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Is an Nvidia Card still a safe bet?
- Thread starter tony3d
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I'm debating between a 680 Mac or a 770, for use with CS6 Pr/AE, and finally going from 10.6.8 to 10.8.4...
The iMac has NVidia, even with same core GK104, so there will be support for a long time
The NVIDIA drivers still support cards as far back as the Quadro FX 4600, which is one of the original G80 series of GPUs. These were released back in ~2006 if I remember correctly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_8_Series
Mountain Lion dropped support for the GeForce 6 and 7 cards from 2004 - 2006:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_6_Series
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_7_Series
So, in short, based on the history of driver support for older GPUs for at least 5-6 years, I really don't think you have anything to worry about.
Not much difference. More power draw and faster memory in 770. Both 1536 cored GK104. 8-pin needed. Performance difference wont be mind blowing between the 2. 680 has 2x6 pin and falls (barely) within TDP of Pro PSU. I can overclock it in Windows to be on par with 770 stock but in OS X that's a big fat no. + or - on hack flash support in OS X and macvid had said he was putting them out with a voltage tweak to allow within Pro power envelope, I believe. So i am stuck debating with you
You have it running off a seperate power supply? If so, do you have photos? That's the part I would want to get right!
I'm currently on a 5870 under 10.6.8, and have been really surprised how well my 2012 MacBook Pro is handling video with CS6.Not much difference. More power draw and faster memory in 770. Both 1536 cored GK104. 8-pin needed. Performance difference wont be mind blowing between the 2. 680 has 2x6 pin and falls (barely) within TDP of Pro PSU. I can overclock it in Windows to be on par with 770 stock but in OS X that's a big fat no. + or - on hack flash support in OS X and macvid had said he was putting them out with a voltage tweak to allow within Pro power envelope, I believe. So i am stuck debating with you
I'm still figuring out just how things stand in CS6. I've been holding onto Snow Leopard and CS5.5 on the MP w/5870 for stability, as it's my main editing machine. Now that I've used CS6 and ML on the new laptop for a while, it seems quite safe to move to Mountain Lion completely. I put CS6 on the Mac Pro, and it seems much improved over 5.5. I think I'll just go all out and put 10.8.4 on the MP, then install a 680 Mac GPU. I'm between major projects now, so it seems a good time to potentially screw everything up, haha.
I still have an old GTX 285 for Mac, which I've not tried since CS5. (I wasn't that impressed.) I wonder how that would do in CS6?
400 quatloos says there will be both Apple and direct nVidia webdriver support for the Kepler (GTX 660, 670, 680, 680MX, 770) chipset for a long long time... Ie into 2017/2018.
AgaIn, due to the iMac using that chip natively, Apple will keep supporting it until EOS. ( End of support, dIfferent from End of Sale and End Of Life milestones, which is years past both of them)
AgaIn, due to the iMac using that chip natively, Apple will keep supporting it until EOS. ( End of support, dIfferent from End of Sale and End Of Life milestones, which is years past both of them)
GTX 285 would probably do a bit better than 5870 in specific CUDA CS6 but it is getting up there in age. And I don't remember if it had decent compute or too weak. If you are going to stay with your Mac Pro and CS6 for the next 2 years or so why not get the GTX 680 and max out your potential? Nowhere to go after that except shopping for an external PSU for GTX 580 or GTX 780/ Titan. Keep in mind the GTX 570 is almost as good as GTX 680 in CUDA and compute based apps for way cheaper.
I *just now* made the jump from 10.6.8 to 10.8.4, and modified the text files for CS6. I now have GPU acceleration with OpenCL in Premiere, which is nice. Look, ma... yellow bars, haha! I don't get the ray-tracing GPU acceleration in After Effects with the 5870, so if I get the urge to speed things up there, I will most likely go for that GTX 680 Mac edition card.
For now, I'm going to work with this new speed in Pr for a while, and see how I feel about AE work before spending the cash on a new GPU.
I've been using PS CS6 on a 3.2 quad MP since it came out. It's a very nice improvement over PS CS5. With a 5870 and 24GB RAM it works really well.
I have dual OS X boot disks. CS6 is fine under either SL or ML but as with almost everything I run it is more responsive under Snow Leopard with less beachballing. Shucks, SL even has real Save As.
Now that Adobe has gotten both stupid and greedy it looks like I might be using PS CS 6 for quite a while. Such is life. I've also got PS CS6 for Windows on yet another boot drive (W8). Windows really makes the 5870 perform. Whether Geekbench or Cinebench or even just opening Office apps Windows really moves along faster than OS X on Apple's own machines. How embarrassing is that?
I have a 7970. It uses both power leads from the motherboard. It does not need an additional P/S.