MacPro upgrades: graphics card options?

[Hywel]

Hi All,

  I have a 3.1 version Mac Pro (2x quad core xeon 2.8 GHz,8 GB of 800 MHz memory- the late 2008 spec). I've currently got an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512 MHz graphics card. I've got a hardware RAID card, with the system drive as a single drive, and the data on three drives in RAID5. I'm using a 30" Apple Monitor. A fairly high-powered system, if a little behind the times.

  I spend a lot of my life watching progress bars crawl across the screen in Phocus, Aperture, Lightroom 3B2 and Final Cut Pro.

  So I'm wondering if there are significant performance gains to be had from any upgrades, or whether I should just live with it for a couple of years until I replace the MacPro with a completely new one.

  Looking at CPU load, few of the programs I use top it out or even get close. Similarly, whilst memory gets pounded by a few tasks, it is rare to see it topped out. Disk activity looks pretty spiky in the usual picture-at-a-time batch jobs I wait for.

  So I'm guessing that a significant bottleneck may be the graphics card. Does anyone have experience of using a higher powered card or benchmarks to compare? Anyone using an Nvidia Quadro FX 4800 for Mac? Does Phocus get any significant speed improvements from that over say a Radeon 4870? How about LR/Aperture/FCP? Anyone know of any benchmarks comparing typical photographer type tasks with GTX 285 vs FX4800 vs Radeon HD4870 vs GT8800?

I don't mind splashing out a fair wodge of cash to make my week's work go quicker but it would need to be factors of 2 not 10%.

Anyone done a graphics card upgrade on a MacPro? Did it help?

  Cheers, Hywel

[Jack Flesher]

I think your best bet is more ram -- it's relatively cheap and does make a difference. Take it to 16Gig at least, 24 is better and 32 better still.  The OS manages available ram, so why you rarely see it top out.  But, doubling your ram maybe will make a 10% difference and quadrupling it maybe a 12-15% difference tops.  Nothing is going to double performance except a new system, and even then a double is probably unrealistic.  30% to 50% faster for a new system, probably; but 100% improvement is unlikely I think...  At least until we see the  12-core Mac Pros in a few months

[Hywel]

I think your best bet is more ram -- it's relatively cheap and does make a difference. Take it to 16Gig at least, 24 is better and 32 better still.  The OS manages available ram, so why you rarely see it top out.  But, doubling your ram maybe will make a 10% difference and quadrupling it maybe a 12-15% difference tops.  Nothing is going to double performance except a new system, and even then a double is probably unrealistic.  30% to 50% faster for a new system, probably; but 100% improvement is unlikely I think...  At least until we see the  12-core Mac Pros in a few months

Thanks!

I am certainly considering more RAM as well, and possibly even moving to an SSD with a fast write speed for my system/swap disk. I should have been clearer about my "double" performance. I know that nothing is going to double the overall system performance except a new system a couple of years hence. But it is certainly possible to get a component that performs twice as fast at the specific bit of the job it does, given that the 8800 GT is a pretty old card now. If that happens to address one or two bottlenecks that "feel" annoying to me in slowing down my working, that'll be well worth it, even if the overall improvement in system performance isn't great.

And you are right about OSX managing memory- Lightroom in particular seems to be a huge memory hog. Why it is demanding 20 GB of memory on export is a bit of a mystery, so that's one part of the system that absolutely would benefit most from more RAM. The Final Cut Pro stuff, though, I suspect is likely to see significant gain from the graphics card, as is Phocus performance where it is the interactive performance most of all that feels like a total dog.

  Cheers, Hywel.

[Jack Flesher]

A faster graphics card will help with screen redraws and rendering 3D, but won't help much during processing itself or 2D work, so I would expect only minimal gains with any upgrade there.  Keep in mind even at 3 years old, the NVIDIA 8800GT is no slouch even by today's standards.

[Hywel]

A faster graphics card will help with screen redraws and rendering 3D, but won't help much during processing itself or 2D work, so I would expect only minimal gains with any upgrade there.  Keep in mind even at 3 years old, the NVIDIA 8800GT is no slouch even by today's standards.

I was under the impression that several of the programs I'm using call on the GPU as well as the CPU.

