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Video cards for 2009 Mac Pro and After Effects CS6 / GT 120, GTX 285, or ATI Radeon HD 5870
Before I start, I did look at the system requirements for CS6 and noticed that the GT120 and ATI Radeon HD 5870 are not listed.
I unfortunately upgraded my video card about two months ago from the stock GT120 to the ATI HD 5870. I’ve been happy with it so far, but now with CS6 and all the optimizations specifically tailored to CUDA I think I made a mistake. I spend 80% of my time in After Effects, 20% in Maya and/or Cinema 4D.
I’m hoping Todd Kopriva can pipe in here? I’m just wondering which card would be better? I know that the 120 will be significantly slower than a GTX 285, but if it’s not going to make a huge difference I’d rather just throw the stock GT120 back in and sell the ATI HD 5870 I recently purchased. Would this be suggested?
Or perhaps a better question: What’s my best bang for buck regarding an nVidia card in an ’09 Mac Pro running OS 10.6.8 and AE CS6?
Thanks!
Eric Bowman
assemblycreative.com
ericsbowman.com -
3 Replies
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I’m in the same boat. Officially supported, it looks like it’s the Quadro 4000. Now, there are ways to make some gaming cards as the GTX 570, but it’s not officially supported so I’m not sure how much of a reliable out of the box purchase it would be. The GTX 570 has more cuda core than the Quadro 4000, maybe that means it’s actually faster and cheaper for CS6 work?
OTOH, if you believe rumours are to be taken into account, recent rumours claim Apple might launch a new line of Mac Pros at whatever the event they have soon. It might include official support for more GPUs. Or it might not. Or there might be no announcement of new Mac Pros.
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Yeah I’ve been following the rumors. Im not in a position to upgrade the whole machine right now, but I can definitely upgrade the video card to something that works optimally with CS6. I’d love to see some benchmarks for Macs and the tiny selection of supported cards we have available.
Eric Bowman
assemblycreative.com
ericsbowman.com -
[Eric Bowman] “I’d love to see some benchmarks for Macs and the tiny selection of supported cards we have available.”
See this new thread:
AE ray trace engine/CUDA GPU performance comparison [link]The unsupported cards outperform the supported options by a mile.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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