NVidia GeForce GTX 285 Sluggish Performance

[Steve Connor]

Matybe it’s the 10.03 update which seems to have introduced a whole heap of sluggishness to some users systems.

I’m not getting much slowdown on my 3.1 Mac Pro with an ATi card though, It’s certainly not as fast as 10.02 but it’s not unusable!

Steve Connor
“FCPX Agitator”
Adrenalin Television

[T. Payton]

[Don Smith] “My graphics card is an NVidia GeForce GTX 285.

FCPX runs like a stubborn mule.”

Although I haven’t done any systematic testing, from what I have gathered here and around the web, the ATI cards seem to do best with FCP X. I’m on a 2006 MacPro with a ATI Radeon 5770 and for the most part it is buttery smooth.

However, can you expound upon the mule like behavior? Is this happening all the time in FCP X, or only when you perform certain operations. Why kind of projects are you doing (straight cuts, lots of effects etc.) and how many events & projects are you leaving active at the same time? What kind of drives and connection are you using for your events/projects?

Inquiring minds want to know.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Don Smith]

Thanks for you comments T….

“Runs like stubborn mule” means that everything responds slowly. I do a lot of videos (but I’m careful to use Event Manager X to only have a couple active at a time) which require lots of text overlays and basic motion graphics. To put text into a text effect, for example, is far from ‘buttery smooth’. Every click or text entry gets a delayed reaction. Clicking on the horizontal position number and scrubbing left or right results, most of the time, in nothing happening for a couple of seconds and then the graphic starts jumping to catch up. Once in a while the movement might be smooth but that’s the exception.

Sometimes I play the video and it won’t stop. FCPX becomes unresponsive and I have to force quit it.

Maybe I should switch to an ATI card. As I said in my earlier post I keep my Mac Pro updated and I’ve rebuilt the boot drive from the ground up to avoid the Migration Assistant bring old crap into the new system.

This is an 8-core Mac Pro 3,1 with 10GB of RAM. Latest OS. Latest FCPX and Motion 5.

Do ATI cards accelerate FCPX or Motion 5?

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[T. Payton]

Well before you go and buy an ATI card, could you create a quick screen capture of what is happening, perhaps as unpublished on YouTube and then post it here. I’ll then try to recreate what you are doing and we can compare to see if this can be fixed with a graphics card.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Don Smith]

That’s very nice of you. I can do that tomorrow. laboring under a deadline today but I’ll pop up tomorrow with that screen cap. Thank you.

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[Dave Brandt]

Hi,
I recently brought a project I was editing in fcpx On my early 2011 MBP to a colleagues mac pro. It is a 2009 model with gt120 in it.
I was surprised to find the exact behaviour you describe.
Jerkyness, not stopping playback, editing text is horrendous, scrolling through title templates is very jumpy and editing in the timeline is laggy.

On the MacBook with radeon graphics it runs a lot smoother. I’m not sure but I would hedge a guess at the graphics card.

Macbook Pro 17″ i7 2.2 8GB
iMac i7 2.8 16GB
FCP 7 FCPX Adobe CS 5.5

[Adam Helwig]

I also had a GTX 285. It’s definitely the card. I put an ATI Radeon 5770 1GB and it solved all the sluggishness. It’s definitely frustrating but the new ATI card did the trick! Hope that helps

[Don Smith]

Except that you describe the symptoms much better Dave than my “runs like a stubborn mule”!

T says he’s got a ATI Radeon 5770 in his 2006 Mac Pro. I do too at home. Yes, the same card on the same model machine. I just haven’t done much to task FCPX at home since I’m using it all day at work. So, when I go to work this morning I’m taking the ATI Radeon 5770 card out of my home machine and putting it in my work machine to see what happens. I can try his suggestion at no cost to me. Will post the results here.

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[Steve Connor]

[Don Smith] “T says he’s got a ATI Radeon 5770 in his 2006 Mac Pro. I do too at home. Yes, the same card on the same model machine. I just haven’t done much to task FCPX at home since I’m using it all day at work. So, when I go to work this morning I’m taking the ATI Radeon 5770 card out of my home machine and putting it in my work machine to see what happens. I can try his suggestion at no cost to me. Will post the results here.
“

Great idea, I’ll be very interested to see if it improves performance

Steve Connor
“FCPX Agitator”
Adrenalin Television

[Don Smith]

I’ve put the 5770 card into my work Mac Pro 3,1 (2008) and sadly it won’t drive both my 30″ monitors at full resolution. I can get full res on one of the monitors by plugging it into the dual-link DVI port but the other 30-incher has to be adapted to one of the mini-display ports and it’ll only do half the res.

While irritating is not unworkable. I will work today on the full-res 30″ screen while doing the Finder windows and email on the low-res screen and see what happens today.

In the meantime, if the 5770 drives FCPX much better, which ATI card should I get to drive both 30″ screens at their full res?

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