Phocus Issues and Graphics Card Compatibility

[Tim Read]

Some of you might remember I commented on issues I was having with the early versions of Phocus and the Ixpress 384 back, most notably with it crashing whilst in live view mode.  Well those issues never really went away even with the the newer iterations of Phocus and I just put it all down to incompatibility with the older backs and continued using Flexcolor.  Today I had a demo of the HD4 with the 50mp back and whilst it was fine in live view there were a number of crashes during the demo. Which prompted Paul Waterworth (Blad Rep) to raise concerns about the graphics card.   The card in question is the nvidia geforce 8800 gt supplied and fitted by Apple prior to purchase.  Checking the support page on the nVidia site I found that the card was considered to be incompatible with second gen MacPro's (Model Identifier:   MacPro3,1) and therefore should not be fitted. Anyone else experienced problems with this set up?  This also begs the question why Apple should fit this card if there is indeed a compatibility issue.

[alexkent]

the comment on the nvidia site would only refer to after market retail versions of the card.
if apple supplied the geforce 8800 in your MacPro, then they are compatible.

alex

[Hywel]

I had an 8800 GT in my Mac Pro model 3,1 as well and never had any problems with it. I recently upgraded to  GTX285 and no problems with Phocus with that, either.

However, I and quite a few others have had problems with NVidia cards in Mac OSX 10.6.4. The symptom for me was screen flickering, dreadful lag, beachball of death and even total system lockups when processing pictures in Aperture. I didn't use Phocus in the short time I had 10.6.4 installed, but I gather other GPU intensive tasks like games have experienced problems too.

If you are 10.6.4, I'd strongly consider rolling Mac OSX back to 10.6.3 and seeing if that helps. It totally fixed the issues with Aperture for me, and I have been running Phocus very happily with this configuration.

There are several ways to roll back to 10.6.3- use Time Machine is one way, but a relatively pain-free way is just to reinstall OSX 10.6 from the DVD, then download and install the patches up to 10.6.3. from Apple's support site... and AVOID 10.6.4 until this Nvidia GPU issue has been fixed.

Cheers, Hywel.

[arminw]

Thanks for your post Hywel, but that totally explains what's going on with my system . I have some major issues with aperture and some Photoshop tasks when the screen starts flickering and all comes down to al crash and fresh restart. I am also on 10.6.4 and have a NVIDEA 8800 GT video card. I thought my card has failed again just after I had it all new installed , but if this seems a common problem I'll try and go back one update and see if that helps.

[Tim Read]

the comment on the nvidia site would only refer to after market retail versions of the card.
if apple supplied the geforce 8800 in your MacPro, then they are compatible.

alex

Thanks Alex that would seem logical I suppose still doesn't solve the issues I'm having unless the card is faulty in some way.