Fastest non-flashed CUDA card?

[nigelbb]

As per my other posts my GTX570 card doesn't drive two monitors with Nvidia web drivers any more so I am contemplating purchasing a new graphics card. My system is a Mac Pro 3,1 & my main criterion is maximum CUDA performance for video editing in Premiere Pro. I am not interested in Windows in any shape or form. I do not need a grey Apple boot screen.

What is the current state of play with Nvidia cards? Last I heard the GTX570 was still the fastest CUDA card even though the GTX670/680 had more CUDA cores. There have been another couple of generations of Nvidia cards since so perhaps things have changed. A cool running card with very quiet fans would be nice but not essential.

 

[Asgorath]

TITAN Black or a GTX 980 will be your best bets. The GTX 980 can easily be powered by the 2 6-pin connectors as well, which is nice.

 

[nigelbb]

TITAN Black or a GTX 980 will be your best bets. The GTX 980 can easily be powered by the 2 6-pin connectors as well, which is nice.

Thanks. I have just seen the prices on those. Perhaps I should have qualified my question by stating 'affordable'. The base system is a 2008 Mac Pro those cards would be disproportionately expensive. To put this in context I bought my current GTX570 used on eBay for the equivalent of less than $150 nearly 2 years ago.

Secondly do you have some real CUDA performance comparisons with the GTX570? I cannot find GTX570 vs Titan or GTX 980 but here the CUDA performance of Titan vs the GTX580 (same generation a 570) looks very disappointing. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-workstation-graphics-card,3493-21.html Here the Titan is better than the 580 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-workstation-graphics-card,3493-19.html I cannot find 980 vs 570/580 comparison but as the 980 is half the price of the Titan I am assuming that it will not be as good.

As I said in my OP my understanding a couple of years ago when I bought the 570 was that it was the fastest CUDA card available for the Mac. I would need to be convinced that there was a a real performance gain to get achieved over the 570 before I laid out big money on a new card.

Does anyone have real life experience of upgrading a GTX570 to a faster/better Nvidia card?

 

[Gav Mack]

You will find all you need to know about what nvidia cards and CUDA on Tutor's huge maximising CPU performance thread below. A very long and eye opening informative read, might want to work backwards if you're in a hurry.

 

[nigelbb]

You will find all you need to know about what nvidia cards and CUDA on Tutor's huge maximising CPU performance thread below. A very long and eye opening informative read, might want to work backwards if you're in a hurry.

I spent some time ploughing through that thread. Fascinating as it is there is precious little about Macs there.

Perhaps someone can give me a straight answer (ideally from personal experience). Will I see a worthwhile performance improvement if I replace my existing GTX570 with some other graphics card. The heavy duty applications that I run on my Mac Pro 3,1 running Mavericks (Yosemite if necessary) are Premier Pro, Photoshop & Lightroom (possibly FCPX in the future). I don't have any particular performance issue at present but if I knew that I could render out a Blu-ray in half the time with the GTXnnn then I would consider changing.

 

[m4v3r1ck]

NVidia GTX 980!?

I spent some time ploughing through that thread. Fascinating as it is there is precious little about Macs there.

Perhaps someone can give me a straight answer (ideally from personal experience). Will I see a worthwhile performance improvement if I replace my existing GTX570 with some other graphics card. The heavy duty applications that I run on my Mac Pro 3,1 running Mavericks (Yosemite if necessary) are Premier Pro, Photoshop & Lightroom (possibly FCPX in the future). I don't have any particular performance issue at present but if I knew that I could render out a Blu-ray in half the time with the GTXnnn then I would consider changing.

A possible great upgrade would be the GTX980, which only uses the two mobo 6 pin additional power with a max power draw of 225Watt! I have no experience but I'm following the threads about it closely! Good Luck

 

[nigelbb]

A possible great upgrade would be the GTX980, which only uses the two mobo 6 pin additional power with a max power draw of 225Watt! I have no experience but I'm following the threads about it closely! Good Luck

Your enthusiasm in spending my money does you credit However a GTX980 costs about as much as my 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 is worth so I really would like to hear from someone with actual experience of moving from a GTX570. If I was spending that amount of money I may as well sell my 3,1 & spend a £1000 on a 6-core 5,1 Mac Pro then chuck in a cheap PC GTX570 that I know is a damn fine graphics card for my requirements. I am sure that the GTX680/780/880/980 could be super fast at playing Windows games but that's not what I am looking for. I need best bang for buck CUDA & possibly OpenCL for Adobe applications & possibly FCPX. At the moment I haven't heard any argument that there is anything better than a $100 used GTX570 in performance terms. A graphics card that was quieter or able to support more than two monitors could be a contender as long as it was at least as powerful as the GTX570 for Adobe applications.

 

[Gav Mack]

I spent some time ploughing through that thread. Fascinating as it is there is precious little about Macs there.

Perhaps someone can give me a straight answer (ideally from personal experience). Will I see a worthwhile performance improvement if I replace my existing GTX570 with some other graphics card. The heavy duty applications that I run on my Mac Pro 3,1 running Mavericks (Yosemite if necessary) are Premier Pro, Photoshop & Lightroom (possibly FCPX in the future). I don't have any particular performance issue at present but if I knew that I could render out a Blu-ray in half the time with the GTXnnn then I would consider changing.

He runs them in hacks and he has all the comparable CUDA scores for all the different Nvidia types in there somewhere.

A 680 will give you a little speed bump over the 570, but perhaps a used stock PC 780 card would give more bang per buck. If you are going FCPX then maybe an AMD for more future OpenCL though that will lack CUDA of course. Best person to ask would be MacVidCards about this kind of thing..