From your experience or reviews, what is the best NVIDIA card for a G5. In speaking with Iridas it was suggested to go with an NVIDIA card rather than the stock card in a G5. But to be broad, is there any additional hardware to install into, or to accompany, a G5 to help with gui performance. I'm not concerned about render times, but rather to speed up the interactivity while compositing. I'll be working on 2K DPX files. I'm running Shake 3.5 on a dual 2.5 with 2 Sony FW900's (24" widescreen) and 2.5GB ram.
The only nVidia cards you'll be able to get for your G5 are an FX5200 and the 6800 Ultra. Haven't tested the last one, but I used to work using an FX5200 and experienced lots of hang-ups (aqua completely crashed). I got tired of waiting for driver fixes in every Panther update without any success. Finally, I moved to a stock ATI card, which hasn't given me any problem to the date.
I'd really like to go the nVidia way if Apple would just develop good drivers for them. My guess is that Iridas recommends you an nVidia card since Framecycler only works propperly with those chips. So, if you really need to use Framecycler, go for an nVidia card, even if it's the FX5200. Apart from that, I don't think you'll get any speed boost in Shake's gui, since it's not developed to use OpenGL extensively (aside from drawing the interface and the viewer).
So other than an xRaid, an ATI card and plenty of RAM, there's no other way to boost the interactivity of Shake? I'm somewhat spoiled coming from an SGI workstation. I just want to make sure that I've exhausted all my options when putting the final touches on my G5 Shake station.
Thanks again for responding to my post so quickly.
So, you want a 'real' speed boost in Shake? The cruel answer should be: switch to Linux... Now seriously, you can try to tune your memory and cache settings using Shake Configurator tool. You'll find it in the tools section of this page. It is basically an easy way to setup the improvements in memory and cache handling introduced in Shake 3.5. As far as I know, that's all you can do about it... Hope it helps.
O.k I'm totally new to shake but I'm a quick learner =) So I tryed to find this tool...but couldn't find it in the tools section.. I've read thrue some of the manual but cant really get where I configure my cache and memory settings for shake
I'm on a G5 1,8DP with 3gig RAM and are working with DV Pal trying to figure out how to optimise my settings for the best possible performance...
As I said I'm totally new to this (2 days =) ) so bar with me for these noob question...
OK, I though it was hanging somewhere in the tools section, but it's not there... I've found it going to the macros section, then doing a search for 'configurator'. You should see it on top of the list.
Yes I realised that after downloading it.... Well thx for your help anyway =) It's always hard to configure a totally new program at first... I'm kinda used to apps were u configure in the prefs but this is build different that I'm used to causing my brain to a minor meltdown =)