Gripe number two is with Nvidia who sold me a Quadro FX4800 graphics card £1200 over a year ago for a Mac that will not accept it, if your Mac is 1.1 to 3.1 then this card will not work and hey presto no where in the NVIDIA bumf that ships with this graphics card tells you this, nor does the on line shop who sold me this card.
To put you in the picture I have a second Intel MacPro that was bought January 2008 but built late 2007 that I hoped to install the graphics card into to setup Premiere Pro CS6 giving me a second edit system utilising the Mercury engine.
The Quadro FX4800 for Mac was available May 2009 and there is no mention of this card not being compatible with MacPros pre 2008 other than small print on the Nvidia web site that I have not been able to locate yet !
This has been superseded by the FX4000 at £700 but I think its still relevant information.
I did a bit of swapping cards this morning and installed the latest Lion drivers for the 4800 on my main MacPro ver 5.1 and for the first time in over a year I now get a fully functional FX4800 graphics card working with Premiere Pro CS5.5 and it certainly makes for a snappier Premiere.
I look forward to receiving my copy of Premiere Pro CS6 on Friday and finally giving you all my account of what has been hailed FCP-8 !
You should seriouslt try Edius – With the Spark HD card – you could have a proper editing solution for half the price – I know its pc based but with ya savings you could buy a decent i7 PC – just saying
If you give Edius a serious look – you will wonder why u didnt use it before
Adobe have always had a different approach to e-commerce in my experience (we deal with them a lot at work). Many companies could learn a lot from the likes of Amazon, or B&H or CVP in the video realm.
Having said that, I went for the electronic download of CS6 and it all went reasonably smoothly. i.e. at least I got the software! I was rechecking my order page every hour, and actually got the download link before the email, it’s a funny old world.
The main mistake was dropping so much money on a Quadro card to begin with. There are other fully compatible nVidia GPUs with Mercury Playback Engine hardware acceleration which perform identically to the Quadro line that are priced, well, quadro the amount. The only thing that Quadro buys is a technical support help line, and some non-descript higher level of quality control at the factory which should exist for all products anywise.
with CS6 mercury playback engine works also on OpenCL.. means it works on ATI cards too
The best value & fastest CUDA card for the Mac Pro is the Nvidia GTX285 which is now only usually available used but can be easily found on eBay. This works in all Mac Pros except the very first 1,1 model.
The Quadro FX4800 is supported on the MacPro 3,1. If you go to this page http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_quadro_fx_4800_for_mac_us.html & click on ‘Drivers & Downloads’ you will find this:-
Please note:
Mac Pro Requirements: >>To find out if you are running the correct Mac Pro, go to About This Mac to find out what system you are running. You can find this by doing the following:
Go to • About This Mac
Click on the • More Info button
Select • Hardware
The model identifier should be MacPro3,1 or MacPro4,1 (2008 or 2009) or later
Note: MacPro1,1 and MacPro2,1 are not compatible.