Dual Ati x1900Xt possible?

[m3henn04]

Just curious if it is possible and even beneficial to install a second x1900 card on my mac pro. I am only using one monitor but would like a bit better video speed for 3d graphics rendering when using Maya.

 

[killmoms]

OS X has no support for any kind of SLI, even ATI's Crossfire. I believe some people have used a different firmware on the mobo to do Crossfire in Windows? Not sure.

 

[m3henn04]

I thought SLI just allowed you to have multiple vidcards....can't you do that with the stock cards? Is the multiple cards option only for multiple displays and does SLI bridge the two or more cards to essentially make one more powerful card?

 

[MRU]

SLI is Nividia
Crossfire is ATI

MacPro does not support sli or crossfire configurations.

You can put 4 x nvidia 7300 in your mac pro, but they all work independantly and not in sli.

 

[robbieduncan]

I thought SLI just allowed you to have multiple vidcards....can't you do that with the stock cards? Is the multiple cards option only for multiple displays and does SLI bridge the two or more cards to essentially make one more powerful card?

SLI is used to make two cards into one faster card (more or less).

The Mac Pro should support two x1900xt cards but they will act as two separate cards. I'd be surprised if this had any effect on Maya rendering speed.

 

[aneks]

Gpu has no impact on rendering in Maya unless you are using the =hardware renderer, also Ati's and Maya tend to be a very bad combination. One of the main reasons I still have a 7300 in my Mac Pro is that I run Maya under bootcamp.

 

[m3henn04]

Here is a rendering clockspeed that is typical for me

16000 polys
Fully textured 16bit

8x10 @ 300dpi = avg 2mins 30sec
1k Square @ 72dpi = avg 30sec

I talked to a guy at apple and he said that OSX will support SLI or Crossfire but Nvidia and ATI have not released the drivers needed to support those features. the ATI x1900XT is crossfire ready if paired with a x1900 crossfire edition and will work under windows when booted with bootcamp.