Display card replacement advice

The ati 2600XT display card in my 2008 MacPro went belly up over the weekend. I found an ati 5770 at the local MicroCenter, but I was wondering about the ati 5870 which is hard to come by right now. Anybody have experience with it and hazard to guess if it's worth waiting until the 5870 supply loosens up? I can get a loner 2600XT for a couple of weeks from a friend. The machine is primarily used for FCP and increasingly, Color. I don't really use Motion seriously, but rely a lot on After Effects.

Thanks for any insight.

-Russ

Here you go:

[barefeats.com]

Chi-Ho Lee
Film & Television Editor
Apple Certified Final Cut Pro Instructor

If you do a lot of AE then get the GTX285 this is what I have in my 2008 MacPro and its better than the ATI cards for Adobe stuff like AE (mainly because Adobe & Nvidia are working closely together) but it is a bit slower than the 5870 on Apple ProApps like Motion.

[www.nvidia.com]

Or you could plum for a Quadro but thats a lot of money.

[store.apple.com]



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

I feel like an idiot for having to ask this, but I've managed to make myself profoundly stupid about modern graphics cards. Is there an idiot's guide to every major product currently on the market?

Reason I'm asking is 'cause last night a good friend emailed me and said, in essence, "I'm deciding between two refurbished Mac Pros, one with an Nvidia GT 120 and one with an ATI Radeon 5770. Which is better?"

I had absolutely no idea how to answer him. I probably could've googled up a one-to-one comparison of those two boards specifically, but those comparisons ? like the one Chi-Ho posted ? tend to be heavy on irrelevant statistics. I don't care how many frames per second you can get playing a video game. I care about ? you know. The stuff folks like us care about.

Does there exist, somewhere on the Internet, a simple chart of all the available graphics boards, telling you which excel in which areas? Real-time performance in After Effects, rendering in Color, FXPlug rendering, whatever? For example, I know the Quadro 4800 is a high-end board, but if I did nothing but straight-cuts editing in Final Cut Pro would it have any effect on my work at all? I'm guessing no, but I'm too dumb to be sure.

If such a thing does not exist ? Ben? Darling? Sweetiepie? Would you make me one please?

>Does there exist, somewhere on the Internet, a simple chart of all the available graphics boards, telling
>you which excel in which areas?

Not any that I know of. If someone knows how to run a good comparison, I'm all ears too. The biggest difference between the Nvidia cards and the ATI cards is whether the operation is scripted for CUDA or Open GL acceleration. CUDA is proprietary, and I was told OpenCL is like a stripped down version of CUDA, whereas Open GL is much older pipeline, less efficient and less predictable. Which applications make use of CUDA? CS5, the DaVinci Resolve, Smoke for Mac, etc... I seriously don't think anyone has put OpenCL to good use yet. So that leaves us with the applications that use the older OpenGL pipeline- Motion, FXplugs, Color, AE CS4 (not sure about CS5), etc.. Nvidia cards have been known to under perform on Macs. Not dramatically, but enough for some people to want to switch to ATI cards, but that was before the days of CUDA acceleration.

So when you get down to this, there's really no way you can compare the amount of gigaflops or VRAM in the card, unless you're talking about how fast it renders via OpenGL. In short, it's like trying to make a comparison between an 8 core 2.26 Ghz multi processor and a quad core 2.66 Ghz multi-processor. For this it depends on whether the software is able to properly utilize the available multi processors.

>one with an Nvidia GT 120 and one with an ATI Radeon 5770

The Nvidia GT285 would be a good compromise between budget and power if you want a good CUDA accelerated card.



www.strypesinpost.com

Ok in an homage to Dr Ray Stantz...

Don't touch the GT120 with a 20m Cattle-prod!

Its a very poor card for both GPU acceleration and even poorer at driving a second display. When you run two 1920x1200 displays the second display is almost unusable with extremely sluggish refresh.

It is sometimes recommended for simply driving one display rather than doing and serious GPU processing along with a Quadro for working on say the Blackmagic DaVinci.

However I HIGHLY recommend (even for standard def offline suites) that you get the best card you can for your money. As nothing holds up creativity like waiting ages for renders or not being able to play back a few basic filters! Power is not just for the online!

The three "affordable" mid-range options for the MacPros as mentioned are the ATI 5770 & 5870 which as I said earlier?are slightly better for ProApps and run quieter and cooler than the other option; the EVGA Nvidia GTX285 which is much better for Adobe Apps which use CUDA and is the minimum spec Nvidia GFX card that can handle the Mercury Playback Engine.

For games (if you like games) all three are pretty amazing - however I am STILL truly shocked that Apple have not implemented any form of Cross-fire (ATI) or SLI (Nvidia) which you can link 2 or more GPUs together, this could enable distributed GPU processing not just for games but for GPU accelerated ProApps.



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Is it true that FCS will not run smooth with two display cards?
I´m asking because I want to run FCS and a GPU powered Resolve on the same box.
By the way which GPU board is the better buy GTX or Quattro?

The Resolve is designed to effectively use 2 graphics cards- the GT120 for the GUI, and the Quadro FX4800 for the processing power. The GTX285 is quite similar to the Quadro. Color will probably choke on two graphics cards, but I think you'll be fine on FCP.



www.strypesinpost.com

Quote

The Resolve is designed to effectively use 2 graphics cards- the GT120 for the GUI, and the Quadro FX4800 for the processing power.

