Just a general question: (on a 3gHz 2012 Mac Pro with a ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB)

Will upgrading to a newer/better/faster card improve my rendering times -- when outputting to video?

@wnelson_871918
It looks like your current GPU has 1GB of Video ram. (Reallusion quote 4GB as minimum)
You'd honestly do better with nvidia card with 4GB or more of video-ram.
A GeForce GTX 1060 would probably be a realistic 'minimum'.
Better still GTX 1070 or 1070i - and
Even better GTX 1080 or 1080i
The more Vram the better ..... 

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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time!   - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1

Thank you -- was looking at the Sapphire 7950 at macsales site, but *something* needs to be done there.
Will these lower the time to render out the video files?

Hi wnelson .... you'll be able to get more of an insight by looking at this discussion:
https://forum.reallusion.com/353529/GPU-vs-CPU-Which-makes-iClone-Faster
Steve.

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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time!   - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1

I think we are talking about CrazyTalk Animator, so the graphics requirements would not be as severe as for iClone. We are also talking about a Mac. One advantage of the newer Sapphire card is that it can handle higher resolutions, so it's more future proof. 

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thnx ani - I wondered about that (it wasn't til after I'd posted that I noticed the catagory was for 'crazytalk'). 

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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time!   - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1

I am not sure if it's still valid or not but if the discussion is related to CTA3 here are my two cents based on personal experience. It may be more helpful to those just considering a purchase of CTA3.

I understand all the talk about "future proofing", etc. I also understand the "recommended" Reallusion configuraiton. No one would argue that it is better to have a top of the line NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 with a ton of memory than a crappy old card. However here is my story. I recently upgraded my old 2009 iMac with the old 256 Mb NVidia GeForce 9400 (that was standard on late 2009 Macs) to a brand new iMac with 4Gb GPU. The reason I did is because my Final Cut Pro (FCPX) was getting really sluggish there. So 4Gb GPU vs 256Mb made a world of difference for FCPX - it is now flying. It renders 10 times faster than before. For CTA3 however I have not noticed any significant (if any at all) difference in the way it performs or renders. 

Candlelight2007, have you got any answer yet about this? I don't see any consistent results to improve rendering speeds in CTA3, GPU doesn't seem to do a lot here at all. I'm still trying to find an answer on my own but with no success yet. Currently working on a Mac mini 2018 with an i7 6-core, which doesn't seem to render much faster than my 2011 Mac mini i7 dual core. Also inconsistent results on Windows with the trial version in which it seems to use just one core, which is shared with other processes.
Thanks in advance.

Best,
Maikeru7

@Maikeru: my apologies. This thing doesn't send notifications (or maybe I simply disabled them he he). I hope you found the answer you had been looking for.
I did not get any answer; but neither was I looking for one. I don't have any performance issues with CTA3 or CA4. My feeling is again that it has less to do with the RAM or the speed of the hard drive or even with the graphics card but perhaps with something else. I do not feel that CTA3 (or CA4 for that matter) is overly greedy when it comes to RAM or VRAM. Not compared to some other software, like Final Cut Pro X - not by a long shot. Now in my observations rendering speed hasn't changed much compared to my old 2009 iMac even though it had more RAM (16Gb) and a lightning fast 500Gb SSD. Truth be told though, I don't even really care about rendering time because actual rendering is only a tiny fraction of all my interactions with CTA3 (now CA4). Setting up characters and making animations takes up 99% of all the time I spend with the software. And as far as I can tell neither of these tasks creates any performance issues for me.