New Mac Pro and video card

I'm about to order a new 8-core Mac Pro and wondered which video card works best in SL. I've been tinkering a little with making recordings and videos to post on youtube and was hoping to record in the highest resolution possible.

My choices for a video card are:

NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB
2x NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB
3x NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB
4x NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB

The 4x NVIDIA is probably beyond my reach, but I think I can swing any of the others. Apple's site says if you need higher end graphics, go with the ATI card, but their perspective probably isn't oriented toward SL.. hehe.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

- K

I'm very interested in seeing what responses you get. Your question is right in line with my own in another post.

It just about has to be the ATI card. It's much more powerful than the Nvidia, and the Mac doesn't support SLI, so multiple cards are only good for running a bunch of monitors.

If you want to run SL I can only suggest stay away from anything ATi. There are tons of Jira tickets and postings here and other places. SL does not properly support ATi and vice versa.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-12080

The recent ATI equipped iMacs I've run SL on (HD2600 Pro and HD2600XT video) have done well. The best Macs I've run it on have used Nvidia cards, but they were also much more powerful cards (8800GS and 8800GT).

If the ATI 4870 is as bad as people's experience on the PC, I'd either find out if there is a version of the Nvidia 8800GT Mac Edition will work in the new Mac Pro and get one of them, or I'd pass on the Mac Pro for SL. Pairing such a weak card (120GT) with such a powerful computer is ridiculous.

An SL friend of mine got a Mac Pro 8-core system a few months ago with the NVIDIA card. The ATI wasn't a preconfigured option at the time. She's not had any problems using it in SL. However, she also boots to Winders since she wants higher performance for SL sports activities. She only ran it under Mac OS for the first few days after she got it. I'm not sure which model of the NVIDIA card it came with, but I can't imagine it was any better than the 120GT. I'll ask her.

I want to get into more video/audio recording and was looking for something where I could use the highest SL resolution and not have all the local machine performance issues I have on my old iMac and MacBook Pro.

I also wanted to stick with Mac OS so I could use the software for video capture and editing that I already have and know how to use.

The optional Nvidia card for the previous 8-core Mac Pro was the 8800GT. It is vastly superior to the 120GT.

That was a recent comment from Zen Linden in http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-12139:
"Talked to ATI. Looks like it was a problem in the driver of confusing accessing compressed textures vs. uncompressed textures and has been fixed internally by ATI, but probably will not go out by 9.3. 9.4 will most likely clear it up."

I'm not entirely sure if this addresses all the problems with ATi, but if so it would be great. Given that there may be changes coming soon in Catalyst 9.4 I'd rather wait a bit longer before making a decision about buying ATi or not. The 4870 is by far the most powerful option you can get and if they fix the driver issues, that's the one to go for. But if not, stick to Nvidia.

Well, I'm hoping the 1900 with 512 is a good card for my Mac Pro, 'cause I got a used one for $100 on eBay and it will be here on Monday. I have a 30" LCD Apple display, and I'd love to bump up the graphics value of SL when using it, so I can get some big, quality screen grabs.