What’s the best graphics card for Motion?
Right now, the choice is clear. Motion is a GPU-based application, which means that the graphics card you choose makes all the difference in the world: the better the card, the better Motion’s realtime performance. There are a myriad of cards on the market, but if you have a Mac Pro, your choice is a simple one: you want the Radeon HD 3870. It’s quite simply the best card out there right now for Motion on a Mac Pro, it works on all Mac Pro models, and it’s surprisingly inexpensive at about $200. Now, you may be wondering about the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB card that is available when you configure a new Mac Pro on the Apple store. Well, due to driver issues, we just haven’t seen the level of performance that card is capable of – in fact, some have found it slower than the stock Radeon HD 2600 XT. And on top of that, folks who recently upgraded their OS from 10.5.4 to 10.5.5 saw a performance decrease with that card! Here’s some test results: http://www.barefeats.com/harper20.html Th