Yes forgot to mention I learned that from your DaVinci review my dear



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

I don't know if it is still true, but here is an article from Apple support about not using more than one graphics card with Final Cut Studio:

Final Cut Studio: Unexpected behavior with more than one graphics card

I would suggest that if you are doing color grading with something like a Resolve, you should be able to easily bill enough to afford to run things on a separate Mac Pro...

Expecting to do everything possible on a single Mac Pro may not be the best thing...



-Dave

P.S. - I think I may have posted this info before, but it was probably in the "dead zone" time (where we lost some posts for Aug and Sep this year)...

I'm not sure how many folks run FCP on two graphics cards, and it may mess up FXplugs, since those use the GPU, but don't the MBPs run on two graphics cards? With regards to the Digital Cinema Desktop preview, there's no reason to use it when you have an external monitor, which you would have for any sort of color correction work.



www.strypesinpost.com

The system I am planning is supposed to become a universal assist station for rendering, digital dailies, AE work and digital delivery. My shopping list also includes CS5 and AVID MC5.
Dave is right I guess; running everything possible on one single Mac might not be a good idea.
I´ll ask my ASE for demo/test and see and tell.
Thanks everybody!

Quote

don't the MBPs run on two graphics cards?

Not at the same time. When one's powered up, the other's powered down.

I gotta admit I've not worked extensively in FCP with 2 graphics card. I have the resolve running on my Mbp with the stock 8600 card. Not fast, not real time. Not a recommended finishing config (my graphics card isn't too fast by today's standards), but it works. I'm sure you won't have much issues with having a sole gtx285 on it.



www.strypesinpost.com

Good thread everyone...

I see strypes' point about two graphics cards possibly "confusing" certain applications.

The KnowledgeBase article I linked to only explicitly mentions Digital Cinema Desktop issues. The other issues that "may" occur are mostly undefined.

At the risk of oversimplification, I suspect that having two separate graphics cards may "confuse" certain plugins, applications, etc. I see sort of a parallel between using two graphics cards nowadays and using two monitors years (10+?) ago. If an application was not well-written, a second monitor was made useless. I had a few conversations with some large developers about a lack of proper support for multiple monitor setups.

Plus, the more apps, frameworks, QT components, kernel extensions, etc., you load onto a single Mac Pro, the more likely there will be conflicts and instability.

I, personally, could not imagine using something like DaVinci Resolve (or Smoke or ???) without a "fully-loaded" system, including super-fast disk array, high-end external display(s), and a good "control surface" (which itself could cost a couple of thousand up to $30K US, or more)... To me, most finishing apps and HW setups, along with using something like Resolve, should be left to those that do that kind of work exclusively. If a budget doesn't allow for that, then I believe the built-in tools in FCP, along with the available plugins, or Color, provide more than adequate capabilities...

My two cents worth...
;-)


-Dave

One of the points in my Resolve article is how efficiently you can work within the same machine. So for the guys who usually do a lot of work within the same machine, the Resolve is one big addition to your suite. Although most of my work these days is centered around the offline edit, I still do some of my work in Color whenever I need to get finishing work done, so I am quite well versed with the interface in Color. Having tried the Resolve, I would gladly move over to the Resolve whenever I can. Don't get me wrong. I like Color, but the Resolve feels much more robust, and it has has better tracking tools, better color isolation tools, and a much better UI on the whole (the nodes beats Color's "rooms", simply because you can shift the order of the nodes around easily). Also, in the Resolve, you work in full float, so you don't need to bother about having your colors clipped when you push them above 110 IRE when you are moving between nodes.

You can get the Tangent Wave at $1500, although you would still prefer the full Davinci panel, because then you don't have to toggle around to get the knobs you want. I did speak to the guys at BMD about making a "lite" version of the Davinci panel, with more controls than the Tangent Wave, but cheaper than the full Davinci panel, but the truth is, they've already done so much to port it onto the Mac since they acquired DaVinci, and so far everything seems to work pretty well, and using a Tangent Wave isn't a bad starting point if you were previously grading with a mouse.

I'm not sure how much having two graphics cards will affect FCP, but if you're having issues, you can always unhook the stock GT120 (you're not paying for a GT120 because it comes with the Mac). The Resolve can still run pretty well with one graphics card, and you can always choose to render down to watch the grade should the real time function be insufficient with the GTX285. The render times will still beat the render time from Color, because everything in the Resolve was designed with real time in mind.



www.strypesinpost.com

Thanks strypes!

Got your point Dave, if I was building a serious 2k4k finishing colorgrading suite I would buy it on linux. I just want nice looking rushes at low cost and some extras.

10 years ago a 12 core onyx/inferno filled a fridge. Today a 12 core mac/AE/FCP sits under your table and does the same thing.
That is technology and it is not going to stop.

+2 cents is 4

hamaca

PS: and next Final Cut will be awesome !

hamaca Wrote:
> +2 cents is 4
>
> hamaca
>
> PS: and next Final Cut will be awesome !

No, I bet it will be "super awesome"!!!

+2 cents = 6

;-)


-Dave

P.S. - Sorry for the early Sunday afternoon (my time) caffeine and sugar induced silliness...

>+2 cents = 6

8 cents, adjusted for inflation.



www.strypesinpost.com

I´m in euro land we have no inflation, we have switzerland around the corner...

you forgot tax..



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

tax? switzerland?

I´m working on my "how to tell my controller speech" - also in silly mode.

hamaca

I tuned out on this, because I didn't think anyone was going to comment... was I wrong. Thanks to everyone who entered the discussion. I went ahead with the 5770 because there are no 5870 to be found.

Thanks again.

-Russ