GeForce 7800 GT vs GeForce 6600

Look at the 2nd chart:

http://www.barefeats.com/quad03.html

LOTS faster is the answer.

My 6600 in aperture loupe very slooow how in 7800
GT?????

About 4x fatser according to the chart, perhaps even a bit faster if data transfer to and from the card is faster on the 7800.

Farick,

I've been haunting these forums with tales of woe with Aperture, a big raw library and the door-stop that is the 6600 video card. But what is making me crazy is still the lack of an Apple video upgrade. SIX MONTHS after receiving my quad there is no upgrade path for dual-core PCIe G5 owners !

If your brave/rich you can get a hacked firmware 7800 from whitedogs or ebay for stupid money. There have been mixed reports from others...search for 6600 in these forums.

Joe - Where is Apple with this ? Its Five weeks since you last said "We're looking into this..." 1.1 is loaded on my quad, it runs noticeably slower (honest) yet is a big feature/bug improvement over 1.01. This is why i'm going crazy, would begging for help cos i'm past tears.

If your brave/rich you can get a hacked firmware 7800
from whitedogs or ebay for stupid money. There have
been mixed reports from others...search for 6600 in
these forums.

Well, actually it's starngedogs, not whitedogs. And imho it's not stupid money, at least not if you're not buying on ebay. The strangedog price is what an original mac 7800GT would cost you. Remember: Mac cards have always been more expensive than their pc counterparts.

The guys at strangedog have put a lot of "blood and tears" in their effort to get a working 7800GT for Macs and they have smoked a lot of cards in this process, so I can fully understand why they're charging a little bit more than what the pc card they're converting costs them. They're definitely not getting rich on this.

Compared to what you're paying for the sparepart 7800GT (which doesn't cost Apple anything more then the modell they're building into their PMs) it even is a "cheap" solution. As you said, Apple doesn't seem to care about their PM customers, so I think we should take into consideration that the guys at strangedogs provide us with solutions (not only for G5 PCIe, but also for AGP Macs or the Cube) when Apple (no longer) doesn't seem to take care.

You might already have guessed it, I am a fully satisfied strangedogs "costumer" and cannot say anything bad about my new 7800GT, nor have I heard about any complains about 7800GTs they have made. Ebay might be another story...

Bye,

Carsten

Carsten,

Sorry i got the name wrong, but don't take my rant as an attack on strangedogs or those people buying off ebay. Full credit to those guys sweating "blood and tears" and smoking many cards to develop alternatives.

My anger is TOTALLY directed at Apple. Why should anyone HAVE to buy on ebay or strangedogs to upgrade its current top-of-the-line G5 system, 6 months old ? I bought a complete waste of a video card, its killing my Aperture investment and there is nothing i can do about it.

I'm taking a firm stance on this. Apple sold me a system "more then adequate for Aperture". I now find it is not. I can't buy from Apple what i want - a 7800 video card. But hey if i start again buying a NEW quad i CAN get a 7800 ! How screwed-up is that ? Apple owns this Monkey, not me.

I don't want to go down ebay or strange dogs route because it is extortionate, risky, and not covered by the Apple warranty. Do i care that my video supplier "smoked" many cards to give me my option ? No! Its my choice to hold to account the supplier of my system and its specifications. THE 6600 VIDEO CARD IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR APERTURE. Am i the only begger complaining about this ? Actually i don't care if i am because it my hard earned money that has bought this and its not fit for purpose.

If Apple would get a better video card on the market that i could buy (with my rebate!) to get my Aperture experience where i want it to be. I really really like its logic and flow and don't want to dump either Aperture or my G5. I am still very angry about this feel very let down by Apple. To get an Aperture-ready G5 i need to buy another quad, picking this time a 7800 card. Which was not available when i bought my quad... I could explode with rage about this, but i won't because my doorbell is ringing.

Quad G5, 2GB, 6600 256MB, 250+400GB SATA (WD & Seagate) Mac OS X (10.4.6)

It is a remarkable difference between the speed of the 6600 and the 7800. You can make a lot of adjustments and every slider still moves real time and the straighten tool still is usuable after a lot of adjustments. Loupe performance is also good, but the 7800GT doesn't really reduce the time Aperture needs to a load an image "into the loupe" if it isn't already in the memory.

Bye,

Carsten

Carsten,

I too have a dual core 2.0 G5. I am also extremely frustrated by the inability to buy a video upgrade form my machine. Like others, I became extremely frustrated with the 1.0 and 1.0.1 release, to the point that I just put it away and carried on with CS2. I am impressed with some of the improvements they have made with 1.1, but with my 6600LE, the RAW adjustments, particularly in full frame, and excruciatingly slow. Sometimes, I will get the beachball and the whole program will stop running so I have to force quit it. I can't understand why Apple doesn't have ANY upgrade path, and non of the third party vendors are authorized to sell any either. I am seriously considering Strangedogs path. How does you system work in full frame mode, and how quick is it for things like "straightening", which is almost unusable on my machine.

