Mercury playback capable card for Mac Pro 2007 (2.1)?

[Michael Szalapski]

Since Mercury Playback has nothing whatsoever to do with After Effects (and the graphics card has little to no effect on After Effects’ performance), perhaps you should ask this in the Premiere forum. In Premiere the graphics card matters and Mercury Playback is a thing.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Andy Taplin]

Thanks for the replies and pardon my ignorance! I’ll also post on the Premier forum.

If I could rephrase the question though, can anyone recommend a card that will significantly improve rendering/encoding performance as well as particles, 3D etc., in After Effects (and perhaps other CS5 apps as well) over the ATI Radeon X1900 XT I’m currently using – and be compatible with a 2007 Mac Pro.

Thanks

Andy Taplin
Director / Lighting Cameraman
https://www.andytaplin.co.uk

[Andy Taplin]

Understood, thanks Dave.

Andy Taplin
Director / Lighting Cameraman
https://www.andytaplin.co.uk

[Michael Szalapski]

Sorry, I clearly didn’t explain myself well. The graphics card makes no difference to AE. There are very few effects that are sped up by it. AE renders on the CPU, not the GPU. Some third party effects do use it. Off the top of my head: some of the Zaxwerks plugins (I think), Knoll Light Factory Pro, Optical Flares (I think), and Element (which has yet to be released).

Adobe employee Todd Kopriva chimes in on these threads with a bit more info: [link] and [link]

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Apparently I keep typing whilst others are doing the same. Hopefully I’ve been able to offer a bit more depth to counteract my slowness. 🙂

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Andy Taplin]

Sounds like I should save the money unless I want the playback advantages in Premier
thanks.

Andy Taplin
Director / Lighting Cameraman
https://www.andytaplin.co.uk

[Walter Soyka]

[Andy Taplin] “Sounds like I should save the money unless I want the playback advantages in Premier”

Or put the money into RAM. How many cores do you have in your system, and how much RAM do you have now?

For some other tips, see the Improve performance [link] page in the docs.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Andy Taplin]

I’ve got 8 cores and 16GB of RAM so I’m OK in that area – I can finally use all that RAM now thanks to CS5!

Andy Taplin
Director / Lighting Cameraman
https://www.andytaplin.co.uk

[Michael Szalapski]

Double your RAM, if you can. It’s nice to have about 4 GB of RAM per core of your processor.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Stefan Hinze]

Hey,
with a 2,1 MacPro there is no chance of getting the CUDA.
Sorry to say…
I was luky with the 3,1 and the GTX285. I did my search on the web and the only option was the 285.

(ofTopic: works fine in editing and PP.CS5!!)

…hey there, take a walk, think about it, come back, solve it!