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Do I need more than 8800GT in 2008 mac pro to handle lightroom?

K

kudukudu

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 24, 2007
198
4
I've got one of the 4 core early 2008 mac pro with 8800GT and 10 MB RAM with SSD as a boot drive for applications (okay at one time this sounded pretty impressive :) Anyway, I just got a nikon d800 and since a) imovie can't import movies from a D800, b) Aperture has been discontinued, I decided to make the move to lightroom for both pictures and video. The program seems a little sluggish compared to Aperture. Would improving the video card make a difference or do I just need to face reality regarding the age of my mac pro?
 
Lightroom doesn't care, because it doesn't directly leverage any gpu framework. Your bottleneck is elsewhere. It could be any number of things, but it's not a gpu issue. It taxes your gpu about as much as safari or firefox.
 
THink you might need more RAM. Look at Activity monitor and see how RAM is being used, and if any page ins and outs.. A larger SSD would help - esp apportioning a section of it as scratch disk...
 
I have a D800E as well as a Mac pro 2008 I'm in the same boat as you debating what the best route is for an upgrade.
 
8800GT is enough for LR as previous posters said. In general it goes in this order: CPU, RAM, SSD. You can't do much with first in 2008, so focus on second and third. You may also want to check this arstechnica thread out.
 
kudukudu said:
I've got one of the 4 core early 2008 mac pro with 8800GT and 10 MB RAM with SSD as a boot drive for applications (okay at one time this sounded pretty impressive :) Anyway, I just got a nikon d800 and since a) imovie can't import movies from a D800, b) Aperture has been discontinued, I decided to make the move to lightroom for both pictures and video. The program seems a little sluggish compared to Aperture. Would improving the video card make a difference or do I just need to face reality regarding the age of my mac pro?
Click to expand...

When I had a 2008 3.1 Mac Pro, using Lightroom ran just fine without any sluggishness. My GPU was Nvidia 285gtx with 12g ram and just HD platter drives. I regularly do some maintenance like using Disk Warrior to regularly fix HD directories, Drive Genius to defrag and doing a clean install of the OS. You may want to try doing a clean install of the OS.
 
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