Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

FCPX Card upgrade 5770 or 5870?

mikeandbecka

mikeandbecka

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 25, 2005
33
27
Southern CA
Im thinking about upgrading my early 2009 Mac Pro that has the ATI Radeon HD 4870 512 MB inside with either the 5770 or 5870. I primarily use FCPX and just want a little more boost in the system.

I also plan to move the current ATI Radeon HD 4870 to my 2006 Mac Pro (currently has ATI HD 2600 XT 256).. does anyone know if that card will work there? The card it currently has doesn't support FCPX and just want a simple pre editing bay for an assistant editor
 
Yes, the 4870 will work in the 2006 Mac Pro.

I don't think the big price difference between the Apple 5770 and 5870 is justified, so I'd go with the 5770 there. If you look into PC versions of those cards, it's another story.
 
Has anyone tried to get a PNY Quadro FX 5800 Graphics Card to run on the MacPro? THanks so much!
 
rhapsodyosx said:
Has anyone tried to get a PNY Quadro FX 5800 Graphics Card to run on the MacPro? THanks so much!
Click to expand...
Someone here mentioned that the "professional" cards are not really properly supported on the Mac and the drivers are mediocre at best, so it would not be worthwhile in the first place, as a "normal" graphic card would run circles around it. Not sure, but i think this was even applicable for use with dedicated programs that could in theory make use of those cards...
 
one of our members at Netkas tried 5800.

the Nvidia drivers inited it, but OSX was not able to deal with 4GB of VRAM

(they keep coding this in a stop gap way, as if RAM wasn't going to always increase)

Quadro cards are artificially "boosted" by disabling featues in regular cards.

Until Kepler, this was done by limiting DOuble Precision Float.

Since there were no apps (that I know of, still hoping there is one) that used Double PRecision, it meant that Quadro cards were not able to demonstrate a reason to be so expensive, other than their support. (to some, this is enough)

Kepler cards are different. They have found better ways to cripple the GTX6xx cards, so soon we may have a Quadro well worth buying.
 
Ok so with the options right now just go with the cheaper version.. not that much of a difference between the ATI 5770 and 5870?
 
MacVidCards said:
Since there were no apps (that I know of, still hoping there is one) that used Double PRecision, it meant that Quadro cards were not able to demonstrate a reason to be so expensive, other than their support. (to some, this is enough)

Kepler cards are different. They have found better ways to cripple the GTX6xx cards, so soon we may have a Quadro well worth buying.
Click to expand...

What did they do to them this time?
 
thekev said:
What did they do to them this time?
Click to expand...

LOL. Not to them. The mainstream Kepler are "crippled" double float. You don't have to pay extra to relatively loose double's throughput potential. It is now a all around feature. It appears to be partially how Nvidia saved on bit power consumption with this generation.

The fully scaled up double solution will be just in the K20 Tesla (GK110 core)

There are more than few apps that use doubles. Gaming and most media stuff doesn't really have to be all that accurate.

Nvidia could make Quadro's out of GK110 without the Hyper Q , Dynamic Parallelism, ECC memory, and perhaps down clocking a bit. Reducing the Double precision is another old trick can still deploy here. And/Or shrink the caches & registers a bit to make it smaller (if worth it to get another die made and ramped up). Basically, make it "not as good a GPGPU" card as the Tesla's, but leverage the same infrastructure.
 
AVX is what makes FCPX fly, that's why MacBooks and iMacs are better than MacPros, until Ivy Bridge MacPro unless.

Intel Ivy or Sandy is the only chips with AVX instruction set.

So you're better off with either an iMac, rMBP or hackingtosh
 
flatfoot said:
Yes, the 4870 will work in the 2006 Mac Pro.

I don't think the big price difference between the Apple 5770 and 5870 is justified, so I'd go with the 5770 there. If you look into PC versions of those cards, it's another story.
Click to expand...

To me it would be a downgrade as the 5770 is not as good as the 4870 he currently has.

Even the link you left it does show where it does significantly faster in things like openCL which FCP X does take advantage of as well as twice the VRAM. As well as twice as many cores.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back