GTX // Tesla ? For Resolve... is it working ?

[Bérenger Brillante]

I'm currently rebuilding my PC workstation and my dealer told me Tesla could be better than GTX for computing only.
Because it's less greedy in W, and take less slots.

Does somebody knows if Resolve work with Tesla GPU computing cards ? and if it's better ?

my config would be Dual Xeon (don't know if it SR-2/3 or Asus)

with Quadro 4000 as GUI (GUI in DVI, monitoring in Display port)
and 2 x Gtx 580 3gb // or 2x Tesla for GPU

Another question directly related to the Quadro.

With the Quadro 4000 having a 10 bits Display port, do I really need a Blackmagic card to display the signal in Resolve ?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Skip the Quadro 4000 unless you are running applications that specifically benefit from the Quadro series. And then, the 5000 is a much better buy than the 4000. Although there is 10bit output ability on the Quadro via DisplayPort (and adapter to HDMI), your applications must properly support it in order to benefit. My advice is to use the GTX580 and buy a BMD DeckLink HD Extreme 3D+ for monitoring out of Resolve and other software.

Tesla cards are EXPENSIVE! They do accelerate compute operations, but only for applications that support the Tesla compute engine. Resolve does not. In fact, Resolve uses dedicated CUDA access for non-display GPUs, which puts it on the same level as Tesla, but you can use the GTX series.

I just built a PC with i7 3960X CPU, 32GB RAM, and dual GTX580's. The system is FAST. ...Just needs a RED Rocket card to smooth out the R3D debayer performance in some apps (like Resolve). But actual node performance on just one 580 (the other being used for GUI) is quite impressive.

If you're going to go for dual Xeons, my advice would be to wait. Intel should be shipping the updated Xeon E-series CPUs and new chipsets within 3 to 5 weeks. If you buy now, you'll get last year's Westmere CPUs with the i5520 chipset from December 2008.. Just sayin'

This was the big reason I just built the new Sandy Bridge E i7 system. I needed another workstation and couldn't wait for the Xeon update. For most apps this thing is running circles around my dual Xeons that I build in '09 '10... Something to keep in mind.

 

[Bérenger Brillante]

That's what I thought too.

Thanks for the insight on Xeon E, I'll wait a bit then !
About the 10 bits outout, I know Adobe support it, but what about resolve ? On the hardware recommendation they support Decklink, but I must say I'm not a fan of monitoring card... Bad memories from Matrox hardware... I would rather go with "internal" monitoring if I have the choice.

 

[Gunleik Groven]

That's what I thought too.

Thanks for the insight on Xeon E, I'll wait a bit then !
About the 10 bits outout, I know Adobe support it, but what about resolve ? On the hardware recommendation they support Decklink, but I must say I'm not a fan of monitoring card... Bad memories from Matrox hardware... I would rather go with "internal" monitoring if I have the choice.

LOL

I guess blackmagic will kinda prioritize the Decklink cards, especially as the lite is now so fully featured...

I tried to use the AJA codec in resolve the other day, with not much luck...

G

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

That's what I thought too.

Thanks for the insight on Xeon E, I'll wait a bit then !
About the 10 bits outout, I know Adobe support it, but what about resolve ? On the hardware recommendation they support Decklink, but I must say I'm not a fan of monitoring card... Bad memories from Matrox hardware... I would rather go with "internal" monitoring if I have the choice.

Dear gods ... no, a thousand times no. This isn't at all like the older Matrox video i/o hardware. Well, it is i/o hardware.

I use a BMD Decklink Extreme 3D just as suggested.

It is ROCK SOLID. I have had exactly 0 failures or crashes due to the i/o hardware in the last year of daily use with Premiere, FCP 6, Color, Resolve, After Effects and as an extra video monitor when they enabled that again.

You gain a lot, starting with the ability to work in Rec709 colorspace instead of Computer RGB color space.

AJA and BMD are playing in a whole other league from Matrox. Matrox has stepped up their game significantly ... but they are still second tier.

 

[Bérenger Brillante]

So, I guess I'll go with the Extreme 3D too

 

[Mike P.]

Hey Jeff,

Does Adobe/CS5/CS5.5 take advantage of the hexacore? I seem to recall it tapping out at quad-core in terms of multi-threaded efficiency?

As for the topic:
I agree with what most are saying; Adobe CS5/5.5 (AE and PPro specifically) doesn't really take advantage of Quadro's additional types of hardware acceleration (other than the superior display pipeline)... At least not enough to warrant the cost (in my opinion.) I mean, the Quadro 2000 with 2GB is $800... you could get dual 560s which have a boatload more CUDA cores, and multi-GPUs tol help run Resolve. Or you could get a 580 3GB and be sitting pretty.

