Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

  • 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 :)

DaVinci Resolve 7 for Mac now shipping

So, I have the RedRocket installed in the system I'm testing Resolve on but it doesn't seem to be accelerating playback? I verified it works in REdcine. Is there something I have to enable in Resolve?
 
Is the GTX 285 still available? I can't seem to get hold of one in the UK.

MC
 
GTX285 Mac Edition has been discontinued. You would have to find a vendor that still has one. They pop up on eBay here and there too.

I'm curious if anyone has tried a non-Mac Edition GTX285??? With some cards, that don't have the Mac EFI, they can't be used for system-level graphics, boot menus, etc.. But often will still allow drivers to load once in OSX. It worked with the older non-Mac Quadro FX4500 cards. Once booted into OSX, the drivers would load and the card was usable.
 
GTX285 Mac Edition has been discontinued. You would have to find a vendor that still has one. They pop up on eBay here and there too.

I'm curious if anyone has tried a non-Mac Edition GTX285??? With some cards, that don't have the Mac EFI, they can't be used for system-level graphics, boot menus, etc.. But often will still allow drivers to load once in OSX. It worked with the older non-Mac Quadro FX4500 cards. Once booted into OSX, the drivers would load and the card was usable.

I am getting one with flashed mac firmware.
I'll report as soon as I get it.
 
thanks
It's the same guy I am getting it from. Looks like a good source.
He also trades the old cards for a reasonable price.

I'll be running it on 8core 2010 Mac pro 5.1
Did anyone had any trouble with those cards on the new macs?
 
I have a nvidia GeForce 8800 GT which uses 2 of the power sockets any one know of a source for splitters so i can run power to my GTX 285?
 
I'm getting great realtime playback from a 12-core, 24GB Ram with QuadroFX in slot 1, GT120 in slot 2, Redrocket in 3 and Decklink extreme 3D in 4 with 3 internal 2GB's software Raid 0ed...
This thing is smokin!
Now I just have to save up for that Cinetal...
 
I have a nvidia GeForce 8800 GT which uses 2 of the power sockets any one know of a source for splitters so i can run power to my GTX 285?

Can't use splitters, you can over-draw voltage by doing that. You will want a couple of these. Not sure of a source outside the USA...

The 8800GT should work just fine for your primary display with the 285 as your extra GPU. Just need to solve that power problem and probably pull the power from your secondary optical bay.
 
Slightly off topic, but sort of related. We're building a RAID and are curious about this: will a card like Atto R680, with 6Gb/s drives like Barracuda XT drives, in a 6Gb/s JBOD enclosure like Sans Digital 8bay (http://www.sansdigital.com/elitestor/es208x6plusb.html) have greater speed than CalDigit, Rorke, etc. 3Gb/s solutions?

Reason I ask is that we are now grading larger/longer projects and wanting to optimize what Davinci is giving us. While I know we can use internal software Raid on the Mac tower...that's too small for longer form projects.

Thanks,
Paul
 
Hi Paul,

You're really asking a multi-faceted question.

The various vendors use differing oem options when building their systems so not all 3Gb/s systems perform at the same level. And other factors like raid level and PCIe speed and motherboard throughput matter as well.

In my limited testing there wasn't a huge difference when moving to 6Gb/s drives on an 6Gb card in a PCIe 2.0 slot on a 8 Drive raid 5 or raid 6 array.

FWIW my testing methodology was basically flawed because I used different drives in the test, but it gave me some idea of what to expect. Basically I just swapped between two enclosures, one with 3Gb/s drives and one with 6Gb/s drives.

More generally, the number of drives really matters, (e.g. 8 is a LOT faster than four) as does the speed of the PCIe slot you allocate to the card, and the speed of the individual drives.

I'd purchase the higher bandwidth card, as the additional cost is minimal.

I don't use raid 0 personally, too scary for me, but if I was heading down that road, I'd stick with drives built for raids like the WD RE series or equivalent.

I've found the WD to be a bit faster than the other vendors but this is going to vary by model.

And again speaking generally the 1TB seem to perform better than the 2TB drives.

Hope that helps a little.

Steve
 
thanks, that does help. I'm just looking at what Resolve is bringing and want to make sure that our shop takes as much advantage of it as possible.
 
Looks like I will have to find a 120.
Is anyone using an pci expander.? If so which?
 
Kinda off-topic but related too, about the performance of a MacPro for DaVinci.

Thinking of buying a new MacPro, but I'm in doubt between the 3,33 ghz 6-core or the 2,4 12-core. Anyone got some advice on that?
In most apps the 3,33 got the edge now, but what about DaVinci, does it use multiple cores well, or does the higher clock speed triumph?

Would love some advice on this.
 
Thinking of buying a new MacPro, but I'm in doubt between the 3,33 ghz 6-core or the 2,4 12-core. Anyone got some advice on that?

Get the 8-core or 12-core for sure. When buying a Mac Pro, you should avoid buying one that only has one processor. That means no quad-core or 6-core model. Is Apple selling a 6-core system now? I thought they just had 4, 8 and 12. The reason why is because if you only buy a single-CPU model, Apple does not supply the additional cooling components for that second CPU socket and if you decide to add a second CPU later, it will cost you a kidney. In addition to that, the memory controllers are hosted on the CPUs. So having one CPU in there effectively cuts your RAM capacity and throughput in half.

The 8-core will save you some money over the 12-core. I can't comment about how well Resolve scales to multiple CPUs yet... But will say that unless you're doing a lot of scalable or CPU-bound rendering or calculation options, 12 cores won't give you much benefit over 8 cores. I would definitely go with more cores if you have the budget to do so. Not only because you get 4 more processor cores -- that's like another whole computer in there! But you also gain some clock speed across all of them.

IMO, the 2.66GHz 12-Core Mac Pro is probably the one to get right now. If your budget allows. The 2.93 would be slightly, even noticeably, better, but the cost really starts to go and that money could be put toward a PCIe Expander or RAID.
 
What I hadn't seen is that the 6-core has just 4 memory slots too.
And it's not possible to add a second processor later on. So I'll probably go for the 12 core 2,66. The 2,93 is a bit too expensive in comparison, in my opinion at least.
Going for the raid card instead. Think that'll net me a bigger performance gain, combined with 3 small ssd's or fast hdd's.

That mac + the GTX285 I already got should give me reasonable DaVinci performance I hope, at least for smaller jobs.
 
Back
Top