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Looking for some Snow Leopard / FCS 3 / GPU Upgrade Benchmarks?
Know what would be great to find out?
If there’s someone out there like me, who’s got an older Mac Pro – one of the dual 2.66ghz models from 2007 or so with an X1900 graphics card, running Leopard and FCS 2. And that someone upgrades their graphics card to something like an ATI 4870, or even the Nvidia GTS 285, and then grabs FCS 3 and Snow Leopard. And then runs some comparisons to see if Snow Leopard’s GPU acceleration has any effect on a lot of mundane FCS 3 tasks – tasks like converting HDV to ProRes, render times on applying filters, render times on Color projects, and using Compressor to export your ProRes / HDV projects to various formats, like Quicktime for the web or SD DVD’s.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find out if a $1000 upgrade would really speed up one of these older systems?
So I’ll keep my eyes open for any such tests and benchmarking, and I hope others in the same boat will do the same.
And I did try asking a couple of sales guys / techs I work with at Apple this question, and they didn’t have the answer. But if they get one to me, I’ll pass it on.
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7 Replies
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Hi Jason
My Mac Pro is the 2006 2.66 quad core, X1900XT, running Snow Leopard and FCS3. Haven’t had much time to check things out but a timeline render shows all four cores at about 80%. It’s not a benchmark but it is what I wanted to see.all the best
Terrymoving parts are so last year
MAC Pro quad 2.66, 8GB, X1900XT, 23″ ACD, 10.5.8, Studio3, MXO2 Mini, etc.
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It depends on what you do if you see a speed-increase to be honest. Some things are CPU based, some GPU, some constrained by I/O or RAM. Moving out 8-Core 2.8Ghz machine at the office from the stock ATI Radeon HD 2600 to a ATI Radeon HD 4870 made a huge preserved difference in Color. I sadly haven’t done any hard figure tests though.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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First, I don’t think the older MP will even be able to use that graphic card – “PCI Express 2.0”
Plus, it is my understanding, OpenCL is something that will take time to see the benefits to. Software needs to be recoded to take advantage of the GPU processor. Same thing as Grand Central Dispatch, which I think is where FCP rendering will see a huge improvement with speed, but that needs to be written into the code of the app. So hopefully the x.x.1 of all the new apps will see the power unleashed. Those of us with the older MP may be left a little behind. (remember slower is not obsolete so lets not start that whining)
So on my 8×3.0 with the X1900 my real hope for speed is the general OS and GSD.
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I know that the GSD needs to be written into the code. One would think, or hope, that when the coding was done on FCS 3, the developers at Apple would say to themselves, “You know, with Snow Leopard coming out around the same time we release this, maybe we should write it into the code”. From what I’ve read so far, that isn’t the case. So it looks like I”ll be waiting for FCS 3.5 (or whatever they decide to term it) to get the GPU acceleration benefits.
And as for PCI Express 2.0 – so far as I know, it’s the same physical slot with no major changes in I/O, just more bandwith: a 2.0 graphics card should work and work well as long as it’s an x16 slot, it just won’t be at full possible bandwith. That’s how it’s worked on the PC side of things since the switchover, anyway.
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I would not count on the graphic card working in the older systems but maybe it will be it works but not supported.
From what I read, FCS3 was tested heavily on SL, to make sure it ran fine out of the gate but the needed code was not done. My guess is that is why it was release BEFORE SL and not with or after. But this is just a guess.
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Wondering about the same potential upgrade.
There are definitely people running 1st gen MP’s with 4870’s in them (both Apple branded and EFI flashed 3rd party PC cards).
I don’t have the link handy, but someone did do a few benchmarks comparing the 4870 and X1900 under Leopard and FCS2. They only saw a small speed increase at best.
I wonder if, as Michael suggests, the 4870 is running at PCI-e 1.0 speeds in the older MP’s and therefore doesn’t give you an advantage over the X1900?
I’d still love to hear about someone benchmarking the X1900 and 4870 in Apple Color on a SL, FCS3 MP1,1.
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It might just be my theory but I don’t think until Final Cut Pro is brought over to Cocoa (i.e. more or less a re-write of the app) will it see the full benefits of Snow Leopard (or OSX for that matter). This is a huge process on larger applications like this. Adobe has taken what, 4 or 5 versions in OSX to finally go over to this API for the majority of their apps (CS5, when ever it’s release). It look Apple 10 years to migrate something as fundamental as the Finder to this also.
When looking at OpenCL and thinking what can it accelerate and how much will affect things look at what something like the Velocity Engine did for the G4. As I understand it’s pretty similar type of code that efficiently runs on these co-processors that also runs on our current GPU’s. In a simple OpenCL test a Geforce 8800 GT GPU represents the horse-power of roughly 5 Xeon 2.8Ghz CPU’s. Add something like the nVidia Tesla and we’re talking perhaps a 100-fold of that processing power.
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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