Please help VFX-Artist choose a new GPU.

Hi there,

so I have a 2010 Mac Pro, 12-core 2.93Ghz with 32GB of ram and an ATI Radeon HD 5870 Graphics Card running Mavericks. I’m looking for recommendations for a better graphics card, without having to:

•add an additional PSU.
•flash firmware or mess around with it in Windows to make it OSX friendly.
•lose my boot screen.

Considering these limitations, is it worth investing in a newer graphics card? Will I get any speed improvements over the current card I have? What are my options?

My main GPU heavy hitter applications are: Maya 2014, PhotoShop CS6, NukeX 6.3, modo 603 and no, I don’t play games. :)

One thing I definitely would like an improvement on is more ram on the card. The more the merrier I suppose. Maya’s ViewPort 2.0 and nVidia’s new offerings in Mental Ray are especially GPU-ram hungry.

I’ve read through the various threads here on this forum debating Mac Pro GPU offerings and quite frankly, they are a bit of a daunting read for the likes of me. Hence this thread. Please be kind to me and thanks for reading. :)