 

[Gunleik Groven]

Like Alexander, no issues with a multitude of BM 3D cards here...

 

[Kirk.Attard]

I like the pc you built Jeff.. Could you be so kind to tell us what motherboard yo used to pack 32g ram on please?

Thanks a lot.
As you said I think it is very good value for money.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Hey Jeff,

Does Adobe/CS5/CS5.5 take advantage of the hexacore? I seem to recall it tapping out at quad-core in terms of multi-threaded efficiency?

As for the topic:
I agree with what most are saying; Adobe CS5/5.5 (AE and PPro specifically) doesn't really take advantage of Quadro's additional types of hardware acceleration (other than the superior display pipeline)... At least not enough to warrant the cost (in my opinion.) I mean, the Quadro 2000 with 2GB is $800... you could get dual 560s which have a boatload more CUDA cores, and multi-GPUs tol help run Resolve. Or you could get a 580 3GB and be sitting pretty.

Premiere CS5 seems to hit a wall with about 10 threads going. CS5.5 does a bit better and almost makes it to 16 threads. You get the equivalent of 12 threads out of the hexacore, so it's a great CPU for Premiere. As for the other Adobe software, Media Encoder doesn't benefit that much. I'm not sure how well (if at all) it's multi-threaded, but regardless of that, most encoder plugins out there -- ProRes and such, are all single-threaded anyway and will be the bottleneck. AE can span multiple CPU cores for renders.

Quadro 2000 is a waste. The Quadro 4000 is much more card and can be had for around $700. Best bang for the buck is the Quadro 5000. But yeah, the GTX cards are the way to go unless you specifically need the unique Quadro features. I don't consider the 10bit display output to be one of those key features as you can get that with some of the ATI cards and you will get much broader support from more applications with much better control by using a dedicated card like the BMD or AJA solutions. For Quadro-specific features, I can just about count all the mainstream applications out there to use them on one hand. If you spend much of your days in AutoCAD, XSI, Maya, Pro/E, SolidWorks, etc... Buy the Quadro. If not, don't worry about it.

In addition to the 580, there's the 590 and some vendors have a 595. The 590 is like dual 560's on one card, but not as much onboard RAM for both onboard GPUs. The 595 has the extra RAM too.

Outside of Resolve, there aren't really any professional applications out there to use multiple GPUs. Some OpenGL applications can benefit from from multiple cards in SLI mode. However, there are usually trade-offs to that. SLI is best used for games and/or simulation environments specifically designed to take advantage of it.

I like the pc you built Jeff.. Could you be so kind to tell us what motherboard yo used to pack 32g ram on please?

I'm using the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme. It has 8 DIMM sockets -- which is what the X79 chipset supports. So technically, I could install 8x8GB for 64GB total, but I went with 8x46GB 2133MHz G.Skill RipJaw X modules. I attempted to overclock the system, and it actually worked great, but having just air cooling, I couldn't keep the temps under control with the system under load (gaming or rendering) for any significant amount of time (an hour or more). I went back to stock speed and it's fine now. I will be installing liquid cooling in a few weeks when I get around to it, but I'm going to wait for some better LGA-2011 cold plate options to hit the market first. ASUS did include an adapter plate for the socket so that I could use LGA-1366 cooling devices, which I am actually doing for the CPU fan right now. But I didn't want to do this with the liquid cooling and will wait for more options. The new E-series CPUs and LGA-2011 socket are larger and it will take a larger and properly-fitted cold plate system to do it right.

The system is an OK value, but I've got around $4K in it so far. X79 + SandyBridge-E CPUs have a quad-channel memory controller, so you need to populate either 4 of the DIMM sockets or all 8 sockets for the best performance and make sure all the modules are identical. Many of the cheaper X79 motherboards are only using 4 sockets, so you would have to use 8GB DIMMs to get to 32GB and that raises the price considerably. It's a better deal to buy the nicer motherboards with more sockets and you will also get more PCIe slots and features.

 

[Kirk.Attard]

Thanks for the advise Jeff..

Thats the route I'll go I think.
So If I'll have 2 GTX for GPU processing. (is this fine for resolve?). ( I think one will be used for the computer display right ? )
a Declink for SDI monitoring (4:2:2) or (4:4:4) and a red rocket when we get the scarlet.
Should we be good to go?

I like the Rampage IV a lot. I think I'm convinced

Thanks Jeff.

