CUPERTINO, Calif., Jan. 28 Apple announced the ultimate digital powerhouse for creative professionals -- the new Power Mac G4 featuring dual 1-GHz PowerPC G4 processors, the industry's first NVIDIA GeForce4 graphics card and a DVD/CD burning SuperDrive, priced at just $2,999(US). Delivering an amazing 15 gigaflops (15 billion floating point operations per second), the dual 1-GHz Power Mac G4 runs professional applications like Adobe Photoshop up to 72 percent faster and encodes DVD Video over 300 percent faster than a 2-GHz Pentium 4-based PC*. "The new dual 1-GHz Power Mac G4 with NVIDIA GeForce4 graphics is the fastest Mac ever and the fastest personal computer ever for creative professionals,'' said Philip Schiller, senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "This is the first Mac to break the 1-GHz barrier and the first computer in the world to feature NVIDIA GeForce4 graphics.'' Apple also introduced two new Power Mac G4 models with 933 MHz and 800 MHz PowerPC G4 processors, starting at just $1,599(US). All models feature the Velocity Engine, and the 933 MHz and dual 1-GHz models include 2MB of double data rate (DDR) L3 cache per processor to boost performance even further. All models also include next generation graphics technologies from NVIDIA and ATI. The 800 MHz Power Mac G4 includes the ATI Radeon 7500 with 32MB of DDR SDRAM. The 933 MHz and dual 1-GHz models debut the incredible NVIDIA GeForce4 MX with 64MB of DDR SDRAM, able to generate an astounding 1.1 billion textured pixels per second. In addition, all Power Mac G4 models now offer dual monitor support. All new Power Mac models include both Mac OS X and Mac OS 9, with Mac OS X factory-set as the startup operating system. Mac OS X features symmetric multiprocessing, enabling the operating system itself, as well as applications, to take full advantage of dual processors for dramatic performance gains. In addition, all new Power Macs include Apple's award-winning suite of applications for digital music (iTunes 2), digital video (iMovie 2 and iDVD 2) and digital photography (iPhoto, free download from apple.com). The new Power Mac G4 also offers an exciting suite of creative, productivity and communications applications designed specifically for Mac OS X, including: Ambrosia Software Snapz Pro X, Caffeine Software PixelNhance 1.5, Code Line Communications Art Directors Toolkit for X, Lemke Software GraphicConverter 4.1, Omni Group's OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, James Thompson PCalc, FileMaker Pro Trial 5.5, Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0, Earthlink 2.5, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.1 and Smith Micro FAXstf X Preview, as well as Apple Developer Tools X.