GTX 285 getting hard to find...

[Tom.Wong]

I'm not here to have a pissing contest on who's got more cuda cores. I started this thread to hopefully have some info on the boards with the same concerns I have. gtx 285 for mac is EOL, is it worth getting that or going quadro route. I've concluded quadro because there is future support, including better drivers.

different sensibilities for different people. I know i'm taking performance hit by refusing the hackintosh/flashed cards route with cuda. I'd rather trust in the reliability of officially approved setups, and what I believe a client wants. An aspect of showmanship is part of making a client happy. It pays my bills, what more can I say? would I like more perfomance? hell yeah, and thus I'm hoping and wish for 500 series cards support in the future. Right now I think i'll be content with what I'm getting in this week. The saved slot from the single width quadro is gonna let me have my rocket with sdi, and esata card. can't afford the expander right now, thinking about getting the 4 or 6 slot later on. If there's future compatibility with cyclone, all the better. I can just buy the back plane and customize my own set up, with kick ass raid in a minimal chassis set up.

 

[L Wachowski]

You're missing the point. It's not about reliability of a hackintosh or CUDA specs. Yes, there is a stigma. When you have real clients who pay real money, they expect things a certain way. When they walk into your facility and sit down with you in a color or editing session, they don't want to see a hackintosh. Many bigger clients want the full hardware tour to see who and what they're getting into when choosing a provider.

You may want to watch the attitude. Your response here smacks of another hackintosh proponent that has been banned from these forums. Not because of the hackintosh discussion, but because he was a total douchebag. Hopefully you are not that guy.



Uh, OK. So put Resolve on there and show us what it can do... You're going to want some more RAM and you're running 4-cores too light. Just sayin'

Can do on the RAM to 24 GB and up the CPU to a 4.2 GHz 6 Core but I'm a total noob on DaVinci. Attitude? I was simply asking if my CUDA count was good enough for Real Time DaVinci 4K playback? Maybe I need to take some more English classes? My English is not so good. I'll try better next time. LOL

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Can do on the RAM to 24 GB and up the CPU to a 4.2 GHz 6 Core but I'm a total noob on DaVinci. Attitude? I was simply asking if my CUDA count was good enough for Real Time DaVinci 4K playback? Maybe I need to take some more English classes? My English is not so good. I'll try better next time. LOL

No worries. You did come across as a bit defensive, so I kinda rubbed you a bit to see what you would say. We had a troublemaker on here a couple weeks back and I was just making sure. Sorry to welcome you aboard like that.

Your CUDA core count is just fine. In fact, it's great. I think a lot of us would be curious as to how DaVinci does run on that system. You won't get realtime 4K playback, CUDA acceleration is only part of the pipeline and that all happens AFTER the the frames are decoded from their compressed format and put into an RGB image context. On your system, you would be hard-pressed to get decent playback speeds of 4K footage at more than 1/8 or 1/4 resolution without a RED Rocket card. And you would also need a decently fast disk system or RAID capable of 300MB/s sustained or more. Not sure what you have in there for drives.

I haven't tested DaVinci in terms of how many CPU cores it can utilize. Quad-core may be just fine. But you would want more RAM, try with 12 and see what happens. Maybe you don't need 24.

CUDA acceleration happens for color and FX nodes. You should be able to run several nodes before seeing degraded performance. If you have a drive system capable of the 300MB/s I mentioned above, you should be able to grade 2K DPX sequences in real-time without much issue. And probably layer a dozen nodes on there. With 12GB RAM, you may run out of RAM before you run out of CUDA cores and node processing ability.

A lot of this is hypothetical and in uncharted territory. Many of us have just started using DaVinci ourselves. I have so many configurations and different things I want to try, but there's just not enough time and spare systems around here to tinker with it.

 

[Nikolai Vavilov]

Can do on the RAM to 24 GB and up the CPU to a 4.2 GHz 6 Core but I'm a total noob on DaVinci. Attitude? I was simply asking if my CUDA count was good enough for Real Time DaVinci 4K playback? Maybe I need to take some more English classes? My English is not so good. I'll try better next time. LOL

The other question is who really needs 4K playback. Do you have 4K grading monitor or projection?