I have noticed another thing on my machine. Sometimes, Aperture seems to be faster and moves fairly quickly with almost real time sliders, and other times it "slows down" to almost a snails pace. This is without anything else running in memory, and I have 4.5 gigs of RAM!

Anyone else see this?

AlphDog,

what you're talking about are actually two problems: general poor performance with 6600LE and some occasional performance issues which can occur in 1.1 (see other thread in the forum).

Under normal cicumstances (and also with 1.01 as long as I could test) the 7800GT is a great improvement. Almost all adjustements are real time (exception: Sharpen and Noise in the RAW Fine Tuning Settings), even with multiple other adjustments actviated at the same time. Even the straightening tool works really smooth with a lot of other adjustments. So the 7800GT is the way to go.

The speed variations (normally they come along with massive CPU useage) seem to be an Aperture 1.1 problem which hasn't occured in the previous release. Memory and GPU (or PPC or Intel) don't seem to be the problem, it seems to be about Aperture needing too much CPU power than it should need. It seems to be that this problem mostly occurs when loading new images (into the viewer, the loupe...), switching to full view or after long periods of work. This is definitely a software bug and should be fixed soon (hopefully).

Bye,

Carsten

I realize that this is a 7800 vs 6600, but just wanted to add......

A buddy of mine came over with his MBP (ATI X1600 video card) with Aperture installed. The sliders on the MBP were much smoother than my Quad (Nvidia 6600) as well as scrolling thumbnails. The Loupe tool also reacted better, but still had some lag time, although not as jerky as my Quad.

I have an .aplibrary on an external LaCie 500GB with FW 400/800. I connected it to my friends MBP (FW 400 only) and ran some tests with the Adjustments HUD and scrolling. I had 'Create new version with adjustment' checked in prefs.

On the MBP, there was a slight delay (very, very slight) when creating a new version (instantaneous with its internal HDD) due to the speed of the external drive. However, the adjustment sliders were still much smoother than using the same external drive on my Quad (connected with FW 800).

I could go on and on, but the point is this.....

The Nvidia 6600 is a DOG of a card with Aperture. It has since been removed from the spec sheet on this page....

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wo/0.RSLID?mco=8 D19F826&nplm=MA438Z%2FA

....and is only a minimum requirement on this page....

http://www.apple.com/aperture/specs.html

Why it is on one page and not the other only Apple can tell us.

The better question is "What is Apple going to do?". There are many of us that bought the new Quad, when it was first announced, with the Nvidia 6600. We have been left out in the cold. We were given a spec sheet that was wrong and no we are told that there are, NO UPGRADES!!

In my order, the only other vidio card option was the $1650 Quadra card (too much). The Nvidia 7800 wasn't offered until after my Mac was shipped.

Aperture was in the same order with my Quad, so Apple knew what I was getting and why I was getting it (Photo work). Yet 6 months later, Apple has yet to contact any of us with this issue.

Yes, I tried customer relations. They offered me $60 off on a $200 purchase. Basically, spend $140 more in our store, STFU and go away.

Joe, thanks for the 1.1 update, but my $5300 system is a 'Pig' running Aperture as compared to my friends $2800 MBP. And my friend can take his computer out anywhere he goes!!

"^@#&(*(*%%TYF%^&#&*(*(*^#!@&()%%@$%^&#&%*"

Narvon

Quad 2.5, 6600, 4GB ram Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Soooo, Joe reads the threads related to the white balance bug. Does he read this thread? Why are there no options even if you want to buy?

Dual Core 2.0 G5, G4 Laptop Mac OS X (10.4.6) 4.5Gbyte RAM

I'm hoping something comes out of NAB or somesuch very very soon. Few people seem to realise what a messed-up situation Apeerture is now in for 6600 owners. Under 1.00 & 1.01 Aperture was at least useable for low volume work, but 1.1 is simply not. I recently got a MBP 2GHz and will be running some rough benchmarks. But i can tell you now 1.1 on a Quad with 6600 is utterley useless in a 10k raw library. Initial impressions are that the MBP will easily surpass the quad. It pains to say so because i have noticed quite a lot of improvements and nice features (WB apart) in 1.1.

Joe - You must get back to us on what is going on, useability-wise (only) 1.1 was a backward step. I am using Aperture on my quad less as a result. Are you doing any testing with 6600s ? If not i can lend you one plus a beer in exchange for a 7800 from your 'spares' inventory. What are the solutions ?