FCPX Card upgrade 5770 or 5870?

Yes, the 4870 will work in the 2006 Mac Pro.

I don't think the big price difference between the Apple 5770 and 5870 is justified, so I'd go with the 5770 there. If you look into PC versions of those cards, it's another story.

Has anyone tried to get a PNY Quadro FX 5800 Graphics Card to run on the MacPro? THanks so much!

rhapsodyosx said:

Has anyone tried to get a PNY Quadro FX 5800 Graphics Card to run on the MacPro? THanks so much!

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Someone here mentioned that the "professional" cards are not really properly supported on the Mac and the drivers are mediocre at best, so it would not be worthwhile in the first place, as a "normal" graphic card would run circles around it. Not sure, but i think this was even applicable for use with dedicated programs that could in theory make use of those cards...

rhapsodyosx said:

Has anyone tried to get a PNY Quadro FX 5800 Graphics Card to run on the MacPro? THanks so much!

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You could probably get it to work somewhat decently with Lion's Nvidia drivers, or ATY_Init.

one of our members at Netkas tried 5800.

the Nvidia drivers inited it, but OSX was not able to deal with 4GB of VRAM

(they keep coding this in a stop gap way, as if RAM wasn't going to always increase)

Quadro cards are artificially "boosted" by disabling featues in regular cards.

Until Kepler, this was done by limiting DOuble Precision Float.

Since there were no apps (that I know of, still hoping there is one) that used Double PRecision, it meant that Quadro cards were not able to demonstrate a reason to be so expensive, other than their support. (to some, this is enough)

Kepler cards are different. They have found better ways to cripple the GTX6xx cards, so soon we may have a Quadro well worth buying.

mikeandbecka said:

Ok so with the options right now just go with the cheaper version.. not that much of a difference between the ATI 5770 and 5870?

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There can be a big difference or no difference at all depending on what you are doing.

http://www.barefeats.com/wst10g7.html

For FCPX, there seems to be little difference.

mikeandbecka said:

Ok so with the options right now just go with the cheaper version.. not that much of a difference between the ATI 5770 and 5870?

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Only hanging one display off of either one ?

Two 5770 may help of one is gobbled up by lots of framebuffer work, leaving OpenCL more elbow room on the other primary card.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1360570/

MacVidCards said:

Since there were no apps (that I know of, still hoping there is one) that used Double PRecision, it meant that Quadro cards were not able to demonstrate a reason to be so expensive, other than their support. (to some, this is enough)

Kepler cards are different. They have found better ways to cripple the GTX6xx cards, so soon we may have a Quadro well worth buying.

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What did they do to them this time?

thekev said:

What did they do to them this time?

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LOL. Not to them. The mainstream Kepler are "crippled" double float. You don't have to pay extra to relatively loose double's throughput potential. It is now a all around feature. It appears to be partially how Nvidia saved on bit power consumption with this generation.

The fully scaled up double solution will be just in the K20 Tesla (GK110 core)

There are more than few apps that use doubles. Gaming and most media stuff doesn't really have to be all that accurate.

Nvidia could make Quadro's out of GK110 without the Hyper Q , Dynamic Parallelism, ECC memory, and perhaps down clocking a bit. Reducing the Double precision is another old trick can still deploy here. And/Or shrink the caches & registers a bit to make it smaller (if worth it to get another die made and ramped up). Basically, make it "not as good a GPGPU" card as the Tesla's, but leverage the same infrastructure.

AVX is what makes FCPX fly, that's why MacBooks and iMacs are better than MacPros, until Ivy Bridge MacPro unless.

Intel Ivy or Sandy is the only chips with AVX instruction set.

So you're better off with either an iMac, rMBP or hackingtosh

flatfoot said:

Yes, the 4870 will work in the 2006 Mac Pro.

I don't think the big price difference between the Apple 5770 and 5870 is justified, so I'd go with the 5770 there. If you look into PC versions of those cards, it's another story.

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To me it would be a downgrade as the 5770 is not as good as the 4870 he currently has.

Even the link you left it does show where it does significantly faster in things like openCL which FCP X does take advantage of as well as twice the VRAM. As well as twice as many cores.