Will changing my graphic card inprove render times?
 

OK I have a Mac Pro which is a dual 3.0 Mhz Core Intel Mac with 30 inch Cinema monitor. I have 4 Gb Ram.

I am thinking of changing the graphics card to help improve render and output times. Currently I have an Nvidia Geforce 7300GT 256Mb installed.

Would changing the card to a Nvidia Geforce 8800GT 512Mb make much difference? Or do I just need a load more RAM?

Thanks in advance.

A faster video card would only affect the realtime previews from Motion. System RAM, faster hard drives, and a faster processor are the only things that would improve render times.

I upgraded to the Radeon 4870 and didn't see any speed increase for rendering. Motion feels a little bit smoother, but nothing drastic. If I played games on my Mac Pro, I'm sure I would see a huge difference.

Tahnks for the info. My Mac Pro is first generation and over 3 years old now. Might chop it in on ebay and update to a new quad core in the spring. No point upgrading when it isn't goimg to make much difference.

GPU instead od CPU
 

All big players in video and grafix soft- and hardware intend to let the GPU take over more tasks in the future. As far is I know, apple will do the switch with the introduction of Snow Leopard, the Next Generation OS, due in 2009. Expect more to hear from MacWorld in early 2009.

P.

if you have a 8 core machine, 8gig of ram is the bare minimum. rule of thumb is 1G per core, 2 gig is good, 4gig if you have money to burn. be aware the current ver of FCP doesn't use more then about 2.5 or so. However, the extra ram for system resources and other apps to stay in ram is good. AE CS3/4 both benifit from more ram.

as for the graphic card, yes it does effect FCP's RT abilities and rendering. while apple doesn't doc exactly what they do on the card, this much seems to be clear. Scale position crop ( no edge feathering, now in 6.0.4, maybe ) 3 way color corrector, many FXplugs = blurs, glows, and other fx that load from motion, which are of course rendered on the GPU.

OTH, drop shadows seem to be CPU rendered :( why ? who knows. probably because older GPU's couldn't handle it.

if you only have a layer or two, you won't see any difference, but if you have a bunch of layers you _should_. where the better cards help is if you add some FX plug filters like blur and it still stays RT. try it. I know I have seen preformance improvements with a better card. I would recommend ATI 3870 or the next model up if apple is supporting it.

I think the OP was referring not to realtime rendering, but rather to offline rendering (like transcoding through Compressor, etc) in which case GPU doesn't (AFAIK) come in to play.

It wouldn't make sense to go that route either, but I assume Pater was talking about realtime rending.

Upgrading to a quad-core will be an improvement, the difference between the dual G5 at work and my quad at home are night an day when Compressor is using all 8 cores to render at a time (love those clusters). Wait until after January, when the new Mac Pros will be out.