 

[Tom.Wong]

you don't need 4k monitoring set up to grade 4k files. r3d natively, is 4k no matter what you swing it. in da vinci, if all you have is a 1080p grading panel, you can set your timeline to play down as 1080p, even though you are working with 4k files. and you can output at whatever resolution you want. so it debayers, and puts it in a 1080p frame for you on the fly. however from what I've been gather. 1/4th debayer settings are where you'll get real time on the playback with a single quadro 4000 for acceleration and a rocket card.

Judging by what Jeff is saying, more graphics cards probably won't mean better r3d playback. It will just mean the ability to stack more nodes before seeing a loss of performance. I keep forgetting that CUDA doesn't accelerate playback of anything, it was designed to handle the payload of effects. Same in premiere. So now the topic at hand is, how to get real time playback from r3d in a Da Vinci at at least half debayer, to half high. 1/4 debayer just seems very low to me... the image would be so soft, will it really be enough to get an accurate account of how your scene looks?

I'll find out for myself, half the parts are coming in today, the other half tomorrow. Thanks to the holiday, all my overnight shipping got delayed a day. I wonder if having 2 rockets will help playback more... it's already compatible for stereo work, but I wonder if you can gear for 2d work.

 

[Rohit Gupta]

you don't need 4k monitoring set up to grade 4k files. r3d natively, is 4k no matter what you swing it. in da vinci, if all you have is a 1080p grading panel, you can set your timeline to play down as 1080p, even though you are working with 4k files. and you can output at whatever resolution you want. so it debayers, and puts it in a 1080p frame for you on the fly. however from what I've been gather. 1/4th debayer settings are where you'll get real time on the playback with a single quadro 4000 for acceleration and a rocket card.

Judging by what Jeff is saying, more graphics cards probably won't mean better r3d playback. It will just mean the ability to stack more nodes before seeing a loss of performance. I keep forgetting that CUDA doesn't accelerate playback of anything, it was designed to handle the payload of effects. Same in premiere. So now the topic at hand is, how to get real time playback from r3d in a Da Vinci at at least half debayer, to half high. 1/4 debayer just seems very low to me... the image would be so soft, will it really be enough to get an accurate account of how your scene looks?

I'll find out for myself, half the parts are coming in today, the other half tomorrow. Thanks to the holiday, all my overnight shipping got delayed a day. I wonder if having 2 rockets will help playback more... it's already compatible for stereo work, but I wonder if you can gear for 2d work.

If you have a Red Rocket, you should be easily able to get Half-res playback in RT.

The comment about the 1/4th resolution is to do with software decodes.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

If you have a Red Rocket, you should be easily able to get Half-res playback in RT.

The comment about the 1/4th resolution is to do with software decodes.

All fine and good in theory... 1/2 res playback *almost* works here with the Rocket on Resolve. Must be something to do with their pipeline. Actually it does work when cached, but tends to stutter otherwise.

System specs:

2009 Mac Pro
2 x 2.93GHz 8-core
16GB RAM
nVidia GT160
nVidia GTX285
RED Rocket
Decklink HD Extreme 3D+
1TB 7200rpm system/apps HDD
8TB RAID tested at 358MB/s sustained writes, 440MB/s reads

I had the Quadro 4000 in this system instead of the GT160 and it was on par with the GTX285 for speed in Resolve. But I had to pull it and put the GT160 back in. There's not enough aux power connectors in the Mac to support two such GPUs, so I was pulling the power from the optical bays and that was interfering with other devices there.

I'm not switching monitors and trying to flip-flop which card the system thinks is the primary anymore, I've dedicated this system to Resolve. For now.

I'm going to wipe the HDD and do a fresh OSX install and see if that cleans up some of the performance issues. When I get time....

 

[Rohit Gupta]

All fine and good in theory... 1/2 res playback *almost* works here with the Rocket on Resolve. Must be something to do with their pipeline. Actually it does work when cached, but tends to stutter otherwise.

System specs:

2009 Mac Pro
2 x 2.93GHz 8-core
16GB RAM
nVidia GT160
nVidia GTX285
RED Rocket
Decklink HD Extreme 3D+
1TB 7200rpm system/apps HDD
8TB RAID tested at 358MB/s sustained writes, 440MB/s reads

That doesn't sound right. Do you have the cards in the slots as per the config guide?

