In all good probability, ATI Radeon HD 3870 will be shipping out for Mac end of May this year. ATI is most definite to offer a retail version of the ATI Radeon HD 3870 with 512MB DDR4 that will boot OS X on 2006 - 2008 Mac Pros. Any day, it would of course, overtake and boot Windows XP or Vista in any Boot Camp partition. This of course is one of the most significant GPU upgrade choices made because the ATI Radeon cards always blow away the nVIDIA GeForce cards when one is talking about the Pro Apps for which Core Image rendering (Motion, Aperture, Color, etc.) is a necessity. The ATI Radeon 3870 video card shall make its grandiose debut for the successful Mac Pro sometime around the end of May.

And, like the 2600, one is all expectations with regard to its support CrossFire mode under Windows in the event that one has two installed. Early evidence of the upcoming ATI Radeon HD 3870 option came from the Singapore Apple Store which briefly listed the ATI Radeon HD 3870 as a build-to-order option for the Mac Pro. The page was corrected pretty soon.

The Mac Pro currently proffers just 3 video card options to the customers. Those being -  ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT and the high end NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600. The new 3870 card, is expected will offer a price and performance that falls somewhere between the current 2600 XT and 8800 GT options for gaming. Nevertheless, there have standards set that suggest how the low end ATI 2600 XT card renders Core Image effects faster than the more expensive NVIDIA 8800 GT, potentially making the upcoming ATI 3870 an obvious and better suited choice for pro apps than the NVIDIA 8800 GT .

One Mac Pro coming up, with updates – if the news is made reality of course.