Magic Bullet Looks is GPU accelerated, I believe, but nothing much else in FCP is.

Aperture definitely uses the GPU via OpenCL. Google'd reports are good for swapping to the GTX285 but it doesn't help with import, RAW decode or final render... annoying, but improving the responsiveness during editing wouldn't hurt.

Phocus also uses the GPU, I believe. No idea if that's for final render or just for previews.


Hence, wondering whether it would help to have a better graphics card.

  Cheers, Hywel.

[Jack Flesher]

I was under the impression that several of the programs I'm using call on the GPU as well as the CPU.

Magic Bullet Looks is GPU accelerated, I believe, but nothing much else in FCP is.

Aperture definitely uses the GPU via OpenCL. Google'd reports are good for swapping to the GTX285 but it doesn't help with import, RAW decode or final render... annoying, but improving the responsiveness during editing wouldn't hurt.

Phocus also uses the GPU, I believe. No idea if that's for final render or just for previews.


Hence, wondering whether it would help to have a better graphics card.

  Cheers, Hywel.

How much faster is LR with your current graphics card with Open GL ON versus OFF?  I would create a folder of 10 raws and batch them out and time it, then turn GL off and re-time.  Take whatever that difference is and speed it up by maybe 50% for the 285 over your 8800.   Even if it doubles the difference, I suspect you'll find it's not a big number in an 8-core machine...  Then you have to ask yourself how much of your actual computer time each day is spent performing that task?

[ErikKaffehr]

Jack,

Thanks for your suggestions, they make sense to me. I have a question, tough. The original poster essentially said that he did not top out memory, CPU utilization was not very high and disk IO was spiky. This is essentially a bit similar to my experience, at some times I don't see any bottlenecks but the system still doesn't utilize the CPUs. So what I ask is "What's my computer doing?".

Accidentally, I don't think 12 cores will be much help as it seems that LR cannot handle more than four very efficiently, even if I'm not especially sure about that.

One thing I cannot stop thinking about is that the CPU/ASIC in a DSLR cranks out about half a dozen JPEGs per second. But still, a four CPU Xeon box perhaps can process a RAW image in four seconds (OK four images in four seconds :-), so the in camera processor is like twenty times faster and that on a tiny battery. OK, the reason we shoot RAW and use LR/ACR/C1 or whatsoever is that we think that the computer will do a better job.

Lloyd Chambers has an excellent site regarding performance on Mac:

http://macperformanceguide.com/index.html

Best regards
Erik

I think your best bet is more ram -- it's relatively cheap and does make a difference. Take it to 16Gig at least, 24 is better and 32 better still.  The OS manages available ram, so why you rarely see it top out.  But, doubling your ram maybe will make a 10% difference and quadrupling it maybe a 12-15% difference tops.  Nothing is going to double performance except a new system, and even then a double is probably unrealistic.  30% to 50% faster for a new system, probably; but 100% improvement is unlikely I think...  At least until we see the  12-core Mac Pros in a few months

[Jack Flesher]

Accidentally, I don't think 12 cores will be much help as it seems that LR cannot handle more than four very efficiently, even if I'm not especially sure about that.

Well, I don't use Lightroom, I use C1 and C1 utilizes all available cores, hence my desire for the dual hex-core machines -- that and the fact they will likely have SATA3, USB3 and FW1600 as well.  I am assuming CS5 would utilize the extra cores too, though that may be a poor assumption.  The reality is my current system is still pretty fast -- an early 2008 Mac Pro 8-core 3.2 with 24 Gigs of ram --  but it still takes about 15 seconds to spit out a 360MB 16-bit P65+ conversion out of C1, and I'd love to get that sub 10 seconds per...  

Perhaps the Open GL will help LR more than added cores, but you won't know until you test it...

[BJNY]

Well, I don't use Lightroom, I use C1 and C1 utilizes all available cores, hence my desire for the dual hex-core machines -- that and the fact they will likely have SATA3, USB3 and FW1600 as well.  I am assuming CS5 would utilize the extra cores too, though that may be a poor assumption.  The reality is my current system is still pretty fast -- an early 2008 Mac Pro 8-core 3.2 with 24 Gigs of ram --  but it still takes about 15 seconds to spit out a 360MB 16-bit P65+ conversion out of C1, and I'd love to get that sub 10 seconds per...  

