nvidia quadro 4000 or 5000

[Gregory Sheffer]

Cutting RED footage on a new MAC Pro and wondered how a better video card will help in Premiere Pro 6 and Final Cut 7? How exactly does a video card help when cutting and is the nvidia quadro 4000 good enough or is the 5000 something to consider?

Thanks.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The nVidia cards are needed for CUDA acceleration, which is nVidia's own proprietary GPU language and that is what most of the current applications use for GPU acceleration. At least that is the case with Premiere CS6. Final Cut 7 is old and EOL and doesn't support GPU acceleration at all. Changing your video card will have zero effect on Final Cut 7. GPU acceleration, in the form of OpenCL, which is the open standard alternative to CUDA, is present within Final Cut X. Unfortunately, FCPX does not support R3D files natively yet... Apple has confirmed the support for a future release, but that's all we know.

As for how it works within Premiere CS6, it accelerates operations on your footage after the R3D files have been decompressed and decoded. It does provide a significant speed up for transitions, transformations, FX, etc.. However, the wavelet decompression is still CPU-bound and the bulk of the processing requirement within the RED workflow.

This forum is saturated with discussions on this topic, so look around a bit, I feel like I'm reinventing the wheel here...


The Quadro 4000 is currently the best officially-supported GPU on the Mac platform. The Mac Edition of the card, obviously. If you want to go with a non-official card, there are several options, but I would actually stay away from the Quadro 5000. For non-standard cards, you should look into a card like the GTX570 with 2.5GB RAM. There are also a few threads on that here too. But to sum up, you do make some sacrifices by going to a non-standard card and you will also want to be running the current OSX Mountain Lion 10.8 release to get the best performance.

 

[Ryan Browne]

Hey Jeff, sorry if you've touched on this elsewhere (so feel free to just provide a link if you have) but can you explain why to stay away from the quadro 5000? I have the 4000 and was wondering if the upgrade might be worth it.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Not to speak for Jeff, he may have other reservations, but as a rule Apple is painfully slow in fully supporting new GPUs so weirdness and poor use of resources is common - especially with nVidia cards. I have the Quadro 4000 in my MacPro and its been stable with decent performance. YMMV.

Cheers - #19

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Support for Quadro 5000 and Quadro 6000 is incomplete in the Mac drivers. Even the latest and greatest drivers which are supporting the GeForce GTX5xx series cards don't provide the level of support you would want to use these Quadro cards. Quadro 4000 is really the only option if you want a Quadro card on a Mac at this time. If you want to go faster, at the expense of other copromises, you're better off to go to a GTX570 card in a Mac Pro.