What is the best Video Card I can get for an Early 2009 Mac Pro?

Still having problems getting Premiere Pro CS6 & After Effects CS6 to recognize my GTX 660 Ti card. I even removed the other supported nVidia Cuda cards from the list in case there were imbedded control characters in the file.

DaVinci Resolve 9 does recognize and use the GPU.

I was able to get it working on a similar Mac Pro for a colleague. While the situation is better now, that I can't make it work with Premiere & After Effects on my system is most discouraging.

Suggestions from anyone are most appreciated. Thanks in advance.

As far as I was told on MacRumors I think, with the intro of 10.8.3, you can now drop just about any retail card into a Mac Pro and it will work, you just can't boot up into EFI mode and see the Apple logo. However, only under Windows can you take advantage of the Dual GPUs on a card at this time. The new Mac Pro due out this year however will have support for dual GPU, partly because that will come standard in the machine.

I'm planning to drop a Radeon 7990 into my 2008 Mac Pro. Although the Radeon 7970 and 7990 were intended for PCI-E 3.0 slots, you can still drop them into a PCI-E 2.0 16x slot and they will run, just not as fast. From what some techs have told me online, there's not yet a large noticeable difference running 3.0 vs 2.0 when it comes to PCI-E slots. Mainly the same deal with some processors. Unless the software is being written to utilize higher processor speeds, your paying more for speed you won't notice on everyday applications.

One sales guy even told me that if you get a GPU card with say 3000 processors on the GPU and a speed of only 900 MHz, it will beat a similar card that only has 2500 processors on the GPU and a speed of 1GHz. I say that as examples. The reality is what overall you are using your computer (i.e. Mac Pro) for, if you're a graphics designer and depending on the Graphics Software (i.e. Adobe, Apple, etc.) the heavier duty GPU cards may or may not produce noticeable results to warrant paying for a higher cost card. On the other hand, if you're a gamer using Boot Camp, then a higher end card would be warranted, but again only depending on the size of your monitor, the resoultion you're running your game at, and the refresh rate of the monitor.

Example: I had a GTX 285 running under Bootcamp playing Resident Evil 5, with the benchmark average of about 98 fps. However when I swapped it out for a Radeon 5870, my fps shot up to 120+ fps. So in that case the Radeon was faster. However my resolution for my Cinema Display was maxed out at 1650 x 1050. Now if I had a lot bigger a monitor it might be different story as I have noticed in some reviews that depending on your resolution, sometimes Nvidia was better, other times, ATI is. All depends on your setup.

True. Unless AMD says it has support for that. I too looked at the 780. The GTX 690 is faster due to the dual GPU and you should have double the processing cores on the 690. However with the Mac Pro's power supply you shouldn't need an external one unless absolutely necessary.

Also for rendering you might lean more towards a dedicated rendering card, depending on your budget.

Hello! I have an early 2009 Mac Pro with the following specs:

• 2 x 2.93 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
• 12 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC (just ordered upgrade to 48 GB - 6 x 8 GB)
• ATI Radeon HD 4870 512 MB (think it might be getting ready to die on me)
• OS X 10.8.4 (12E55)

So, I read a lot of information here regarding the GeForce GTX 660, and thinking that may be what I want for an upgrade. Is it true that the latest Mountain Lion now has driver support for that card?

I Boot Camp into Windows 7 Professional for some graphics-intensive games (Skyrim, SWTOR, etc.), so would upgrading to the GeForce GTX 660 pose an issue there?

Finally, my system has the cinema display (30-inch), so would I need an adapter to use it with a GeForce GTX 660? If the answer is no, is there a better graphics card that has native Mountain Lion support?

Thanks in advance!

Yes, Moutain Lion 10.8.4 has support for the GTX 660. It works out of the box.

In addition, NVidia provides their own driver for the card ('web driver' it's called) which can fine-tune the cards performance. Just download and install from their website.

The card should be fine in Windows Bootcamp. I use a GTX 650 in Windows 7 on my Mac Pro and have had no trouble. Download and install the latest nVidia drivers for Windows.

One thing about Windows is that the cards bus speed will be half what it would be in OS X or on a PC.

The 30" Cinema Display has a DVI cable, doesn't it? If so, it should connect directly to most NVidia cards without the need for an adapter. Make sure you get a 660 with a DVI input.

Thank you. The card price is reasonable, and it should be considerably better than my current one.

In the same boat...

What do folks think of the GTX 660 TI?

> What do folks think of the GTX 660 TI?

Not bad, but I like the GTX 780ti even better... ;-)

Hopefully Apple adds support for the GTX780ti (if they haven't already) to OS X.

The Radeon R9 290X is nice as well, but it runs pretty hot. I think the GTX780ti has a much better cooler, and although the 780ti is a hair slower, and is only 384-bit (instead of 512-bit), it's still a beast of a card.

Haven't tried installing them into a Mac Pro just yet, but I'd love to see Apple add the drivers to OS X for the NVIDIA GTX 780ti, and the RADEON R9 290X, and 290.

Good to know....once upon a time, one had to find a card that actually worked with a Mac. These days, just about anything does...

🙂

DaDrainer-

The important footnote to your statement is that generally speaking:

** graphics cards that are not Apple-Brand or "Mac Edition" generally do not support boot-up screens or Alt/Option-Boot screens.

Some users will find this so inconvenient as to reject these cards as an option.

Kevin-

Read your posts with great interest. Just curious if you have found cards compatible with Mavericks that also work with the 2009 Mac PRo (4,1). I am splitting my time between After Effects CS6 and FCPX. I currently have the GT120 GeForce butof course that is not compatible with Mavericks and I am running the OS GX driver.

Thanks

Rick