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Graphics Card query
Hi guys,
I finally got around to upgrading the graphics card in my PowerPC G5 from the standard Radeon 64MB card that came with the machine to the 256MB Radeon X800XT. I was sick of only being able to run one video track with one filter at full framerate in Motion, or having to render anything more than 4 DV tracks in FCP. I thought this new card would fix all that.
With the X800XT things seem better and worse. I’m having trouble where I wasn’t having trouble before. For example:One of my FCP2 projects, working off Firewire 800 ext HDD, consisting of 1 track SD PAL DV footage, 1 accompanying subtitles track and one video track containing a vignette and 5 audio tracks, will now not play in realtime using Unlimited RT where as it would before using the old AGP.
I get the dropped frame warning all the time now… The only way to get past that is to render EVERYTHING before I play it back using SafeRT, or play back with UnlimitedRT at Quarter Frame Rate and Low Video Quality. Unlimited RT now seems useless.But on the plus side, rotoscoping in Motion 3 handles a lot better. Before, I could do 3-4 frames of masking (averaging 100 nodes per frame) before Motion would start crying and crash. Whereas now I can mask as much as I like and the program sits there and takes it.
How can a card increase the performance of one app and reduce the performance of another?Am I missing something obvious here? Can I tweak the card to make it perform better across the board? Because the way things are now, I might put the old 64MB card back in- It may be slower in Motion, but was reliable with FCP. I really don’t wanna do that though.
The X800XT card was installed correctly, and is showing up in System Profile (all 256MBs worth) and is running two 21″ flat screens fine. (as did the 64MB card before it)
I have 6GBs of RAM on the system, and Dual 2Ghz processors (not Intel dual, old school dual) and plenty of HDD space.
I wasn’t expecting a huge increase in system performance, but I wasn’t expecting a reduced performance either! Any ideas or suggestions?
Thanks.Simon
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7 Replies
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I should also add to my previous Post that in the Effect Handling tab of System Settings in FCP6, the only options in the drop down menu are Final Cut Pro or None. Should the X800XT show up here as an option too?
And if it should, how do I add it?
Thanks again! -
Two programs that use different parts of the computer. Motion relies on the graphics card and FCP relies on the processors.
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True, but I thought that increasing the power of the AGP would have an overall improvement on the system in general, certainly not a noticeable decrease!
Shouldn’t the card still show up as one of the options in the drop down menu in the Effect Handling Tab of System Settings? I thought unloading some of the number crunching from FCP onto the GPU would only help improve things??
PS: I tried trashing my FCP prefs in a hope it would refresh the Effect Handling Drop down list to include my card, but no joy there either!!
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No, only cards like Blackmagic or AJA will show up in the effects handling section.
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Ah, well that answers that then!! Cheers!
The only thing left remaining to be answered is why a new graphics card with 4x the RAM would show a markable reduction in quality & framerate over the original 64mb card. Any suggestions?
Simon -
So – you used FCP Rescue and FCP re-calibrated your RT effects capacity?
Patrick
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I didn’t use FCP Rescue, I just trashed the prefs following steps on Ken Stone and then FCP re-calibrated RT Extreme. That went well, reached 100% and my project opened. But no change from before. Still dropped frames etc.
Are there any known bugs in FCP 6.01 when using a Power PC G5 running the Radeon X800XT card? Or again, am I missing something really simple? This seems such a weird problem. Why would installing a better AGP reduce performance?
Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks
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