New MacPro ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB GDDR5 Motion performance

the black sun wrote:
I've also got a sneaky feeling that we may have to use both (2) power connectors on the motherboard to have this beast run; hope not but...

Looks like you are right.

http://manuals.info.apple.com/enUS/Mac_Pro_Early2009_RV770_CardDIY.pdf

On a separate thread, I asked about having more that one card in a machine. Specifically, keeping the NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 in after I install the 4870. I got a useful response that others might find useful. In effect, it might not be a good idea.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1970813&tstart=0

Message was edited by: Russell Vaught

OTOH, If you drive 2 displays with one card, you are splitting the card's VRAM in half, which will certainly impact Motion's performance.

Mark Spencer4 wrote:
OTOH, If you drive 2 displays with one card, you are splitting the card's VRAM in half, which will certainly impact Motion's performance.

That is what I thought, which is why I asked the question on the other thread. I will not have my 4870 card until mid-May so cannot test with my two monitors.

Maybe somebody who currently has two monitors attached to different cards can chime in.

Does it really make a lot of difference? Especially when you've got half a gig of ram - I'm sure it was different when you only had 64MB of vram, but does 512MB really work THAT much better than 256x2?

Patrick