Cheaper card with more vram.

[InuNacho]

I'm not entirely sure how to calculate how much I need, but on my 5870 atMonitor reads that I close to my vram limit with both LR and PS open. I don't do much outside of those two so what would be a cheap upgrade that gets me a little more power than my 5870 but has at least 2GB on it.

 

[RoastingPig]

Gigabyte 670 or the evga 670 they both are about 300 and have 2gb of ram...

 

[DanielCoffey]

Or there is the 7950 with 3Gb - you can buy the PC card and make do without the boot screen or just flash it (details at Netkas) and get the boot screen.

 

[ActionableMango]

For official cards there isn't really a "cheap" upgrade. If you don't mind PC cards and the fact they don't have boot screens, you can get to 3GB fairly cheaply:

Fry's has a GTX660 3GB (FTW edition) $250AR.
The GTX660ti 3GB can be had just over $300.

 

[InuNacho]

I've been out of the loop about these things, are the Nvidia cards the ones that require a bit of work and the AMD ones are essentially plug and play right?

 

[Karetage]

yes.Gigabyte 670 or the evga 670 they both are about 300 and have 2gb of ram

 

[TheDoc]

I've been out of the loop about these things, are the Nvidia cards the ones that require a bit of work and the AMD ones are essentially plug and play right?

I popped in a 6870 with no issues. Just lost boot screen, DVD Player and some Steam stuff.

Having said that, I'm pretty sure the Nvidia ones are the same now, so long as you are running at least 10.7.5. See here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1440150/

That is, both 10.7.5 and 10.8.* will work with NVIDIA PC cards out-of-the-box.

 

[ActionableMango]

I've been out of the loop about these things, are the Nvidia cards the ones that require a bit of work and the AMD ones are essentially plug and play right?

A wide array of video cards across both brands are now essentially plug and play with existing Apple drivers in later versions of ML. Pick whichever brand suits your needs and there will be a model suitable for you.

That's assuming you don't need boot screens. If you want boot screens there is a smaller subset of models that you need to stick to. The introduction of AMD and Nvidia "Mac Edition" cards have opened up those models (and similar models) for flashing.

 

[goMac]

I'm not entirely sure how to calculate how much I need, but on my 5870 atMonitor reads that I close to my vram limit with both LR and PS open. I don't do much outside of those two so what would be a cheap upgrade that gets me a little more power than my 5870 but has at least 2GB on it.

Keep in mind that measuring whether or not VRAM is truly "full" is difficult. There is a lot of caching going on of things that may not be important for performance.