New fcpx update today. Could this make my my timeline faster?

It has to pass Apple's specific OpenCL for FCPX, not all OpenCL cards are FCPX friendly. Check the compatibility chart on the FCPX web site.

@Ronny - I have checked around and I believe Mavericks enables OpenCL for the GTX680 unlike previous OS's. I looked into Multibeast which in v06.1 no longer updates kexts for OpenCl but just for Intel graphics now. I downloaded LuxMark OpenCl test and got a score of 689. It recognized my card as running OpenCL 1.2 and saw the 4gbs of RAM on it.

@Ben - I checked the FCP Compatibility site and saw this:

The following aftermarket graphics cards support OpenCL in OS X Mavericks.

NVIDIA
GeforceGTX 680
Quadro FX 4000
Quadro FX 5000

There is a Mac version of the GTX 680 that NVIDIA sells that has 2gb of RAM, but I wouldn't think the OpenCL support would be different, just the EFI boot...

Try running the LuxMark test and see if OpenCL is working, The fix that Ronny mentioned that I also won't get into changes the card ID information.

If the system checks the card and it doesn't match the exact supported models, it won't enable OpenCL even though it's the same graphics chip.

I had one for a wile and switched to AMDs.

I ran the Luxmark test and its got OpenCL 1.2 enabled and running fine.

I checked and the device ID for my GTX680 4gb is different than the Mac Edition GTX680 2gb. According to a thread on Netkas, I can't flash my card to be an exact Mac clone because I've got the 4gb version. Is there another way to deal with this in Mavericks?

I'd like to keep this card because it works well with Resolve, After Effects and Adobe Mercury Engine apps. I know that Resolve is now OpenCL friendly and doesn't require CUDA anymore, so I'm wondering if its worth getting a Radeon 7950 instead? Or a Mac GTX680 with 2gb?

Also, I'm loathe to invest more in this machine until I can afford the new Apple chrome ice-bucket!

My limited understanding as to why certain nvidia cards work great and others like slow molasses through a sieve is that some brands of PC cards need more help than others to work out of the box.

I just go to the sites that are in the know and buy what they tell me to. I sold my older cards for a fair amount on ebay. I had a 7950 for the past six months and it was amazingly fast. I now have two 7970s that are even better. I can get 80fps in Resolve 10.1 Lite from blackmagic raw footage from the pocket camera running 3 nodes. That's more than enough for me.

The tinkering around is what I won't miss. I would sell your 680 while it's in demand and get a real Mac 7950. It will hold it's value far longer than a PC card.

Is there any reason I shouldn't get a 7970, then? Would it need flashing or work out of the box?

A 7970 would work, but the question is: would it work so much better than a 7950?

Not really, according to these tests: barefeats.com/tube05.html

- Ronny

ronny courtens wrote: I'm afraid it won't solve the different FCPX responsiveness issues some people are having due to updating to Mavericks over ML. A clean re-install of the boot drive is still the only way to solve this. Once that is done 10.1.1 will fly like a rocket.

Ronny - what are the symptoms that the ML to Macericks update is causing problems with FCP? Curious because all of my machines have been updated that way.

T.

Hey Tim,

Many people who have installed Mavericks over ML don't have any problems at all with FCPX. But some have, and when they do the symptoms are quite typical: from slow response when scrolling the timeline while everything else works great; fcpx hanging up on start screen; some buttons (such as the Timeline Index) refusing to work... to overall sluggishness when dragging clips onto the timeline.

Having received quite some e-mails about all this and having read through various forums I saw that creating a new admin user (to be fair it was Tom Wolsky who first suggested this on the Apple forums) could make FCPX running smoothly again. This indicated that the root of the issue could be related to conflicting user preferences. Seeing that many of the symptoms are indeed UI related confirmed this.

Further search revealed that Mavericks installs certain files differently that ML, so when you install Mavs over ML some existing preference files and particularly certain .lock files are not deleted/replaced. This can result in preference conflicts leading to certain applications (among which FCPX) not working as expected. This also explains why creating a new admin user often solves the issue, as a new user creates entirely new user preferences and can not have any conflicting old ones.

To make a long story short: over the past weeks it has been confirmed in various forums that if you are among the few unfortunate ones who are experiencing serious performance issues with 10.1 on Mavericks a clean install of the boot drive can in most cases solve this.

Updated projects not rendering as fast as newly created Libraries seems to be yet another problem, but that could be related to third-party plugin behavior and not to strictly to the OS. I have done a clean install on all of our machines (a mix of maxed iMacs and recent MPs) and I can only say that I haven't seen one single problem with FCPX yet, 10.1.1 runs faster than ever.

- Ronny

Hi Ronny,

Thanks so much for the detailed note. Just yesterday I was getting out a couple of projects that each had about only a few hundred items in the timeline and and my timelines becomes quite sluggish compared to 10.0.9. Moving a connected clip was "hard" and so was trimming. I've also seen my event browser text size preferences not sticking.

I'm also working on a feature length project (5000 or so items on the timeline) and that is also exhibiting the "hard" moving of connected clips and trimming. Scrolling is nice and fast however. Granted we have decided to put "chapters" in compound clips to reduce the complexity of any individual timeline.

I'll keep watching things.