best video card for G5 (AGP X8)

[Russell Lasson]

[kutmasta] “IS Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition the best?”

Yup. I haven’t installed FCS2 on our system that has that card, but I haven’t heard of any issues.

-Russ

[Ernie Santella]

What advantages does a better video card give you? I’m using the stock GeForce 7300GT card that came with my Intel Quad 2.66. I have the Apple 30″ and a Dell 2407 monitors.

FCP6 runs fine on that cheap, stock video card. Is it just that you can run 2×30’s with the other cards?

Ernie Santella
Santella Film/Video Productions
http://www.santellaproductions.com

[Kozo Okumura]

Ernie,

Motion and Color take advantage of VRAM on video card. Generally speaking, more video ram, the faster you can process.

[Ernie Santella]

Could you please explain (briefly) why a monitor video card has anything to do with number crunching of the processers for a motion or color effect?

I would understand how a monitor card would possibly put up nicer images on the computer monitors, but not how it would effect the speed of processor calculations on an effect render?

Ernie Santella
Santella Film/Video Productions
http://www.santellaproductions.com

[Kozo Okumura]

Mac OS X tiger has quartz extreme and core image technology which make use of VRAM on video card. Please read the links below.

https://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme/

https://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreimage/

[Paul Dickin]

[santellavision] “I would understand how a monitor card would possibly put up nicer images on the computer monitors, but not how it would effect the speed of processor calculations on an effect render?”
Hi
Broadly speaking you may be right.
However the advantage of a PCI-e rather than an AGP buss for the graphics card is that it is two-way, so the CPU can have direct fast-bandwidth access to calculations and data processing that the GPU has done to create the display. Thereby passing render calculations back to the CPU and memory to minimise overall render time.

Something like that – like you I only really understand analogue processes 😉