The Best Video Card for Motion

It's easy to get caught up in trying to make your system "Adobe CS5" ready,  or "Resolve" ready. Both of those involve the purchase of a second video card from Nvidia that will cost you $1,000 or more.  Premiere Pro CS5 and Blackmagic's Resolve both take advantage of Nvidia's CUDA technology.  But what if you're sticking to Final Cut Pro and do most of your graphics builds in Motion?  Eric St-Martin did some testing between ATI's 5870 and the Nvidia Quadro 4000 to see which comes out on top.

Who wins?  The ATI card.  It's not a surprising finding but it clearly creates two different camps for Mac Pro users and the video cards they stick inside.  If you want the best performance for Apple products, you're probably best sticking with ATI cards and specifically the 5870.  And hopefully, HOPEFULLY, down the road Final Cut will tap in to Apple's own OpenCL standard and the 5870 should scream even more.  But if you want to get the best performance for CS5 or Resolve, you have to go Nvidia.

The only middle ground seems to be that Blackmagic has certified with 5870's little brother, the 5770, as a "GUI" video card (meaning it can only be used to power the CPU monitors and not as GPU acceleration).  In some of the testing I've seen the ATI 5770 does a better job handling Motion than the Nvidia cards.  It certainly beats the Nvidia GT120, another Blackmagic approved GUI card.

To read more about Eric's testing, check out his site here.