Perhaps the Open GL will help LR more than added cores, but you won't know until you test it...

It would be a pleasant surprise, but I'd be shocked if the next Mac Pro has ANY of these onboard.

[markhout]

I have a 3.1 version Mac Pro (2x quad core xeon 2.8 GHz,8 GB of 800 MHz memory- the late 2008 spec). I've currently got an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512 MHz graphics card. I've got a hardware RAID card, with the system drive as a single drive, and the data on three drives in RAID5. I'm using a 30" Apple Monitor. A fairly high-powered system, if a little behind the times.

Out of curiosity - if you are running on 64 bit did you get any significant processing gain vs 32 bit? I "upgraded" to 64 bit a couple of months ago and there is some improvement but not much (I have a similar setup, Early 09 with 16GB memory).

[Hywel]

Out of curiosity - if you are running on 64 bit did you get any significant processing gain vs 32 bit? I "upgraded" to 64 bit a couple of months ago and there is some improvement but not much (I have a similar setup, Early 09 with 16GB memory).

I'm running Snow Leopard 10.6.3, but not booting it in 64 bit mode. I could try that I guess.

Actually it looks like the discussion may be a bit moot for me now. Last night my 3 year old Alienware PC basically blew its top doing some video encoding... overheated pretty badly, I think. I managed to get it to reboot eventually and have updated the last few things which needed backing up, and am spending this morning cleaning up and making sure I have the few remaining tools I need to add to the Mac so I can finally abandon the PC world entirely.  (Colour coding HTML editor, decent FTP program, Flip4Mac Pro HD for encoding the cursed WMV files that customers seem to like for some unaccountable reason...)

But that means that I don't have a backup computer, except for a "waaay too slow for anything but direst emergency" 13" MacBook.

I don't like to leave my business with any single points of failure if I can avoid it, so I guess maybe I'll have to have a shiny new MacPro when Apple refreshes the range, and use the current machine as the email/Interweb/video encoding chugger. Bugger, could have done without spending that money this year, but if the main Mac blows I'd REALLY rather have a fallback machine ready to plug in the data storage with all software loaded, up to date and ready to go.

  Cheers, Hywel.

[Hywel]

.. thanks for helpful suggestions. I've decided to fit an extra 8 GB of RAM and install a GTX 285 graphics card. That should keep things ticking along nicely for now, and I can invest in a top spec new machine when Apple release the next gen MacPro.

Cheers, Hywel.

[Jack Flesher]

.. thanks for helpful suggestions. I've decided to fit an extra 8 GB of RAM and install a GTX 285 graphics card. That should keep things ticking along nicely for now, and I can invest in a top spec new machine when Apple release the next gen MacPro.

Cheers, Hywel.

So how did the graphics card work out for you -- did you notice significant improvements with it?

[BernardLanguillier]

decent FTP program,

Tasmit 4 would be my recommendation.

Cheers,
Bernard

[kers]

Hello Hywel.
 I have the same computer and had the same question- how to make it faster.
I do not think the graphic card is the bottleneck unless you are into video or 3d modeling.
I am a photographer and think the 8800GT is OK.

I brought my machine to 16 gig of ram- then put in Snowleopard 64 bits wit photoshop CS5 , and last but not least a system SSD. The photographs are on a raid of two disks.

With this system i think i will wait for the next genreation mac-pro of 2011.


I do not know if making part of the ssd a scratchdisk will help a lot since i have enough ram to do my things...

 Pieter Kers

[Jack Flesher]

With this system i think i will wait for the next genreation mac-pro of 2011.

At this rate, it may be 2011 before we see ANY new Mac Pros from Apple!

I do not know if making part of the ssd a scratchdisk will hel a lot since i have enough ram tot do my things...

Scratch is still important, but definitely not as important as it was with CS4 and earlier.  Also, no need to partition an SSD for this as it will not improve performance at all.  In fact, with enough RAM installed to cover your normally largest file processing requirements, you can probably use an SSD for your OS and apps AND scratch and not lose very much at all performance-wise for the rare times you'll actually tag it hard. CS5 still reserves space on your scratch volume as you process, but that is not a highly disruptive process, especially on an SSD...

