which Imac video card ?

[Dunnart]

I have some friends who want to buy a new 24" imac to replace some old G4's which have given long and dedicated service. Apart from the usual stuff, they will use the computer to run Aperture and and occasionally Final Cut Pro.

I know Aperture needs as much video ram as you can give it, so my question is, which video card would be the best for my friends to get - NVIDIA GeForce GT 130 512MB or the ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB ?

Aperture will get more use than the video work and both are for home amateur use - don't ask why they have Final Cut Pro 🙂. Is one of the video cards better for video work over the other ? The price difference between the two video cards isn't important, I'm just trying to see if there is a performance difference.

Thanks

Steve

 

[007bond]

I have some friends who want to buy a new 24" imac to replace some old G4's which have given long and dedicated service. Apart from the usual stuff, they will use the computer to run Aperture and and occasionally Final Cut Pro.

I know Aperture needs as much video ram as you can give it, so my question is, which video card would be the best for my friends to get - NVIDIA GeForce GT 130 512MB or the ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB ?

Aperture will get more use than the video work and both are for home amateur use - don't ask why they have Final Cut Pro 🙂. Is one of the video cards better for video work over the other ? The price difference between the two video cards isn't important, I'm just trying to see if there is a performance difference.

Thanks

Steve

if you are looking for the best performance the 4850 does have a slight edge. and all of the issues it used to have are fixed.

 

[Dunnart]

thanks for your reply 007bond. From comments I've seen elsewhere,there isn't a lot of difference between the two cards.

 

[Challeron]

Not so sure about that ...

The ATI Radeon in the iMac 9,1 model is not supported for hardware "fragment shading" (aka pixel shading); I use Poser 7 for CGI modeling, and X-Plane 9 for amusement, and both of them use OpenGL Fragment Shading for real-time display, and my iMac doesn't display the calls correctly: e.g. in Poser 7, any complex Procedural Texture (say, velvet) displays as a bright white instead of the expected color; and in X-Plane, where water and sky effects use fragment shading, those effects don't display at all.

I have made Apple aware of the issue; I'd like to think that they're working on it, and that any delays might be due to the release of SL, 😉 but this firmware problem does exist. (ATI recently released a new Driver for Windows, but they do not offer Mac drivers.) I have no idea if the problem also occurs with the nVidea card.

Just my $.02 ...