Is it really your video card that's the problem?.

Question

Bought a DC/2.3 G5 to run Aperture, upgraded to 1.1 and everything became slow, got a 7800GT, not a huge improvement. Upgraded to version 1.1.1 with some improvement, now at least it's usable.
Got a new MBP 17in with 2Gb ram and a fast(7.2k) disk, split the 100Gb for bootcamp and installed Aperture 1.1.1 and restored my vault. It's slower than any other configuration I've had on the G5.
20Gb library of all raw images 8-9Mb each in size. Go figure that. But I still want to use this application.

Answer 1

The ram on both boxes is fine, 2.5Gb on the G5 and 2Gb on the MBP.
The MBP came pre installed with 10.4.6 where as the G5 came with 10.4.4 which I upgraded to 10.4.6.
The MBP has 2 partitions, 68Gb for OSX and 30Gb for the Bootcamp WinXP. There is almost 20Gb free on the OSX partition.
I was working with a smallish project with about 150 Canon raws(8Mb each)the thumbnails had finished building 2-3 days ago. I did notice that all the Thumbnails inside stacks did not build so I opened all stacks and allowed Aperture to build the remaining Thumb's. But it's still slow at moving from one image to another using the keyboard to navigate.
I rebuilt the Library using the option keys when starting aperture this time with all the stacks open, it rebuilt all the thumbs but the resulting overall speed is still the same.
Perhaps I was expecting some overall improvement with the ATI X1600 graphics card on the newer Intel Dual cores but at this stage it's the same at best with the G5 and both the MBP and G5 suffer from random slowdowns & SBOD. The only improvment I have noticed is the adjustment sliders in the hud or inspectors move smother than before. Other than that, I come back to the point of my thread, with all the questions that have been asked and blame put on the lack of GPU, I'd suspect the issues run far deeper than your current graphics card.