I just recently set up a new 15" MacBook Pro i7 with 8G RAM and a 500G 7200 spinner, then removed the optical drive and installed an OWC 100G SSD.  I have my OS and apps on the SSD and have the spinner partitioned off for images, misc documents and a back-up bootable OS. I have experimented with using the outer partition of the spinner for scratch and the SSD for scratch, and so far cannot tell any difference between either --- they're both fast in the laptop world .

On my desktop, I compared a pair of SSDs in RAID-0 with OS and apps on it to my existing dedicated 4-drive spinner RAID-0 scratch  for CS5 scratch, and again there was virtually no difference -- and this was with a HUGE file operation that blew by the 16G of RAM I have allocated to CS5 to force scratch.

[kers]

Jack,
thanks for the feedback; it saves me some time finding out things for myself.

As some - diglloyd et al- point out -:the software is often the bottleneck because it does not use the 8 + cores nowadays found in the new machines.
Only few programs do ( DXO is one)
Then it is only the CPU speed ( HZ) that counts. I believe the new Macpro will come with 6- 12 cores and cpu speeds between 2.6 and 3.3 khz.
My two year old 8 core Mac pro is still 2,8 khz - so that is why I decided to spend money on other things than a new computer.
New Software, RAM and SSD(s).

I have not spend much time on photoshop CS5 yet but already noticed some speed gains. most time consuming i find is opening and saving images in Photoshop.
I hope they have been able to speed that up.

Pieter Kers

[Jack Flesher]

Then it is only the CPU speed ( HZ) that counts. I believe the new Macpro will come with 6- 12 cores and cpu speeds between 2.6 and 3.3 khz.
My two year old 8 core Mac pro is still 2,8 khz - so that is why I decided to spend money on other things than a new computer.
New Software, RAM and SSD(s).

While that concept is basically correct, it's not the whole story.  The bigger difference between our older machines and the new ones is the memory bus speed --- ours are 2x800 (or if older, 2x667) where the new ones are 3x1067.  Then you have the bigger on-board cache and on-board selective overclocking in the new processors.  ALL of those together can make a pretty significant difference on any processor intensive application.  As an example, the 4-core 3.33 with 32G ram is about 30% faster than my 8-core 3.2 wth 24G ram on any heavy CS4/5 process.  

Of course the relative importance of any given speed increase is variable depending on your use.  If you process say 200 images per day that you run say an average of a minute of heavy CS script on, with a new machine that is 30% faster, you'll "save" 4000 seconds -- or over an hour ever day -- which is pretty significant.  However, if you process say 20 per day that way, you'll only save 400 seconds -- or about 7 minutes -- prolly not worth the entry cost delta for the new box.

[Jack Flesher]

Add on comment for thread posterity.

I just installed the NVIDIA GTX 285 in my MacPro. Normally I wouldn't have bothered with a $500 upgrade for the older box, but my old card was pretty basic with only 256 of ram and had some limitations driving my current dual monitor setup.  And when I buy a new Mac Pro, I was going to spring for this card optionally anyway since I *hate* the idea of one Dual-DVI out and one MiniDisplay out, and would want 2x DualDVI. This also giving me the ability to mount both cards and drive three monitors, my ultimate goal in the next studio I build.

First off, the new card is very nice, and the improvement to screen redraws is pretty obvious -- frames 'pop' into place instead of sort of appearing to 'load'. It also manages my dual displays more effectively than my old card did -- that alone is worth the cost to me. My old card for example would not display the low rez start-up OSX screen during boot on my NEC -- not sure why, but it wouldn't. This made it impossible to see error messages if you had a hang on boot or boot choice menus like when you want to choose an optional drive to boot from.   The new card shows this.

The real acid test though was how significant was the added VRAM for open GL operations?  My old card has 256MB, the new card a Gig.  I opened CS5 and ran a few benchmarks with open GL at various settings.  Short version is the old card ran the benchmark in 32.5 seconds and the new card ran it in 30 for a savings of approximately 8%.  Not insignificant, and if you spend all day processing then definitely worth considering. But probably not worth the $500 entry fee for the casual image processor. In my personal case, it is possibly enough to allow me to hold off for one more generation of MacPro revisions before I upgrade.


FWIW,