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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

GTX-570 still good option?

Paul Provost

Paul Provost

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buying cubix and looking for cards to beef up Mac resolve system. looks like gtx-570 2.5gb is best cost - performance at the moment. any downside to getting 3 of these versus something else?
 
GTX-570 needs to be hacked or re-flashed to run properly in a Mac under OSX 10.7.3 and newer. Best source for them is from the MacVidCards guy on eBay.

You're not going to fit 3 of the 570 cards into a standard Cubix unit unless you buy their larger rack-mount units. The desktop units come as a 4-slot width. You can get one with 2 double-spaced slots or one with 4 single-spaced slots. Some liquid-cooled GTX-570 card options out there will shrink the cards into a single slot width, but by the time you go with liquid cooled and Mac-flashed cards, you may as well buy Quadro 4000's -- would probably be cheaper. ;)

3 GPUs like this trying to run through a single PCIe X16 slot is also going to be a bottleneck. And then we also have the question of what Mac you're running and if this will even be worth pursuing. For the price of the Cubix box alone, you're well on your way to the price of assembling a dedicated PC system just for running Resolve.
 
i am getting the latest desktop 4 - which is 4 double width 16x slots with 80gbps max bandwidth. that should work with the three cards right?
3 570 cards is less than a grand (unflashed) and used cubic boxes going for about $1500.
this would be on 2010 8 core
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
GTX-570 needs to be hacked or re-flashed to run properly in a Mac under OSX 10.7.3 and newer. Best source for them is from the MacVidCards guy on eBay.
Click to expand...

The standard PC cards work really well in a Desktop 4 cubix which can support 4 double-wide cards (limited to 3 on Mac due to total limit of 4 GPUs). Make sure you get the Cubix variant which support full x16 cables, etc.
 
OK... Yeah, forgot Cubix makes a desktop model with 4 double-width slots now. So how are you guys getting past the way the GTX570 is being crippled without re-flashing it? Or do you just run it in crippled / low-power mode and find that acceptable? Or stay with OSX 10.6.8? ...or has the latest nVidia driver release addressed this issue? I have not tested the 570/ 580 cards since nVidia posted drivers right after the OSX 10.7.4 release.

...I don't think they have updated drivers since that 5/10/2012 release though.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
OK... Yeah, forgot Cubix makes a desktop model with 4 double-width slots now. So how are you guys getting past the way the GTX570 is being crippled without re-flashing it? Or do you just run it in crippled / low-power mode and find that acceptable? Or stay with OSX 10.6.8? ...or has the latest nVidia driver release addressed this issue? I have not tested the 570/ 580 cards since nVidia posted drivers right after the OSX 10.7.4 release.

...I don't think they have updated drivers since that 5/10/2012 release though.
Click to expand...

Hi Jeff,

We get near identical performance with the PC 570 version on the Mac Pro as compared to a PC. For Resolve use, it's not crippled at all.

With V9, there is a new option in the SDI monitoring section which makes using just a single 570 really awesome.

Rohit
 
got the 3 GTX 570s running on resolve v9b now. awesome. os 10.8.
haven't done a total nodes/blur/nr realtime test yet because I had 4 jobs to complete, but I did notice that output render on prores 1080 23.98 was cooking at about 80 frames a second on a job with 2 or 3 nodes a shot and occasional NR. is that good?
btw total cost:
used Cubix desktop 4 - $1500
3 GTX 570s - $950
pretty good investment!
 
Paul, are you saying that you're using the native PC GTX 570s unflashed for Mac and they're working? If this is true, i want them too!!!
 
How are the 570 cards working with 10.8? What/ if anything / does it show in the system profiler?
 
They work fine in 10.8 with the native driver, and ID properly in the System Profile. They will also work fine in 10.7.3 and 10.7.4 with downloaded NVIDIA drivers (NOT the native drivers). 10.7.3 needs 270.00.00f01 and 10.7.4 needs 270.00.00f06. If you use a card that is not EFI flashed as the only card, you will not see any of the boot process until OSX loads the driver and gets the card going. This would bother me personally ( I want to see what it's doing during the entire boot process) but assuming the system boots normally, it's not a big deal for folks, apparently. If you have a dedicated Mac GUI card and are only using the PC GTX cards as Resolve GPU cards, the boot thing is a total non-issue.
 
What does it show for these cards in the PCI cards section of Profiler?

Are they operating with proper fan speed control and power throttling? The nVidia drivers for 10.7.3 and 10.7.4 *DO NOT* properly control the fans or provide power management functionality for these cards, nor do those driver sets allow the cards to run at full speed. You must hack and re-flash the firmware on the cards to enable those features. In 10.6.x, you can modify the graphics power management kext file, but this file is deprecated and removed in 10.7.x, turning over full control to the driver. nVidia's drivers to coincide with 10.7.4 improved on the 10.7.3 drivers, but still don't support a lot of card functionality.

In 10.7.x, many configurations are restricted to using 2GB of VRAM. 3GB GTX580 cards, 2.5GB 570 cards, Quadro 6000, etc.. all report 2GB RAM. I see his is reporting the full 2.5GB, that's already a promising sign. Curious to see if the driver will throttle the cards up or if they're stuck in low-power, half-speed limbo.

Another promising sign is that the cards are functioning under 10.8 with the native driver. That's a huge step forward compared to what we went through with the last couple point releases of 10.7.
 
I'm looking into getting a GTX 570 or perhaps one of the newer GTX 670 cards. Anyone have an idea of whether the 670 is worth the premium over the 570 and whether it will actually work the same as the 570?

Edit: I forgot to mention that I would be putting the card in a MacPro 2008 running Mountain Lion....
 
Forget the 670. Even if the driver support was there, which it is not, it would be a poor match for the older hardware. For CUDA acceleration tasks, the only real reason to install one of the unsupported nVidia cards, the 670 is no faster than the 570.

The 570 is a good choice and seems to play well with the Mac at this time. Of course, being an unsupported card, that situation may change with subsequent releases of OSX.
 
Thanks for the heads up Jeff! If Apple had updated their MacPro offerings recently, I would have probably upgraded, but like many others I'm playing the waiting game for the supposedly next 'insanely great' version of the pro lineup...
 
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