Video cards for Mac
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I'm on a mac 2.0 dual with a basic 64mg video card. Needless to say this beast has slowed down to a crawl. It's basicly unusable after I've imported a dozen windows/doors or so.
My ? Will a 128mg card with open GL support show significant improvement? or do I need to find a bigger card. The larger cards are very hard to find, maybe impossible.Will I be wasting my $330 on the 128?
Thanks for any insight. -
What model of graphics card have you got at the moment? It might just need a driver upgrade.
The other thing to do is make sure youve got hardware acceleration (and possibly fast feedback) turned on. I think you'll find it under sketchup-> preferences->openGL.
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My current card is an ATI 64 mg card. That's the only info I have on it.
HWare acceleration is on.
Haven't found any driver updates. -
This is interesting because I have massive problems with the Nvidia 8800GT on my Mac Pro. Similar in VectorWorks as well. Just awful. There is a difference between performance with different cards, so best to get a recommendation from someone before you spend your money.
The thing about this problem (which most Windows users don't realise) is that you just can't update drivers. They are built into the OS, and to update the driver, you need an OS patch to fix it. Sometimes they are released for specific models, sometimes they are rolled out in general updates.
A bit of a pain, but that's the thing with the Mac, some good things, some not so good.
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If you go in to the apple menu->about this mac->more info you should be able to find the exact card model. this might hlp with finding new drivers.
To answer your original question: if you get a decent card it should improve the performance of SU. Im not sure how hard it is to get the right cards for macs, so that might pose a problem. What were you thinking of upgrading to?
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Just to clarify (sorry Remus) but you can't update the graphics card, or any other driver for the Mac. You need to install a system update. Sometimes there will be specific firmware updates for particular problems, but these appear to be quite rare. If you have the software updates option turned on, your system is probably already up to date. Unlike Windows, drivers are fully integrated into the OS, and are always managed by Apple, and always through Software Update.
You can check by going to >System Preferences>Software Update>Scheduled Check>Check Now.
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I am on Windows and am really confused now that you say you cannot just update your video driver on the Mac. What the hell is this guy talking about then (and it even seems to be some kind of a Windows driver with an exe extension while the topic title clearly says Mac)
http://groups.google.com/group/sketchupissues/browse_frm/thread/6e0b556a96326979 -
Guess what Bigstick- I just ran across this:
http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/mac/macosx10-4x-3x-radeon.html
But it didn't help
found it:
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 64 mb VR -
I looked at the files, and this stuff seems to be aimed at old hardware and versions of OS X. Some of the dates of the programmes are a couple of years old.
It seems to me like this doesn't update the actual driver, but adds configuration options to adjust the performance of the graphics card.
However, intrigued at some of this information, I did a little research about the whole driver issue. It appears that actually, you can download a few drivers for hardware that isn't included in the OS X core. There are some examples here:- http://mac.rbytes.net/cat/mac/drivers/apple-nvidia-driver-3.0/
However, core hardware drivers are still released by Apple and managed by Software Update as you can see from the above page. But if you look here:- http://support.apple.com/downloads/ you will see that Apple keeps tight rein on its hardware support. If you look here:- http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3194 you will see that the latest OS X update 10.5.6 includes fixes for ATI graphics card issues. You don't say what version of OS X you are running, but the latest version will give the best performance and the new Snow Leopard, due for release in just a few months promises significantly better performance.
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I'm running OS 10.4.11 and will be for the forseeable future.
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