Mac Pro nVidia - Redcine support

[roryhinds]

As Scratch used the nVidia cards I was wondering if RedCine works best on nVidia in a Mac Pro.

Trying to sort out my new Mac Pro and it seems Apple are very poor at writing drivers for the high priced FX5600 which doesn't make it any more powerful then the less expensive cards.

 

[Bill Goehring]

Scratch runs on a PC platform, which works best with nVidia cards. But Macs work best with ATI cards at the moment, because of Mac nVidia driver problems. This is unfortunate, since the only ATI card currently available through Apple for the MacPro is a 256 MB standard model said to process video chores slower than the last ATI MacPro iteration. Apple offers two nVidia cards, the slower of which is a 512 MB model, which would certainly out-perform the ATI model, if not for driver problems. That's what I'd get, if I knew Apple had cleared up the issue.

 

[roryhinds]

Redcine is written by Assimilate who's software is primed for nVidia.
Has the Mac REDCINE been primed for ATI or nVidia?

 

[Bill Goehring]

As stated above, the issue is with the drivers. Apparently, Mac did a sloppy job with their nVidia drivers; hence, by default, ATI is the best choice with Macs.

 

[Lucas Wilson]

Redcine is written by Assimilate who's software is primed for nVidia.
Has the Mac REDCINE been primed for ATI or nVidia?

The Mac has been primed by Apple for whatever it's primed for.

As Bill hinted, Apple writes all their own graphics drivers, so it really is up to them how much support they put behind various graphics cards. Currently, it seems pretty clear that ATI cards are more full supported and stable on OSX.

This is also why there is still no driver for the NVidia SDI cards on OSX. Not because NVidia doesn't want to do it... but because Apple does not appear to want to.

Best,

Lucas
------
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA

 

[roryhinds]

I totally understand Apple write there own drivers... I've know this for year.

What I'm asking is is Redcine written for nVidia in mind like Scratch?

 

[Bruce Allen]

EDIT: Rory, I realized that most of what I wrote is not really useful to you. Here's my recommendation:

Don't buy a new Mac Pro for RedCine right now. Get a $450 PC for that.

Or, wait for any of the below to happen:
...for Jarred to tell us which graphics card he has in his new Mac Pro.
...for Red to announce something.
...for Apple to fix their drivers.
...for someone to make a new post on RedUser that says "RedCine SMOKES on my Mac Pro with such-and-such video card"
...for Apple to release higher-end ATI video cards - or maybe a GeForce 9 (coming soon) with re-written drivers. NAB?

Definitely don't buy the FX5600 unless Luki says so.

I totally understand Apple write there own drivers... I've know this for year.

What I'm asking is is Redcine written for nVidia in mind like Scratch?

I think you've got the programming thing backwards.

Generally, we aim to write stuff that should work on both nVidia and ATI. We don't like to take sides, try to be good people, follow standards, etc.

Then we find out that even though we have crossed our t's and dotted our i's, our code doesn't work / perform well because of poorly-documented driver / OS / hardware screwups.

So then we try to make do with what we have. In the PC, it looked like nVidia wrote drivers that behave well / perform as advertised.

So the correct answer would be that RedCine was written with a decent OpenGL implementation in mind - and the only current example of that is PC / nVidia. Apple hasn't made one yet, and it looks like ATI isn't there on PC either.

So, the ball is in the court of Apple (and ATI on the PC side). Either of them could get on the phone right now to Red / Assimilate, and sort this out to the point where people would say "wow, looks like they had Apple (or ATI) in mind when they wrote this software!". But no, that would make life too easy

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com