Color User's video card Speed Thread.

[John Jonathan]

I would love it if their was a thread to talk about speed improvements for Apple Color.

I think we have all kinda figured out a workflow, but my biggest problem is speed. We would all love to grade on a hardware accelerated scratch or lustre or quantel, but Apple Color is the down and dirty way to get stuff done.

Apple doesn't have any sort of disk caching system, but relies on the video card. I get a primary and max out 8 secondaries and I am slowly squeaking along. It doesn't crash, but its not fast at all.

I am either grading with an Nvidia 8800 or a Radeon 3870's, both about the same performance.

Have people noticed a speed increase using the Radeon 4870? The GeForce GTX 285? Quadro FX 4800?

I'll go out a buy one of these cards if it will make a difference, but their are no Apple Color demo sweets around to test the speed diff.

Anyway found a new video card setup really make a huge difference in Apple Color??

[Nikolai Pigarev]

Am curious about it as well. But hoping that RED ROCKET will make a difference

[Elvis Ripley]

I got a 3870 and it seemed to speed things up but I was using the Geforce 7300 that came with my Mac Pro. It was very slow. What card do you have now?

[John Jonathan]

I have a station with a Radeon 3870 and one with a NVIDIA 8800. I am working on 2k R3D conforms and PRORESS. .R3D onlines, are deff a little slower, but still with 8 scaffolds per grade, Apple Color starts to poop out.

I think they are pretty much the same speed.

[Elvis Ripley]

I guess wait until Monday and I will check the new Color speed and see how it changes. The new nvidia GTX 285 is probably the fastest card you can get and it has 1 GB of ram. Poorly optimized drivers showed up in a recent test where it didn't do much better than the 3870 when it should have been twice as fast at least. Maybe someone else will come along the thread and with some experience with that card.

http://www.evga.com/articles/00479/

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I've got the GTX 285 here in a 2.93GHz Nehalem Octomac. The drivers for the card suck. FedEx should deliver my new FCS3 within the next 24 hours, I'll report with what I find. I also have the ATI 4870 for this system. Both cards perform about equal in most cases, but the 4870 is more stable or consistent it seems. The GTX285 should be noticeably faster, as it is in the Windows world, but with the current OSX drivers it's a dog... :-(

As mentioned above, the nVidia 8800GT and the ATI 3870 are pretty equivalent. At least that is my experience. The 8800GT does have a bit of an advantage for some 3D apps, like Maya, as it's a bit more powerful for geometry and pushing polygons, but that doesn't matter for the Pro apps, Color, Adobe CS4, etc..

The 4870 is a good bit more powerful than the 3870. And it's probably the best Mac Pro video card right now until nVidia / EVGA get the GTX285 drivers optimized.

[Kaku Ito]

Jeff,

I recognized some difference between ATI and nVidia (the ones comes built in to iMac and Mac Book Pro) that when you render to QT, the color changes. On ATI what I see on REDCINE or Clipfinder are same as QT. Have you noticed something like that on more expensive nVidia cards?