[3kntstonowhere]

Originally Posted by Davy Jones

Running a late 2009 Mac Pro with a firmware flash to 2010 specs, Nvidia GTX 980ti and El Capitan. No issues with the camera in CW, but have seen similar issues in other applications.

Tried fixing those issues with upgrades to the video card. Saw a fairly significant frame rate increase (30-40 percent?) when going from a GTX 280 to GTX 780, but only about a 10 percent improvement when upgrading from the 780 to 980ti.

The single largest performance boost came from flashing the 2009 firmware to 2010 specs and replacing the original 2.66Ghz four-core processor with a 3.33Ghz six-core. Also added a PCI bus SSD controller (6Gbit vs standard memory bus 3Gbit data transfer rate) and 6Gbit capable 250Gb SSD at the same time. Roughly speaking, this increased processing power by 50 to 60 percent (minimum)... and decreased startup time to a little over 10 seconds.

Don't know if you can do something similar with an iMac. However, if looking to build a (relatively) inexpensive Mac on a budget, would recommend purchasing a used 2010-2012 Mac Pro with (at least) a 3.33 six core processor, then adding the PCI controller, SSD and used GTX 780 (Mac flashed) or better video card...

Simply put, the 2009 to 2012 Mac Pros are tanks, both easily upgraded and dead reliable in my experience (have two). The other parts are fairly cheap, especially video cards one or two generations old (like the GTX 780 3Mb and GTX 980ti 6Mb cards, and highly recommend getting a video card that has its firmware flashed to be Mac compatible).

Compared to the latest generation Mac Pros, this setup fairs very well as far as performance is concerned and is internally expandable. Altho it isn't the absolute fastest, it's no slouch (for me at least, it's good enough for who it's for) and very cheap by comparison (YMMV).

HTH

I am not hugely into computers and modifying them so for me to do that would be a lot to handle even though it may be simple I've never been great with them, yet I will be looking into this and seeing how to possibly upgrade it. Thank you for the great ideas