 

[Tony Lorentzen]

Small note. The GTX 590 is actually a dual GTX 580 and not 560 as Jeff mentioned above. The GTX 560 uses a GF110 core (also used in the GTX570 btw) but in a cut-back version that is not as powerful as the one in the GTX 580. So - if you buy a GTX 590 you're essentially getting two GTX 580 cards running internally in SLI - so not as fast as two separate GTX 580 cards. I'd highly recommend getting the 3 GB version of that as the 1.5 GB version will be throttling at the same memory for both graphics processors (which obviously isn't a good thing). Now - currently there's nothing in the Davinci Resolve specs about support for the GTX 590 so make sure you either test this or confirm with Blackmagic-Design that it will work with the 590 (I don't see why it shouldn't, but it's always worth making sure). Also note that the free version of Resolve doesn't support two GPUs so you'll need to buy the full version of Resolve when the Windows version is out.

 

[Kirk.Attard]

Thanks Tony

Very informative.
I think its better to wait for Black magic techs to guide us on best video card combos I guess. They usually issue some guides.
Yes of course its better to buy the full version for good workflow although the Lite version will get the job done.

Currently working on a Mac and have no problems with Resolve but as no Mac pro seems ever to be released will go with Pc. Only resolve was holding us to Mac. I like the Mac os but I dont think that its enough to hold me from going to Pc.

Thanks Jeff and Tony.

Just some other question..
Do you really notice the difference from 4:4:4 to 4:2:2 (given that a 10bit properly calibrated monitor is used.)?
I know it might sound like a stupid question but it might affect the budget of the whole setup by quite an amount.

Thanks again.

 

[Subhadip Sen]

Small note. The GTX 590 is actually a dual GTX 580 and not 560 as Jeff mentioned above. The GTX 560 uses a GF110 core (also used in the GTX570 btw) but in a cut-back version that is not as powerful as the one in the GTX 580. So - if you buy a GTX 590 you're essentially getting two GTX 580 cards running internally in SLI - so not as fast as two separate GTX 580 cards. I'd highly recommend getting the 3 GB version of that as the 1.5 GB version will be throttling at the same memory for both graphics processors (which obviously isn't a good thing). Now - currently there's nothing in the Davinci Resolve specs about support for the GTX 590 so make sure you either test this or confirm with Blackmagic-Design that it will work with the 590 (I don't see why it shouldn't, but it's always worth making sure). Also note that the free version of Resolve doesn't support two GPUs so you'll need to buy the full version of Resolve when the Windows version is out.

Peter Chamberlain hinted that GTX 590 would be used as two GPUs, but indicated that its access to only 1.5 GB per GPU could be a limitation. By the way, GTX 560 uses the GF114 core. However, there's a limited edition out there called "GTX 560 Ti 448 Core Edition" that uses cut back GF110. A total mess at branding - there are 5 different products called GTX 560 in one way or the other! It is easy to get confused.

Side note, AMD is releasing Radeon HD 7970 next week, and that brings a really promising compute oriented architecture and will be way faster than a GTX 580. There's no mention of OpenCL support or AMD GPUs from Blackmagic for the Windows version - let's hope something is clarified soon. AMD are clearly ahead of NVIDIA, it is just their lack of CUDA support holding it back.

 

[Tony Lorentzen]

You're right Subdahip - I should have mentioned that it's the Ti version of the GTX 560 that is using the GF110

 

[Subhadip Sen]

You're right Subdahip - I should have mentioned that it's the Ti version of the GTX 560 that is using the GF110

The regular GTX 560 Ti uses GF114. It is only the limited edition GTX 560 Ti 448 Core that uses GF110. Then there's GTX 560 (non-Ti), GTX 560 (OEM), GTX 560 2Win, GTX 560 (Chinese edition), what a right mess!

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

GTX model numbers can suck it.

Anyway, I'm moving my Resolve work over to Windows. The Mac Pro hardware at this time is just too restrictive. Perhaps there will be a new Mac Pro update when Intel releases the new Sandy Bridge Xeons in the next month or so... Actually I'm sure there will be, but when it comes to configuring multiple GPUs, among other non-standard things, it's just too much of a hassle or not even possible. I have no trouble building a dedicated PC just to run Resolve. But then again, it can run most everything else just great too. So that's what I've done. My new i3960X based system was about the same price as equipping a Mac Pro with a Cubix box and a few Quadro 4000's. ...Just sayin'

Resolve beta looks good on Windows so far, but I admit I haven't spent the time to really dig into it. I just got the system built and burned in and have only been using it for various things, still setting up and tweaking, since monday afternoon.