Will dual video cards inside a Mac Pro increase render speed in Final Cut Pro 7?

[Shane Ross]

Help? Nope. Hinder? Not FCP, but any FXplug plugins might not work right. Motion certainly will be effected badly. As will Color.

It’s not a good solution.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Joseph Owens]

[Tony Velez] “Would adding a second ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB video card to the empty video card slot in the Mac Pro tower help increase the render speed in final cut pro 7?”

Shane is as usual correct. FCP really is quite limited in asset efficiency, but the root cause is that Quicktime is not really multi-threadable, and FCP is Quicktime.

You read about really great rendering efficiency with other applications, but they are, for the most part, 64-bit, and built to take advantage of GPU off-loading, and CUDA processing, none of which Final Cut knows anything about.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Tony Velez]

Thank you for your response. It is a big help. Would I be able to upgrade the current ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB Video Card that is currently in the Mac Pro to a newer card that would be an improvement in render speed? If so, is there a list of approved new video cards that are compatible with the Mid 2010 Mac Pro? One you would recommend?

Thanks again.

[Shane Ross]

No graphics card will increase the render speed of FCP. They will only help Motion and Color. The only thing that speeds up FCP is processors. But by now it’s looooong in the tooth. it’s a 32 bit app, discontinued…4 years old.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Alex Vargas]

Hi Shane,

I cut with an ATI 5870 on a mac pro 5,1, 12 core, 48 GB RAM.
Do you know if a card with more memory allow for renders that otherwise bring up error messages blocking rendering?

FCP 7 doesn’t always allow me to render so I have to remove some plugs, export, bring back the clip and apply the plugs I removed to it. Then it renders. Would a card with 3 or 4 GB memory allow for those renders to happen? If so, I need to know which cards would work.

Thanks

Alex Vargas
filmmaker/composer
Macpro 5,1 12 core 48GB RAM – Macbookpro 15″ – FCP 7+/Logic 9