Aperture for imac g5?

Question

I have a imac g5. it came with a GeForce FX 5200 installed. This card can not be used with Aperture. Can i get a upgraded card installed for this computer? If so does it have to be an apple install?
thanks

Answer 1

Reply
I am bewildered that apple would release a product
that can not be used on so many of it's machines.
My guess is that Apple made the decision to look forward with Aperture, and designed the app from the ground up to optimize for the future states of the underlying OS and Apple hardware. A temporary inconvenience for those of us with legacy hardware - and a serious hit on initial sales - but IMO that approach will pay dividends when we are all on boxes with fast GPUs accessing substantial amounts of RAM.
I have used Cumulus, Portfolio, iView, PS File Browser, Adobe Bridge, etc. All suffer major limitations, many of which do seem to be throughput-power related. Aperture seems to address many of those limitations, and if Aperture succeeds in the long run at being what it claims to be, I for one will happily tolerate the fact that my current desktop tower is not adequate.
Computers used for pro graphics always have needed routine replacement, and recent improvements in DSLR capability (my Nikon D2x can create twenty large RAW + JPEG image files in 4 seconds, all of which must be managed) has exacerbated that issue. Aperture is just exemplary of the trend.
Note that boxes limited to 2-2.5 GB RAM (or even those limited to 4 GB RAM), including all iMacs, are poor choices for future use on graphics apps anyway. Even though such boxes work adequately at the moment, the graphics throughput of future OS versions and future graphics apps (e.g. Photoshop already can utilize 4 GB RAM) will very much be most cost effective using fast GPUs and substantial RAM; certainly much more than 2 GB. IMO.