Slot1: GTX285
Slot2: GT120
Slot3: Red Rocket
Slot4: Decklink

You should have no issues getting half-res playback at 24fps in this configuration.

 

[Tom.Wong]

getting my video cards in tomorrow. holiday messed up the overnight delivery... software and rocket came in today, have my tower laying around ready for the final touches.

Slot:
1. quadro 4000
2. gt 120
3. rocket
4. decklink

I already miss my firmtek 4 port esata card though. having to drop back to fw800 hurts my heart. Running a 5 tb internal software raid, with 1tb samsung drives. getting about 427/mb sec write, 516 mb/sec read... Hopefully I can get to some r3d test tomorrow night.

Guess i'm gonna have to rip out the gt 120 to put in my esata card when i edit, and put back in the gt when i do grading... it's gonna be SUCH a pain. gonna save my pennies for a cubix. Thinking about getting the 6 slot one.

Slot 1: quadro 4000
2. cubix
3. sas card
4. rocket

inside the cubx
1. quadro
2. quadro
3. rocket
4. esata
5. decklink
6. TBD.

I wanna build a small shuttle PC to run a ultrascope in there too, dunno if I wanna do a high res touch screen display or a nice fat 24 inch dell. I also wanna upgrade my dreamcolor to an FSI ...


I"m gonna be staying broke for a very very very very long time....

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

That doesn't sound right. Do you have the cards in the slots as per the config guide?

Slot1: GTX285
Slot2: GT120
Slot3: Red Rocket
Slot4: Decklink

You should have no issues getting half-res playback at 24fps in this configuration.

I've tried that order, no different than the order I have now, which is:

Slot1: GTX
Slot2: Red Rocket
Slot3: GT160
Slot4: Decklink

The reason I'm running with the Rocket and GT160 flipped from the recommendation is because when doing other transcodes with the Rocket, I was seeing a performance hit with it in the X4 slot. I have one other system with a Rocket, and while this is now becoming my "DaVinci system", I'll still need to do other things with the Rocket on it.

Half res playback seems to be just fine, but with intermittent stuttering. I suspect that there may be something going on so I'm doing a clean system install right now.



@Tom, that is going to be an insane configuration. I can't wait to see your report on how it performs.

 

[Aleksandar Colancevski]

getting my video cards in tomorrow. holiday messed up the overnight delivery... software and rocket came in today, have my tower laying around ready for the final touches.

Slot:
1. quadro 4000
2. gt 120
3. rocket
4. decklink

I already miss my firmtek 4 port esata card though. having to drop back to fw800 hurts my heart. Running a 5 tb internal software raid, with 1tb samsung drives. getting about 427/mb sec write, 516 mb/sec read... Hopefully I can get to some r3d test tomorrow night.

Guess i'm gonna have to rip out the gt 120 to put in my esata card when i edit, and put back in the gt when i do grading... it's gonna be SUCH a pain. gonna save my pennies for a cubix. Thinking about getting the 6 slot one.

Slot 1: quadro 4000
2. cubix
3. sas card
4. rocket

inside the cubx
1. quadro
2. quadro
3. rocket
4. esata
5. decklink
6. TBD.
H
I wanna build a small shuttle PC to run a ultrascope in there too, dunno if I wanna do a high res touch screen display or a nice fat 24 inch dell. I also wanna upgrade my dreamcolor to an FSI ...


I"m gonna be staying broke for a very very very very long time....

I am very curious how your typical DaVinci project looks like.
Bussines wise I would spend money on DaVinci control panel which makes more impact on clients (I don't want to start about functionality in work you'll get with it) than on multiple GPUs.
Clients doesn't know what you have under the hood and Resolve does very good job caching proxies in the background.

 

[Tom.Wong]

Well after a whole weekend of grading a feature, all r3d, old sensor and updating to redgamma2 and redcolor2. All I have to say is, this system runs VERY well.

even with a single quadro 4000, the rocket card makes all the difference. I'm running at half good debayer, and I had scenes with 10+ nodes on, and i'm still getting 24 fps. It's not until i start putting on blur's I see a hit in performance. I'm running with software scopes too. With several blurs the framerate drops down to 15-18 fps.

