Mac Pro and CS4: will a Radeon 3870 be faster than stock 7300GT?

MB
Posted By
Mike_Boreham
Dec 9, 2008
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284
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12
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Closed
Found this thread on a search for 3870 experience.

I have recently "upgraded" from a 2600 to a 3870 in my Mac Pro (2006 4 x2.66, 8Gb RAM, 10.5.5) and feel I am getting more crashes with CS4 and Bridge.

I see here:-

< http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb 405711&sliceId=2>

that the 3870 is not a tested card with Mac.

Any comment or advice?

Thanks

Mike
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Paul_Takeuchi
Dec 9, 2008
Mike,
Thanks for pointing that out. The thread is here, if people are interested:

<http://www.adobeforums.com/webx?128@@.59b72402>

What I glean from that experience is that apple and adobe and ati have not done enough testing with the 3870 in a mac pro.

It really is frustrating at how limited the graphic card choices are for mac professionals. I hope Apple can resolve all this flakey performance stuff by the time of Snow Leopard. They really are neglecting the needs of high end users. The Mac Pro is a beautiful, well-designed machine but the CPUs and graphics cards are all old news.

Hopefully somebody will post a favorable experience about CS4, a Mac Pro, and a radeon 3870. Paul
SB
Stephen_Best_in_Oz
Dec 9, 2008
I upgraded my 2600 XT card to the 3870 and it made everything satisfyingly more zippy. I’ve since restored the 2600 XT to the slot above to run a third monitor. However, if you’re hoping for better Photoshop performance it won’t buy you much. CS4’s Open GL implementation is pretty buggy and some redraw functionality is actually slower than just relying on the CPU(s). The data structures to support Open GL also seem to eat into the measly 2.3GB or so you get for Photoshop use. Personally, I think you’re better off with Open GL disabled. That said, the 3870 is great value.
WZ
Wade_Zimmerman
Dec 9, 2008
I cannot report on the Radeon Card but I changed my nvidia 7300GT for the 8800 Gt and and this seems to be the benefit I can open 15 Open GL documents at a time with the 8800GT and only 8 or was it 9 with the 7300GT.

and it seems a bit faster but not much.

I think the big improvement comes with 64 bit and there they say things like rendering in Premiere and AE are real fast as opposed to 32 bit.
P
PShock
Dec 10, 2008
I purchased and installed the 3870 into my 2.66 Mac Pro before the release of CS4 so I can’t really compare PS performance to the previously installed 7300. However, I can say there was a noticeable improvement in the machine overall, and anything to do with GPU intensive operations were vastly improved. The 3870 is a much, much better card than the 7300.

I am happy with it’s performance in CS4 but I do experience some oddities that I haven’t found a solution for, other than a restart. For some unknown reason, brush type operations become "off". By that I mean the visible cursor location doesn’t match the stroke – it’s off by several pixels. It happens mostly with the healing brush and rubber stamp tool but also with the brush tool. Seems to happen completely at random.

When I am experiencing this, another big time glitch happens when I enable the Show Overlay option in the clone source pallet. Instead of just a cursor sized preview of the clone source, the entire full size composite preview moves with the cursor! Again, a restart seems to be the only solution.

I have no idea if this is caused by the card, but judging by the number of reports of things being "off" (marquees off by several pixels, brush stroke size not matching cursor size, etc), I think I have to agree with the above that the Open GL implementation has some issues.

-phil
AS
Ann_Shelbourne
Dec 10, 2008
For some unknown reason, brush type operations become "off". By that I mean the visible cursor location doesn’t match the stroke – it’s off by several pixels.

That may be a Driver problem with that particular card. Another User reported the same thing and could only fix it by disabling OpenGL.

I can only report that it doesn’t happen with the 7800GT on a G5 running 10.4.11.
R
Ram
Dec 10, 2008
I often wonder what the 7800GT (or my 7800GS) uses for a driver, since there’s no dedicated Mac driver for itΒ… but it works!
AS
Ann_Shelbourne
Dec 10, 2008
I understand that the video card drivers for the Mac are already incorporated in OSX.
R
Ram
Dec 10, 2008
Yes, Ann, but would the specific driver for an unlisted/unsupported card be included?
AS
Ann_Shelbourne
Dec 10, 2008
I believe that the 7800GT was an option on some of the G5s Β— so the driver is probably included.
R
Ram
Dec 10, 2008
Aaaah! But my 7800GS was not. Maybe it’s using the same driver as the 7800GT.
P
PShock
Dec 11, 2008
That may be a Driver problem with that particular card.

Doesn’t seem likely since a 7300 GT user reported the same issue. Not only are they using a different driver, but a completely different brand as well.

The other issue I reported about a the entire preview moving when implementing the Show Overlay option in the Clone Source pallet is solved. The problem was …. me! I haven’t been able to wrap my head around a reason for this, but unless you also check the clip to cursor option, the entire composite preview moves. (Anyone know how that would be useful?) Somehow, that clipping option became inactive and it drove me nuts for a while.

-phil
AS
Ann_Shelbourne
Dec 11, 2008
There seems to be a lot of problems with video card drivers in general Β— on both MacIntel machines running OSX 10.5.5 and on Windows machines.

Have you tried disabling some of the Advanced Drawing components or even OpenGL entirely?

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