which graphics card in the mac pro

[Oliver Busch]

The standard MacPro card (NV GF7300GT) should be sufficient for editing tasks in FCP. Having used the standard GF6600 that came with the dual core G5’s with no problems.

ATI cards used to have better signal quality on the analog VGA output which shouldn’t be a factor anymore today with digital display connection.

The Quadro is just hardware overkill for editing. A friend of mine uses the card for 3D modelling in Maya where it really shines with h/w accelerated rendering support etc. But as far as I know, Maya is the only app on the Mac with specific support for the Quadro card.

If you are going to use Motion a lot then the NVidia cards support larger OpenGL texture sizes than ATI’s offerings, which can be a limiting factor for Motion’s realtime capabilities (e.g. when doing text animation with huge font sizes).
This will be relevant to FCP, too, when it’s going to support the CoreImage/CoreVideo/FXPlug architecture that Motion uses (of which I’m pretty confidient it will in the future). Or if you are going to use NoiseIndustries FxFactory for FCP when it comes out this Sept (IBC?).

I wished that Apple would offer some more card options like a GeForce 78xx/79xx series card for the MacPro like they did for the G5. That card is really great (for Motion). Same perf. as the Quadro, 1/5 the price.

My 2 (Euro)cents
Actually it’s gotten more a dime…
Best regards, Oliver

[Walter Biscardi]

We’re putting the ATI 1900 in our Mac Pro 3.0 machine. One of our deciding factors is the quality of the ATI products we’re using in our current machines and the fact that we will be running Final Touch HD on this machine and the ATI card is recommended for that application.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
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