Need advise for Nvidia MacPro

[David Callahan]

For CUDA acceleration in Resolve (and so it seems in Adobe CS6 as well), you can also use non-Mac video cards. The GTX 460, 480, 580, etc.. all provide superior CUDA acceleration over the Quadro 4000. But before you start buying any of those cards, pay attention to their width and power requirements and know if they're going to fit in your intended configuration or have a plan on whether you need PCIe expansion and/ or additional power.

Jeff,
Do you have any recommendations for a MacPro 4,1 8 core machine to run CS6 with Cuda support on a budget? Transitioning from FCP7, I've been using a Kona LHe card with a stock video card in my Mac. I called Kona and they confirmed they will not be writing drivers for the Kona LH series, as they are end of life products. So I'm wondering what the best combo video/IO card might be that would give decent CUDA support but would work well with a BlackMagic IO card. I would like to go with BlackMagic so I could use Resolve as well. I need something that will play out of an I/O card to a production monitor. Is this possible with CUDA acceleration?
What would you see as minimum RAM to work with R3D's as well?
Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[Peter Corbett]

Some quick thoughts....


Premiere requires CUDA acceleration on the displays where Premiere is active in order to be properly accelerated.

Great posts Jeff. Just confirming that the Cuda-enabled GPU must be also used for the dual displays to work properly? I've been advised that Premiere works better like the setup for Resolve with 1 x single-slot for displays and a card like my macvidcards GTX 570 used just fro Cuda. I don't doubt your opinion at all, but if you have the time, could you briefly expand on your view of Premiere and Cuda?

Many thanks,
Peter

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

FWIW, that post of mine is nearly 9 months old now and not applicable to Adobe CS6.

That said, Premiere no longer needs your CUDA card to host the primary display or the display used for video output. Just be aware that Premiere only supports one GPU. To use more than one GPU in Premiere, currently anyway, it's done via nVidia's MAXIMUS interface. That is only supported on Windows and only works when pairing certain Quadro cards with appropriately matched Tesla compute cards or by using dual Quadro cards.

FWIW, Resolve 9 no longer requires a GUI card plus additional GPU card. However, it still is multi-GPU aware. So you get acceleration in Resolve 9 with a single GTX570 or Quadro 4000 on the Mac.

 

[Dave Cox]

Huh, I wasn't aware that you could use a single card for GPU / GUI in resolve 9. That sounds like it might really help solve some issues with on-set carts using a mac pro..

 

[Adam Welch]

So will having two Quadro 4000 only improve performance for Resolve? Will I see any improvement with After Effects or Media Composer?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Dual Quadro 4000 cards will indeed help in Resolve. And since Resolve 9 can utilize CUDA on the GUI card as well now, it should work better than Resolve 8 for you. After Effects uses OpenGL for accelerating its raytrace engine and it does support multiple GPUs for that. Media Composer has very minimal GPU support, I don't think you'll be gaining anything there. But I have not been using Media Composer lately, so I can't say for sure about what's come along in the last point release or two.

 

[Peter Corbett]

Cool. Many thanks Jeff for your detailed clarification.

FWIW, that post of mine is nearly 9 months old now and not applicable to Adobe CS6.

That said, Premiere no longer needs your CUDA card to host the primary display or the display used for video output. Just be aware that Premiere only supports one GPU. To use more than one GPU in Premiere, currently anyway, it's done via nVidia's MAXIMUS interface. That is only supported on Windows and only works when pairing certain Quadro cards with appropriately matched Tesla compute cards or by using dual Quadro cards.

FWIW, Resolve 9 no longer requires a GUI card plus additional GPU card. However, it still is multi-GPU aware. So you get acceleration in Resolve 9 with a single GTX570 or Quadro 4000 on the Mac.