Do I need two video cards for what I do?

[joe_mcinerney]

<p>Hello,<br>

I have saved up enough to buy a Mac Pro. I am upgrading from a 4+ year old iMac.<br />I am buying the low end Mac Pro. It is what I can afford, give or take. My question is will I only need one video card or two? <br />I have an Eizo ColorEdge CG 210 and I will be also buying an NEC27" Widescreen Color-Critical Desktop Monitor w/ SpectraViewII.<br />I will be mostly using Photoshop CS5 and Sinar CaptureShop 6 with a Sinar 54M digital back connected to a Sinar P3.This will be strictly for table top photography. It will not be leaving the studio obviously. File with layers will get to around 400-500MB. <br />I will be upgrading the RAM via OWC to 16GB. I have two 2TB drives I will be adding to the internal bays.<br />Mac Pro configuration:One 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processor3GB (three 1GB) memory, 1TB hard drive, 18x double-layer SuperDrive, ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB GDDR5<br>

So, do photographers need two video cards or upgraded cards for this type of work?<br />Thanks,<br>

Joe</p>

[jeff_schewe]

<p>There are some advantages to running dual vid cards, but for what you are doing, not so much. You should be able to run both of your displays on a single card (with the correct adapters). If you DO decide to put in dual cards, make sure they are matching cards. Photoshop's Open GL GPU doesn't seem to like mismatched vid cards.</p>

[waltflanagan]

<p>Apple's website says the 5770 has 2 Mini DisplayPort outputs and 1 dual-link DVI. If you are using 2 Mini DisplayPort to Single-Link DVI adapters then only two displays are supported. So will you only have the 2 monitors you listed? I don't know what kind of ports your monitors have. DVI? Dual Link DVI (usually only required for 30" 2560x1600 monitors) Are they new enough to have DisplayPort? You may need to buy some adapters. You only need a second graphics card if you want 4-6 monitors or you need to use the >2 adapters as listed above. Multiple graphics cards are used by many games to speed up rendering but it doesn't sound like you will be doing that and I don't know if MacOS even supports that.</p>

[bob_himmelright]

<p>just throwing it out there, the big benefit of the xeons the mac pros use is that you can have multiple cpu's on one motherboard. The newer sandy bridge based processors seem to outperform the older generation xeons by a wide margin. You could get an imac with an i7 and more than double the ram for about $600 less. You won't need dual gpu's for just photoshop. Even the one that comes standard is probably a bit of overkill.</p>