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Attn; Mac Guru or at least somebody smarter than I.

cclesuecclesue Posts: 420
in The Commons

I have an early 2008 MAC Pro (3.1) with two monitors and need to get a better graphics card since mine will not allow me to access the 3d functions on Photoshop CC. There are three listed as compatable for this Model Mac. Two are 512MB and one is 1.5 Gm. These are ATI Radeon HD 4870 and NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT both 512 MB which the minimum required for PS3d and the third is the 1.5GB nVIDIA Quadro FX5600. Here are my questions;

!. is there any advantage as far as IRay rendering is concerned between the ATI or the Nvidia cards?

2.Since I am not using my machine for gaming is it worth the extra 50-100 buck to purchase the 1.5 Gbs over the 512 Mbs cards? further would the larger memory make it noisier?

and Last: 3. Should I remove the installed card or leave it in and run my second monitor from it?

Comments

  • fixmypcmikefixmypcmike Posts: 19,709

    I - Iray will only work with NVIDIA cards, with ATI cards it will render using CPU only.

    2 - You won't be able to fit much on either card for Iray rendering.  If the card isn't being used for driving monitors it will help, but 1.5GB won't fit much.

    3 - Leave it, you can run both monitors off it.

  • HavosHavos Posts: 5,630

    iRay will only use Nvidia cards for GPU renders, so the AMD cards are useless for that.

    However I suspect that both Nvidia cards you mentioned will be of little real use for iRay due to their small amount of VRAM. The 512MB cards probably would not be useful for any scenes, and the 1.5 GB will only be used for very simple scenes (1 character, and perhaps a simple background).

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001

    The 512 MB probably won't be useful for Iray at all...it's CUDA compute level will be too low, so it won't even be seen as an Iray capable card.

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