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4870 success, so far
Installed a new ATI Radeon 4870 in my first generation Intel MacPro 1,1. Motion doesn’t exactly scream but Motion junk that used to take 20 or more seconds per frame now takes 3-5 seconds per frame. Motion blur really clobbers the system so I’m probably seeing the limits of the old CPU and RAM.
We’re running FCP, Aperture, AE, and Motion all at once along with Entourage and Safari and Firefox. Everything seems to be stable but I have not had a chance to test everything at all possible combinations. Haven’t launched Soundtrack, DVDSP, Color or Photoshop yet.
NOTE: The 4870 has one DVI port and one of those itty bitty LED ports so you will probably need one of your old cards to run your second monitor or you’ll need to buy some kind of adapter.
bogiesan
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12 Replies
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I have ATI Radeon HD 3870 on my 2 x 2.66hmz dual with 8GB ram. Maybe it is time to upgrade. Any motion graphics program will demand a quick processor even Apple Motion also every motion graphic program will demand lots of ram and a very good graphic card. Sort of, you can never have enough of power, what ever you do you will have to wait for things to happen (render) one way or another. Shorting the time of rendering is what we are all after. Looks like a good graphic card 4870.
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That itty bitty LED port is a Mini DisplayPort. You will need a Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI or a Mini DisplayPort to VGA Adapter to run a second monitor.
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Did you do anything special to get it to run? I have been thinking of upgrading my graphics card for my home mac.
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[Mikey Bouchereau] “Did you do anything special to get it to run? I have been thinking of upgrading my graphics card for my home mac.”
Negative.
Totally plug-n-play in the classic sense.
The card is recognized immediately and seamlessly by OS10.5.bogiesan
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i fixed it…
you have to connect the usb-hub from the monitor too to make it work
i guess usb is now a part of the dvi-connection 😉
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Sounds good, David. Keep us posted as you get more opportunity to run it through its paces.
As to the export times, I’m looking at this card from Matrox:
https://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/compresshd/
Better Motion performance and faster exports… what a beautiful concept.
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How does the compressHD give you faster export times in motion. I know it works with compressor with H.264 does it work with ProRes??
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As I understand the documentation there are H.264 codecs installed with the card that take advantage of the hardware accelerator through Final and Compressor.
While the video demonstration is poor, it gets the point across. Even realtime encoding would save hours, if H.264 is your intended delivery format.
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Mark I understand its purpose, but you said: “Better Motion performance and faster exports… what a beautiful concept.” How does the compressHD offer better motion performance other than faster h.264 encodes. Or am I reading to much into the comment? In my mind I was hoping this would be like motion taking advantage of a second GPU of sorts.
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Yes, you took my statement a little further than intended. I wish M4 could use multiple GPUs. I suppose this is where OpenCl is supposed to come in and save our bacon, providing you have a compliant GPU (the 4870 is listed as such on Apples site).
BareFeats shows some of this potential, however they use a 2009 MP with only Nvidia GPUs. I’ve also read an article (source escapes me) in which a software developer has begun to incorporate OpenCl into (if I recall correctly) an MPEG-2 encoder and reports an ~45% increase in performance.
While I’m not one to wait too long for the next best thing, the technologies Apple has employed in 10.6 (though not in FCS, yet) seem to warrant the decision to do so. 10.6, optimized FCS, and a more robust OpenCl compatible GPU should, by all rights, propel the FCS workflow farther forward.
Sorry for the ramble.
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