Power windows, hsl qualifier, primary after primary. It's eating up the r3d's no problem. I'm very happy with this set up, but wills till consider getting an expander just to get some slots back for a sas card and esata card. make my current quadro my gui card, that way it will give me cuda in adobe apps too, and just run dual quadro for acceleration.

It's not that I feel that I need more horsepower, but I need the extra slots to get some cards back and with the extra room I might as well get some more juice out of it.

key factors to keep in mind. You HAVE to be working from a fast raid. I did some tests on a normal raid 0 drive, and wasn't getting anywhere close to this kind of performance. The system can get a little unstable using a lot of trackers, so I would save often.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I'm getting similar performance here, now that I have fixed a few things.

I really need 2 more slots though, it's killin' me.

 

[Tom.Wong]

yeh me too. not having an esata card is #1 right now, I'm feeling your pain on relying on a massive internal soft raid. It's just scary. So i think i'm gonna save up, and scale down from the 6 slot cubix to the 4 slot. 6 slot is almost 3x the price, i can't justify it other than just wanting to be selfish and greedy.

gonna put 2 quadros in the cubix
rocket and decklink

inside the tower will be quadro for gui, cubix host card, sas and esata card.

I really wanted an extra slot for another rocket one day for stereo work, but since i'm not GETTING any stereo work it's kind of stupid for me to spend all that money right now, and with the performance I"m getting just from 1 gpu acceleration as is, I might not even need that extra quadro. Time will tell. The cubix is very fairly priced though, a little over 2 grand for the 4 slot. I'd totally go for that one Jeff.

 

[Tom.Wong]

btw I just wanna throw in a plug for Jeff. He's already a mod and his reputation is already there. but I bought his tangent wave, and needed it quick, and he made it happen. Great business man, and probably about 10x smarter than me when it comes to the tech. So be sure to bug this guy for tech questions whenever you can.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Thanks, Tom.

Anyway, check this out (before it disappears). We finally get to see a shot of JMR's 3-slot expander w/ 10 drive bays. Hopefully they will have it at NAB so I can really look at it. They have a larger model out now, but this 3-slot one is really appealing. Quadro + Rocket + RAID controller and 10 drives in one box. Hmmmm....

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

Thanks, Tom.

Anyway, check this out (before it disappears). We finally get to see a shot of JMR's 3-slot expander w/ 10 drive bays. Hopefully they will have it at NAB so I can really look at it. They have a larger model out now, but this 3-slot one is really appealing. Quadro + Rocket + RAID controller and 10 drives in one box. Hmmmm....

I SWEAR by JMR's quality. Their stuff is not cheap - but it's SOLID. HIGHLY recommend all things JMR. And I test everybody's stuff.

 

[joe hedge]

Thanks, Tom.

Anyway, check this out (before it disappears). We finally get to see a shot of JMR's 3-slot expander w/ 10 drive bays. Hopefully they will have it at NAB so I can really look at it. They have a larger model out now, but this 3-slot one is really appealing. Quadro + Rocket + RAID controller and 10 drives in one box. Hmmmm....

Does look good...

"I'm sorry, if you could not take pictures" hahaha

 

[Dustin Cross]

JMR's stuff is too expensive for me. I have heard only good things about them. Don't like the Mac Pro design of that new system.

My Cyclone 600-2707 is still working great and I really abuse it! I am sure it was never ment to be on location five days a week for the last several months. 5 PCIe slots and room for 15+ drives or 13 drives and HH LTO drive or 10 drives and full height LTO and Bluray Burner. All in a nice standard 4u case.


Dusty

 

[Tom.Wong]

Thanks, Tom.

Anyway, check this out (before it disappears). We finally get to see a shot of JMR's 3-slot expander w/ 10 drive bays. Hopefully they will have it at NAB so I can really look at it. They have a larger model out now, but this 3-slot one is really appealing. Quadro + Rocket + RAID controller and 10 drives in one box. Hmmmm....

JMR is military grade. no doubt it's gonna be awesome. this would be perfect for a DIT set up rather than a da vinci set up. ...

I want 2.

damn my poverty!!!