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Upgrading my System - Soliciting Graphics Card Opinions

Business seems to be picking up and I am thinking of upgrading my oldish iMac for a Mac Pro. I have seen that some renderers now can use the GPU for processing and thus really speed things up. On a Mac, this requires a CUDA-enabled graphics card upgrade and I have no experience in this realm. Some of these cards are very expensive.

Does anyone out there have thoughts or suggestions on this topic?

PS: I know this isn't really Vectorworks related, and I hope my posting isn't out of bounds, but I think there must be some overlap with this community and sophisticated Mac-users.

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Permalink Reply by John Zabriskie on April 13, 2011 at 1:07pm

I upgraded from a dual 2.7 GHz G5 mac pro with 8Gb ram (running leopard) earlier this year, to a 3.33GHz 6-core mac pro with the ATI radeon HD 5870 (running snow leopard). I could not afford the 12-core setup & from my research, it seemed that the 6-core single CPU at the 3.33GHz speed was faster than the 8-core dual CPU at 2.4GHz. Further, I do a lot of 3D modeling stuff in VectorWorks, modo & blender, so the upgrade of the 5770 to 5870 seemed justified. I bought the machine as a build-to-order through the Apple store. Later, when funds permitted, I was able to upgrade the ram to 16Gb. Finally, I was able to move from VW2009 on the G5 to VW2011 on the new mac pro.

I also run "Menu Meters" in the menu bar. Due to hyperthreading, the 6-core machine shows up as having 12-cores. When blender renders, they all light up to max until each subregion is finished rendering. It's way cool to watch. [The render times on my blender test model were 9.7 times faster on the new mac pro.] VW2011 is a bit different, since only 2 cores light up during most of the rendering while it builds the model geometry & sets up the scene. It's not until the actual paint-up part of the rendering occurs that all the cores light up. However, most of my time is spent in building & editing the 3D models. This is where the faster CPU clock helps the response time on screen when in wireframe or openGL modes for conceptual design & verification.

I don't have any experience in seeing the HD5770 run, so can't comment on any increase the HD5870 brings. However, I'm really happy with the setup. It's fast, stable & quiet. (The G5 sounded like a jet taking off when the heat pipe Hx fans kicked on when rendering.)