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Best Alternative for Red Rocket?

Piero Sgarbi

Piero Sgarbi

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Has anyone tested any Nvidia Cards on external inclosure as an alternative for Red Rocket?

I was looking into the Titan or Tesla, as sometimes I have some other non-r3d 4k footage that is playing back in Davinci and my dual D700s don't seem to handle it well.
 
It works in Windows, but external GPU support is prohibited in the Mac OS, and GPU's are somewhat limited by the bandwidth of the external enclosure, whether ePCI-e or TB.

Some people get okay results with Win7 bootcamp, Macbook Air, and Nvidia GPU in an external TB2 chassis, or at least enough performance for decent gaming on an external monitor.
 
Shiblon Wixom said:
It works in Windows, but external GPU support is prohibited in the Mac OS, and GPU's are somewhat limited by the bandwidth of the external enclosure, whether ePCI-e or TB.

Some people get okay results with Win7 bootcamp, Macbook Air, and Nvidia GPU in an external TB2 chassis, or at least enough performance for decent gaming on an external monitor.
Click to expand...

I have a MAC and I need a card in TB inclosure that would work good for color grading, don't want to get a Red Rocket X, was looking for an alternative.

Nvidia, Titan or Tesla?
 
Like Shiblon said. An Graphics card in external TB enclosure DOESN'T work on a MAC... (Unfortunately)
 
You can get a ROCKET card for cheap now.

As cheap as a few Quadro 4000s :)
 
Sorry Im confused, he has a ROCKET and its not working in Resolve?

I am going through tech hell at the moment with ROCKET and Dektop Video drivers in new Mac Pro.

I can tell you that there is an issue but so many variables.
 
Eric Santiago said:
Sorry Im confused, he has a ROCKET and its not working in Resolve?

I am going through tech hell at the moment with ROCKET and Dektop Video drivers in new Mac Pro.

I can tell you that there is an issue but so many variables.
Click to expand...

He has a RED Rocket and a NMP. It doesn't work well for him in its current form, housed in a TB enclosure.
 
That is why overwhelming majority of professional colorists continue to use MacPro 5.1 or moving to a PC. You can use Cubix enclosure, if you need more than one GPU or you can get a 980Ti or Titan X and call it a day. Or you can install RRX with a Titan X for a monster of a machine. The choice is there. Unfortunately, nMac 6.1 is a dead end. It is not designed for heavy duty lifting required by something like Resolve working with R3D.
 
jake blackstone said:
That is why overwhelming majority of professional colorists continue to use MacPro 5.1 or moving to a PC. You can use Cubix enclosure, if you need more than one GPU or you can get a 980Ti or Titan X and call it a day. Or you can install RRX with a Titan X for a monster of a machine. The choice is there. Unfortunately, nMac 6.1 is a dead end. It is not designed for heavy duty lifting required by something like Resolve working with R3D.
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So what kind of a performance does the 980Ti buy me for my old Mac Pro? Waiting for the Trashcan I got an iMac for FCX editing, when the newly designed MacPro finally arrived, I didn't see a reason to upgrade anymore. So, will a new card in an old MP just help with Resolve? Or will editing benefit too?
(Yes, I'm one of those guys just used to buying Macs in hope they "just work" because I actually have no understanding of computer hardware...)
 
Christian Schmitt said:
So what kind of a performance does the 980Ti buy me for my old Mac Pro? Waiting for the Trashcan I got an iMac for FCX editing, when the newly designed MacPro finally arrived, I didn't see a reason to upgrade anymore. So, will a new card in an old MP just help with Resolve? Or will editing benefit too?
(Yes, I'm one of those guys just used to buying Macs in hope they "just work" because I actually have no understanding of computer hardware...)
Click to expand...

As long as you get the top of the line CPUs, MacPro 5.1 for a fraction of the cost of a nMac, between a quarter and a third, you'll get better performance across the board, including debayer and color processing. R3D decompression is still performed on CPUs, so that and the 1333Mz bus speed will be your main bottleneck. But with 980Ti you should be able to do a real time full quality debayer of low compression of 4k and 5k R3D. And don't forget a wealth of third party cards- RRX, 10GE, SAS, Fiber, USB3 etc you still have a long way to go before you run put of option. Personally, I'm slowly migrating to Windows and PC. There are plenty of Prores writing options on Windows, so doing final Prores render is not nearly as a big problem, as it was even a short while ago. I used to despise Windows, but after initial reluctance, I started using it and now I'm almost done with my gradual transition from OS X.
 
The biggest problem you'll end up having with an older Mac Tower and a GTX 980 is the read/write speed of the system drive/s, since the system bus is the bottleneck on that older architecture, if you do a raid0 ssd system boot drive (3Gb sata on old mac towers, hence the raid0), that will minimize any data throughput issues and hopefully not kneecap performance of the GPU.

I you're careful about the components you choose, you can build a decent system that's relatively inexpensive and runs both the Windows OS and Mac OS equally well. A $2k quad-core system with a GTX 970 will transcode 6k dragon material at 10-12 fps, not great but not terrible either.

A well built older mac tower, with a GTX 980 should transcode 12-15+ fps if all the kinks/bottlenecks have been dealt with. Obviously if the GPU is severly limited and only able to run at 40% load then transcode speeds will be around 5-6 fps.
 
