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 :)

New Graphics Card

Will report when/if I decide to use NR on the shots I alluded to before. So far, not just no problem experienced, but have seen big improvements all around with this card using it as GUI and GPU at the same time. Now I have an extra PCI slot for other card, such as the OWC hot-swappable SATA and USB 3 adapter. Have heard great things about it, and will give me more connectivity options.


BTW, I forgot to mention that the GTX 780 has 4K display support over HDMI and DisplayPort. The DisplayPort will give you more options in high refresh rates than the HDMI output. I have not tested this since I am waiting on my 4K display.

Now the push is to have NVIDEA to modify their drivers to support 10-bit output. Based on what I have been researching, there is no reason not to have this available. They support it for the old Quatto cards, and this new generation has no limiting hardware that will prevent it. Quite the opposite, they are better suited with the latest technology.


VERY IMPORTANT FACT: you can run this card with current power offered by the Mac tower. Other options, such as the Titan flavor, will require to acquire an external power source.

You need 4 gigs or more VRAM to run motion-based noise reduction and so on in Resolve. I have tested this. 790 is not a double card (my mistake) so new 6 gig version will work very well. I don't understand what you have to decide Luis, you could just test this on any shot and then take it off - no executive decision committee required.

You will see that 4 Gigs is indeed the magic number at 5K, more for 6K - but 6Gigs you are covered all the time, assuming you are using a separate card for GUI as GUI eats a lot of VRAM.

Yes Titan requires external PSU.

I would still advise an external psu with a 790 - it's only $200 or so and removes the possibility of serious damage unless you are using a Mac Vid cards modified version (you can get one for the 2nd DVD tray bay) which also modifies power peaks vs a PC card.

Also not sure why you would need 10 bit output from Nvidia card in Resolve since the monitor feed comes out of a BM card which is unrelated.
 
Last edited:
Paul,

I just did an EXTREME NR (a la Singer's Superman) where the person, specially skin tone looks so flawless, plastic, with a lot of Botox, and the performance during playing was REAL-TIME (23.97). Not a single memory error reported by Resolve.

Hope this helps!

Luis, you weren't suing motion-based noise reduction (it would never create that plastic effect) , you were using the old kind which is much less memory intensive.

Those of you who don't believe me can phone BM support.
 
Everyone has its own butget consideration, plus the factual test and days of flawless performance give me confidence that I got what I needed and can afford.
 
There are some problems with NR in Resolve with less than 4GB RAM. BMD is working on this… While not having enough RAM will decrease performance, it shouldn't cause failures as it does often and the performance reduction shouldn't be as catastrophic. FWIW, I don't really use NR in Resolve as I don't think it does that great of a job. Neat Video kicks its butt for $100. I do most of my NR and similar complex processing in Nuke, though.

The GTX-780SC card is a pretty good choice I think. One has to be reasonable with expectations and balancing the capabilities of these older systems. A Titan or some of the bigger 780/790 cards or even a 690 need extra power to run properly. Some of the newer ones are going to overrun the abilities of the PCIe v2 X16 slot for graphics purposes. CUDA and OpenCL computational use is still a bottleneck for most intense processing tasks and the PCIe bandwidth isn't going to hamper that just yet.

There are not too many options out there for 4GB or more on a GPU right now, not without spending a lot more money and usually needing a supplemental power supply if we're going to install in a Mac. If we look at the flagship GPUs like the K6000x or the W9100, those are each $4K retail with a street price only $200 or so less on average. Actually I'm just reaching on the price of the W9100 since it was officially launched at NAB today. We don't have street prices or broad availability yet. Neither are a good fit for Mac tower, in fact they would be a waste of perfectly good money in that usage scenario, IMO. Of course, there are several other lesser GPUs to pick from, but by the time we whittle the choices down to what fits into the reasonable budget Luis set for himself and what can run within the power confines of his system, I think he made a great choice. And it's nice to see it working for him.
 
It's cross platform, I have a dongle I juggle between systems.
 
Hey Tom,

The one that I have is the EVGA dual-fan, so it is the first one. BTW, contrary to the previous GTX 470 that I had, this one can be working for hours, and after turning it off, you can touch it and it is warm, not burning hot. Really impressive heat dissipation architecture.

Cheers!
 
Yes, that is the one (mine has a dual fan cooling configuration; see above link provided by Tom). As I indicated before, I currently have the PC version, but have done a temporary adjustments of some settings (after a lot of research done since my tech "savyness" has limitations), and after I am done with my current project I will send it to him for pro modifications so it will run flawlessly as both, Mac and PC native.

Hope this helps!
 
Tom, I have that card from MacVidCards. It has two power ports, an 8 pin and a 6 pin. The Mac only has two 6 Pin connectors. I initially put one of the 6 pin connectors into the 8 pin slot (and the other into the six pin) and the card ran without problems. I eventually ordered a 6 pin to 8 pin adapter just to be safe, but I don't know if this makes any difference.

Hope that helps,
CB
 
Just wanted to thank everyone here who commented on this post - I am seeing such better performance on the 780 over the Quadro 4000. I am seeing resolve scream on playback 24 FPS no issues, even with 5 or 6 nodes. Applied Film Convert, took a couple of moment to ramp up but did 24 FPS also. The only nonperformance increase I've seen is NEAT VIDEO, still only giving me 2-7FPS but I don't think its GPU accelerated.

One final question, on occasion my 2nd Monitor (ASUS 24" PAQ24) starts blinking for a few minutes the stabilizes, has anyone seen this (it happens randomly)

Tom
 
Back
Top