Do I Need A Better Graphics Card....

[Dronecatcher]

Try playing Prey on the 6600 and then on the 4500, you'll definitely notice a difference.

Just bought it on ebay for £0.99

 

[MrPilot]

Are there any programs that take advantage of the gpu for video playback?

No, Sorry... not for HD video codecs. Intel macs have DVDecoder for GPU booting, PPC has altivec.

It's not all bad, my 1,67 G4 could do some 1080p movies in tiger using xbmc 9 or 10. I could also do all 720p I threw at it, even from youtube (flash .flv) in xbmc.

 

[MagicBoy]

Answered already, last month. LOL.

 

[MrPilot]

Answered already, last month. LOL.

Added text to my reply.

 

[Dronecatcher]

To me, it looks like it's either one of these possibilities:
- you disabled half the cores with CHUD
- performance mode was set to reduced in one case and maximum in the other
- some other process was using half the cores

I forgot to update this - the performance drop was due to Quicktime, the benchmark with the 6600 was from a while back when I had Quicktime 7.5.5 installed, updating to 7.7 had resulted in slower performance. Unfortunately, rolling back to 7.5.5 upset Webkit so had to re-install 7.7

 

[Cox Orange]

I forgot to update this - the performance drop was due to Quicktime, the benchmark with the 6600 was from a while back when I had Quicktime 7.5.5 installed, updating to 7.7 had resulted in slower performance. Unfortunately, rolling back to 7.5.5 upset Webkit so had to re-install 7.7

Interesting what an influence (be it bad or good) such an update (which from the version number seems just a very little step) can have.

Wasn't the 4500 always recommended for CAD modelling? Shouldn't there be certain Photoshop tasks that it can do better? on Japamacs site there also was a short note, that while the flashed 7800 and the 4500 are at par one would select one over the other regarding the field it would be used in.

There it is: http://www.jcsenterprises.com/Japamacs_Page/Blog/71BBF3EF-9713-4C53-8B80-26771F8A4087.html

Interesting, the 7800GTX works differently under Leopard and Tiger, but I am not sure, if he is only saying this regarding flashing(???) - see last post by Japamac https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3331744?start=0&tstart=0

Gaming benchmarks http://barefeats.com/mutant4.html

 

[MagicBoy]

Wasn't the 4500 always recommended for CAD modelling? Shouldn't there be certain Photoshop tasks that it can do better? on Japamacs site there also was a short note, that while the flashed 7800 and the 4500 are at par one would select one over the other regarding the field it would be used in.l

Workstation (Quadro/Fire series) and Gaming (GeForce/Radeon) cards are aimed at two totally different end purposes. They have tended to use very similar base GPUs for the last few years, some with only firmware and driver differences.

Workstation cards have a couple of benefits :
1) Enable certain rendering features specifically of benefit to CAD applications. These prioritise accuracy and rendering quality over speed and would cause timing delays in games.
2) ISV certified drivers which are rigorously tested for accuracy and stability.

GeForce/Radeon cards prioritise predictable timing (i.e. frame rates) over absolute accuracy.

For Photoshop, the extra feature set is less important than the stability.

CS4 on the Mac uses GPU acceleration for pan/zoom mainly. Not sure which PowerPC cards are supported as Adobe appear to have taken down the KB article.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Ive just tried to play this 4k reference file from the top of the thread on my Mac Pro 1,1 which has the stock NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT and it can't - that's an eye opener when my old G5 Quad could!

Playing a 4K(3840 X 2160) h264.mp4 in full screen
(http://hwcdn.net/j9t9v3v5/cds/Coastguard_H264.mp4)
6600 - Plays smoothly in VLC, stutters with MPlayer
4500 - Plays smoothly in VLC, stutters with MPlayer

 

[barracuda156]

Sad but true .

RE: Video playback, VLC's performance on my dual 1.8 G5 is not great but it's a lot better than QuickTime. Wish there was a really good video player for the PPC.

Try QMPlay2.

While I do not know what is your standard of really good, IMO it is better than VLC.