Radeon HD 7000 series support in 10.8.3 beta points to new Mac Pro

Here's another possible piece in the puzzle that is the long-hoped-for Mac Pro refresh. When digging around in the recently posted OS X 10.8.3 beta, a user on Netkas.org found that Apple had included video card drivers for AMD's top-end Radeon HD 7000 series, pointing to its possible inclusion in the expected 2013 update of the tower computer.

For those not familiar with the Radeon HD 7000 series, it features the first 28-nanometer GPU and tops out at a whopping 3 GB of RAM in the Radeon HD 7970. By comparison, the current Mac Pro is available with the older Radeon 5870, a 1 GB card introduced in 2009 as the first DirectX 11-compatible GPU.

Of course, Apple's inclusion of HD 7000 series drivers could simply mean that the next OS X will support the cards for current Pro owners. Outfitting its next top-of-the-line machine with one of these powerful GPUs out of the box would certainly go a long way towards justifying the "Pro" in its name, though.

[Via Apple Insider]