NVIDA or ATI 4850

[Wyoming Paul]

OK, so I have decided to get a new iMac 24inch 3.06. The question at hand is do I need to upgrade to the ATI Radeon HD 4850? I dont play video games. I do edit large raw photo files with CS4 and I do use Final Cut Express for my video editing. What do you think. Thanks again in advance for your input.

 

[JD92]

CS4 would see an increase in speed thanks to the fact it uses OpenGL for some acceleration if you went for the ATI. In 10.6 a lot of apps would probably get a boost from Apple's inclusion of OpenCL.

If money is no object go for the ATI, but a GeForce GT 130 will be fine.

 

[Jammers]

ATi card is much better but there appears to be lots of freezing problems with it.

Mine is going back for replacement.

 

[sotov]

I spent three weeks pondering this same question. Received more reccomendations for the ATI card and then went with my gut and pulled the trigger. I have used the GT130 for a week. The computer is like lightning. Not a single crash and runs very quietly. It just does what it's supposed to do. The card is based off of older technology than the 4850, but this means that it's well supported and runs solidly.

Check the main imac path on this forum and you will see that with the 4850 there is a risk of getting a "freezing mac." It is very hard to say what the probability of incurring this problem is and my heart goes out to those who have it. :/

You would be taking a gamble of going with this computer with more speed. There are no mass threads of problems with the GT 130 I have seen.

I'd be curious to hear your choice once you make it! Good luck.

 

[Tom Dahl]

The question at hand is do I need to upgrade to the ATI Radeon HD 4850? I dont play video games. I do edit large raw photo files with CS4 and I do use Final Cut Express for my video editing.

My guess is that PhotoShop is mostly dependent on the CPU, not the GPU (Adobe want to compute the pixels their way, not how some graphics blob chooses). I would think the same is true for video-editing applications. The rendering, movement of clip assets, etc. is mostly dependent on CPU and RAM speed (and quantity of RAM -- 4GB will be great).

Thus, the lower-mode graphics options would be very fine for those applications, I would expect.