DMclean Posted June 30, 2015 Share Posted June 30, 2015 Well the topic pretty much says it all. Anyone have any experience using this card (on a Mac) with formZ? I'm currently using a dual display setup with two Radeon HD5770's, and am getting models complex enough that I'm feeling the slowdown in navigating and moving complex pieces (in a transform for example). I'm thinking about upgrading the video, but obviously this is a pretty pricey move so I'd love to know if anyone has had any experience with this card, either good, bad , or indifferent. Thanks, Doug Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tech Posted June 30, 2015 Share Posted June 30, 2015 Hi Doug, This site is primarily for Windows OpenGL scores, but for cards that are available for a Mac, the scores should be fairly similar: https://gfxbench.com/result.jsp Here is also a decent OpenGL comparison for OS X: http://barefeats.com/gtx980.html Hope that helps! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rich f Posted June 30, 2015 Share Posted June 30, 2015 Not quite what you asked, but I would look into PC consumer/gaming cards - you can probably get better, or at least comparable performance for a lot less $. There are a handful of cards that can work out of the box in a classic Mac Pro, and others that can be flashed to work. Good place to start reading: http://forums.macrumors.com/forums/mac-pro.1/ These guys flash PC cards and provide some support if you don't want to do it yourself: http://www.macvidcards.com (no association) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DMclean Posted June 30, 2015 Author Share Posted June 30, 2015 Thanks for the info. All the sites mentioned helped give me more possibilities and food for thought. Thanks, D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3dworks Posted July 4, 2015 Share Posted July 4, 2015 i'm using a macvidcards patched nvidia 780 gtx 3G DDR5 RAM card here, which does a god job with FZ and opengl. ordered a patched 980 TI card a few days ago, which should render even faster. those 780 gtx cards are pretty cheap nowadays on ebay and they run straight out of the box under 10.10. nvidia web drivers (recently updated even for 10.10.4) are required for best performance. without ROM patch you won't however get any boot rescue options, or you add a cheap 120 gtx card just for the booting process. 780 cards are directly supported by the OSX drivers as well, but the newer maxwell generation (including the 980 series) need the nvidia drivers to boot up - causing some troubles when reinstalling systems etc. in these cases, keep an old mac pro card ready to set up the system or use a ROM patched card which can boot OSX directly from EFI. about deciding for a 780 or a recent 980 card: i'm using the card power mainly for rendering with octane under CUDA, but in my experience just for opengl, a 780 card will be more than enough even for very complex projects. be aware that any 'TI' or overclocked version of those older cards might need more power than the internal mac pro can supply. also stay away from non original design cooling systems, as the mac pro case needs the hot air to be directly output by the card on the rear side. usually, the evga brand works well with macs. cheers markus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tech Posted July 6, 2015 Share Posted July 6, 2015 Yes, Rich has some useful links, and the cards that Markus notes both give great performance for the money. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Montoya Posted July 20, 2015 Share Posted July 20, 2015 I concur with Markus. I have a flashed GTX 680 that does great for all of the needed OpenGL tasks in FormZ. If you have ever worked on computers, and have a Windows PC around, you can easily flash your own graphics card and save yourself a bunch of money. I'll be doing the 980 TI as well when we finally get an integrated CUDA render in FormZ. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonmoore Posted July 21, 2015 Share Posted July 21, 2015 This is a great resource for real world performance scores (based on the Cinebench utility): http://cbscores.com/index.php?sort=ogl&order=desc Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
palarsen Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 I use that card on MacPro! It works fine, but I dont notice a huge difference. I dont remember what my old card was, but it was probably the best that shipped with the old MacPro (mid 2013) /Petter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonmoore Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 This information from the Redshift site should be just as applicable to FormZ (especially when running FormZ in shaded full mode). The main advantage you get with Kepler/Quadro cards is that more works goes into driver compatibility with all the main DCC packages and in general they provide larger and faster VRAM configurations. There are some really great GTX range nVidia cards available now that provide far better value than Quadro cards. Redshift requires an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA compute capability 2.0 or higher and 1GB VRAM or more. An NVIDIA GPU with CUDA compute capability of 3.5 or higher and 3GB VRAM or more is recommended. To learn more about the compute capabilities of specific NVIDIA cards, visit https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus. Kepler based GeForce GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670, GTX 680, GTX 770, GTX 780 and GTX TITAN as well as the Kepler based Quadro GPUs such as the K5000 and K6000, work great with Redshift! The Quadro cards are significantly more expensive but are available in configurations with more VRAM than their GTX counterparts. Having more VRAM can improve rendering performance when rendering very large scenes. The newer Maxwell based GeForce GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX750Ti, GTX970, GTX980, GTX980Ti and TITAN X also work great with Redshift! At the time of writing (July 2015), the best price/performance ratio is offered by the NVIDIA GTX 980Ti 6GB. On the very high end, the TITAN X and Quadro M6000 GPUs provide excellent performance and 12GB VRAM, so they are ideal for users that render very high-poly scenes. On the lower-end, the GTX970 offers good performance at a very affordable price. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3dworks Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 and don't forget the octane bench site for comparing nvidia CUDA capability of cards: http://render.otoy.com/octanebench/ markus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonmoore Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 and don't forget the octane bench site for comparing nvidia CUDA capability of cards: http://render.otoy.com/octanebench/ markus The resources are out there, if you're prepared to look. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DMclean Posted August 7, 2015 Author Share Posted August 7, 2015 Thanks to all for the help and resources. After perusing the various references I decided to go with an ETI flashed GTX980Ti, at about a third of the cost of the Quadro. It's now happily ensconced in my Mac Pro. Now if Maxwell will just release that CUDA accelerated version that they're experimenting with... Thanks again for the tips and pointers. Doug Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3dworks Posted August 7, 2015 Share Posted August 7, 2015 nice! i'm very happy with that card as well here! yes, hopefully maxwell will use some CUDA, of FZ will go octane somedays... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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