad range of consumer applications. Standard Power Mac graphics options are based on the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GPU. More information on NVIDIA graphics cards can be found at its Web site. Please visit Apple's web site for more information on the new Power Mac G5 at its Web site.