Video cards

[Mestizo Devon]

Anyone know if the hd 5770 ati radeon is better than the quadro fx5600?
My concern is playing back footage 2k

Thanks

 

[Mestizo Devon]

Crickets... :huh:

 

[joe hedge]

Technically those aren't "video cards", they're graphics cards

Video cards as a rule have BNC ports for HD-SDI I/O, like Black Magic Decklink, Aja Kona etc


Either of those cards you mention should have no problem playing back actual 2k video

 

[Mestizo Devon]

Specifically in a timeline fcpx, its choppy in a 8 core mac pro??

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

ati 5770 all the way on this one. The FX5600 is a couple years older and offers no GPU acceleration of any kind and is actually an all-around inferior GPU because of its age.

With the 5770 card, if your playback is still choppy on an 8-core Mac, then you probably have other issues like your drives not being fast enough or not enough RAM.

 

[Mestizo Devon]

Thank you so much, Jeff! I'm thinking this card is better suited for maya or 3d stuff. On the other hand is it worth going to the 680GTX or 7950 for an 08 mac pro 3.2?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Fro an '08 Mac Pro, the 5770 is just fine. Actually it's an ideally matched card in most ways, unless you need nVidia CUDA acceleration, then you would want an nVidia card. The FX5600's strength, or at least it's strength when it was a current offering, was in pushing polygons for OpenGL. It was a great card for modeling tasks in Maya, XSI, SolidWorks, etc.. It was never a great performer for video tasks or high pixel throughput. It's an older nVidia card and does not have full or proper CUDA acceleration abilities. If you own the card, you should probably sell it ASAP as there's still a market for them in the corporate world to some extent.

I'm not sure if the GTX680 will work in a Mac Pro 3,1 (2008 model). I believe the 7950 does. They will offer a bit more boost in terms of GPU acceleration, but you are already severely bottlenecked by the hardware in that older Mac Pro. The 800Mhz RAM is a performance killer. The RAM throughput hamstrings that Xeon platform, it actually doesn't have enough throughput from the RAM to push the CPUs at full capacity for many brute-force computational tasks.

If you're seeing stuttering or choppy playback on that Mac with either the FX5600 or especially the 5770, as it is now, you have other issues to address. What is the rest of the system configuration? In other words, upgrading your GPU may not fix your choppy playback issues. There's a good bet it won't.

 

[Mestizo Devon]

ordered more ram only have 10 gigs, Sata raid external and 6 drives in tower, ssd for os.
So I'll go with the 5770 and sell the fx5600. Thanks