The Video. . um, Card Game

Question

Grrr. I hate having to change hardware, but I need a little more "oomph" for Motion and as I've just placed my order for FCS2, it's likely that I'll need it even more now.
I've been running an Nvidia GeForce 7800GT. Looking around it seems the Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition is about the only step up without going to that ridiculously priced quadra thingy. What's not very clear to me is just how much better is it really going to be if I upgrade to the Radeon? I mean real world kind of stuff with Motion and not some esoteric spec or benchmark that seems to only apply to gamers, or to no one. Sure, I wish I had the time to learn how to interpret all the specs, but it just doesn't hold an interest for me.
I searched the forums, but didn't find anyone doing the same upgrade path, which makes me wonder. . . .
Or maybe I just need someone to hold my hand. Or, maybe I'm just anxious to give somebody points today. Hey, any knowledge shared is appreciated.
Thanks folks.
PS, I presently get 19FPS with the Globe project.

Answer 1

Randall,
what resolution do you have on your screen?
Playback depends also on screen resolution. I've just check it.
2 days ago I changed (finally) my old two CRT monitors (the main screen was 1400x1050) for ADC 30" (with 2560x1600). And what I saw now: "Globe" project runs 22 FPS, insted of 25 on smaller res. on CRT. As I expected the rendering time didn't change and still is 22 sec.
If I turn off "indent" my frame rate increases to 23fps
I don't understand, what did you turned off?
It looks that Motion for rendering uses mainly GPU. Check again "DNA" project: open Activity Monitor and once again render it. On my comp. it looks that only one core is working. I saw CPU usage up to 99.3 percentage. Why the second core doesn't work? I supppoese that in your computer also only one core will work and the remaining cores will be "sleeping", am I right?.
I am curious how it will be with Motion3. I suppose that it will use 4 and even 8 cores of the processor. Hm...?
BTW, "DNA" project playback 3 FPS on my comp. (in 2560x1600)
The most interesting (but a litlle funny or rather strange) is OpenGL test. Now with this bigger res. I received about 3.5 times worst results. So, I also think that testing applications are little out of real life. I prefer to do test with a stopper in the hand, checking real 3D, Motion, FCP and Photoshop projects.
Please let me kow what resolution do you have.
Do you have Cinema 4D or Strata 3D? We can also do some 3D tests. This is really interesting.
I've never used you NVIDIA 7800GT card, so my knowledge is based on some tests which I found on some web sites, but as you see it's better to check on some real projects and compare the cards and the computers.
But on those web sites I saw that my card (although is never) is a kind of "equivalent" of 7800GT. But now I am not so sure.
Marek.