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jake blackstone said:
That is why overwhelming majority of professional colorists continue to use MacPro 5.1 or moving to a PC. You can use Cubix enclosure, if you need more than one GPU or you can get a 980Ti or Titan X and call it a day. Or you can install RRX with a Titan X for a monster of a machine. The choice is there. Unfortunately, nMac 6.1 is a dead end. It is not designed for heavy duty lifting required by something like Resolve working with R3D.
Click to expand...

That's funny. I have the fully kitted MacPro 6.1 and have no trouble at all in Resolve, Premier, FCPX or REDCINE-X Pro. My only annoyance is that AE ignores my D700 cards.....
 
Scot Yount said:
That's funny. I have the fully kitted MacPro 6.1 and have no trouble at all in Resolve, Premier, FCPX or REDCINE-X Pro. My only annoyance is that AE ignores my D700 cards.....
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"Trouble" is defined in different ways. To me, it includes unnecessarily long wait times due to limited CPU, memory, bandwidth, and GPU resources compared to available alternatives,
 
All very subjective. Resolve runs just fine on a nMP, but it may not perform in a way that one individual user wants or needs it to. OTOH, the most kick-ass system you can build is still going to run into certain limitations with Resolve or any other software and sometimes it's not worth the expense or brain damage of trying for one system to rule them all.

I usually find a lot more value in multiple systems and tailoring each system a bit differently so that one may be ideal for Resolve, while another performs better for transcodes and general editing.

Back on topic here, the latest R3D SDK and tools built around it, as well as RC-X, will use the latest GPUs for both wavelet decompression / decoding as well as the debayer processing. Wavelet decoding is still demanding and the CPU still plays a huge role in the entire workflow or transcoding process. We can't just stack a bunch of GPUs into a system and get all the real-time+++ performance we would like.

External GPUs via Thunderbolt only work in Windows -- not OS X. They may be possible in Linux now too, but even very recently it was not possible on Linux either. It's not so much that Apple is restricting this -- they are aware people want this and have acknowledged this publicly. It's not a simple fix, but requires some re-working of how the GPU drivers and OS GDI interface work together. The other alternative would be for nVidia or AMD to create a separate hardware driver that would allow non-GDI access to the GPU for processing.

That said, even under Windows, using the latest GPUs over Thunderbolt pretty much sucks anyway. The response timing is pretty slow and the bandwidth is only 1/8th of what modern GPUs are technically capable of. Some of the latest like the Titan X can actually saturate their I/O bandwidth for certain operations. Arguably not for computational purposes in most scenarios, but the data pipe over Thunderbolt is very restrictive for GPUs. It's bad enough for the Rocket cards.

I know a lot of the Mac crowd doesn't want to go this route, but a PC with one or more powerful GPUs is really the answer for Resolve at this time.
 
DJ Meyer said:
"Trouble" is defined in different ways. To me, it includes unnecessarily long wait times due to limited CPU, memory, bandwidth, and GPU resources compared to available alternatives,
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No trouble meaning I can play RAW 4k clips of serious length in FCPX, RCX and Resolve with out any problems....I don't have any wait times....it just plays, edits and exports....Not proxies, not optimized...RAW.
 
Again, like Jeff said, it is subjective and there are a lot of confusing posts regarding what a nMP is capable of (or even 5,1 configs) compared to other machines and certain R3D workflows.

For example, Saumene - I own a 6C/D700 for VTR work, switcher pack jobs where I want small rack footprints, small data wrangling, etc. It does not handle realtime 5K FF 4:1 (or 3:1 on faster mags). If someone is shooting that format, they would only be able to expect 1/4 res performance out of that machine, which you may be comfortable with for editing, but personally I can't have a supervised color session with someone and be scrubbing full res 5K from the 6 Core. You can with a RR-X but that is a different config and price point from this thread. So, supporting 5K can be a rather general statement depending on how you look at it.

It is important to consider framerate, frame size (5K/6k/HD/FF/etc) AND compression. 23.98 vs 29.98 on a project does make a difference in realtime playback on certain machines. The nMP 12C/D700/64GB can not playback 6K FF 4:1 24fps at full res. It can playback certain flavors of 6K at certain data rates (compression) in 1/2 res but that means you are making color, noise, secondary and FX decisions on a 1/2 res image which can be further detrimental with DEB, judging artifacts, power windows and so forth. That works for some projects. Others it does not.

If you are used to the amenities of the nMP such as USB3, fast I/O from storage via Thunderbolt and PCIe SSD then you may be able to replace those with PCIe cards in an older tower but you'll run short on slots quickly --

Slot 1 GTX980
Slot 2 AJA/BMD
Slot 3 USB3
Slot 4 Raid HBA

10Gbit or Fiber? PCIe SSD based storage for scratch disk? ESata? Personally, I'd say the alternative to a nMP running a RR is a PC - not a nMP running an eGPU or a 5,1 tower config.
 
Jason Osterday said:
10Gbit or Fiber? PCIe SSD based storage for scratch disk? ESata? Personally, I'd say the alternative to a nMP running a RR is a PC - not a nMP running an eGPU or a 5,1 tower config.
Click to expand...

Probably the main reasons along with FCP I bought into Macs was, components were chosen for me (and that's probably what every computer tech savy person disliked about Macs...).
I hope I don't derail this thread too far if I ask: Are there any off-the-shelve preconfigured PCs, where you just need to add a GTX980 and get an alternative to a nMP with RR?
I still would like to reuse my old MP, but I'm coming from a world of compressed HD and I guess for handling R3D/RC-X, I would also need to add SSDs, faster Raid setups and a new I/O card...
 
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