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Motion still slow after hardware upgrade
Hello.
I’ve been using Motion ever since FCP Studio HD. In those days, we were still finishing in SD and I had very little trouble working with Motion. As we transitioned to HD and the animation demands have grown, I’ve suffered from extremely poor performance from Motion. A couple of weeks ago, a significant job came into our office that has been torturous to accomplish. I convinced my boss to invest in some upgrades to improve the performance of Motion. My research indicated that Motion relies heavily on GPU and after checking multiple forums and other resources, we purchased what seems to be a significantly more powerful graphics card and an additional 4GB of RAM. My before and after configurations are below.Here are the specs:
MacPro 1,1 2 x 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Xeon
OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.7
Motion 3.0.2BEFORE:
5GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT with 256 MB of VRAMAFTER:
9GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 5770 Upgrade w 1024 MB of VRAM(We went with the 5770 instead of the 5870 after research indicated that we would see little additional benefit due to the fact that our MacPro had PCI 1.1 and NOT PCI 2.0)
After upgrading, I am stunned to find that there is no noticeable improvement in Motion’s performance. Live preview jumps 10 or more frames at a time in some areas, and slows to as little as 2 fps in others. RAM Preview doesn’t seem to be any quicker, either. The application does launch noticeably faster, but that’s about it.
What am I missing here? It seems to me the significant increase in VRAM alone should give me some kind of improvement. Or was my research that Motion is heavily dependent on the graphics card wrong? Is a CPU upgrade the only way to improve performance?
Would I get better performance if I buy the new Motion 5 (even though we are definitely going to hold off on FCPX)?
Any advice would be appreciated.
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7 Replies
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Motion 3 is a 32bit application, it won’t use more than 2.5gb of RAM, even if you have it. Motion 5 is 64-bit. It can use more RAM than you can fit into your machine. Plus, the new motion takes better advantage of your GPU. I’d say go for it, mostly it’s just a huge improvement…
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Thanks Jay. At $50, it seems like a no-brainer.
Does anyone out there have experience running Motion 5 on an older MacPro like my 1,1 Dual Core 2.66 GHz Xeon? We’re trying to hold off on cpu upgrades until Apple’s rumored rack mount MacPros come out.
I’m interested in hearing anyone’s experience whether the performance benefits of Motion 5 over 4 would still be noticeable on the older MacPro.
Thanks again.
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Great question, I’d like to see answers to this as well.
Same for the latest Compressor, under Snow Leopard.Cheers
Alexander -
With Motion 5 – Playing an old template with around 6 SD video clips I was getting around 15 fps, which is OK. Motion 4 would have much less and kept freezing after 10 seconds or so in my book a big performance improvement. Now I have a MacPro 2.1 with a RadeonX1900 XT graphics card, as I understand it if I upgrade this card to a Radeon HD 5770 (which is supposed to work in this old mac even though it’s not supported by Apple) I should get even a bigger performance gain, I’m hoping up to around 20 fps (I work in 25p projects)
FCPx I Motion 5 I Adobe CS5 I XDCAM EX1
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I’m surprised you are able to run Motion 5 on your machine since the Radeon 1900XT is not a supported card.
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Mark Spencer
Freelance Producer/Editor/Motion Graphics Artist
Apple-certified Master Trainer
Author, Motion 4 from Peachpit Press
https://www.applemotion.net -
To be honest I’ve got no idea of what “supported” means any more. In my research I’ve read of ways of getting your card recognised by Nvidia cards via a text hack ie adding it to a list. Sometimes I think its more marketing than anything else.
Anyway what I would like to know is do you get performance benefits from better graphic cards, and if so what can you expect
FCPx I Motion 5 I Adobe CS5 I XDCAM EX1
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It runs, But you get a pop up that says, “Unsupported configuration”;)
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