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Quadro or GTX for new system?

Paul J Steinberg

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I'm building a new PC that will be running ScratchLAB and Adobe CS6 suite. One thing I can't nail down is the GPU. Almost all of the setups I have seen listed for higher end systems all use the Quadro line of cards (I was thinking of the Quadro 4000 or 5000) but the newer GTX line are now PCI3.0 enabled, have A LOT more CUDA cores and are a fraction of the price. I've gone through the Adobe forums and the resident hardware guru (Harm) over there seems to favor the GTX line but then again it seems like most folks over there are working on h.264 and AVCHD files.

What would the ideal card for working with R3D media in ScratchLAB/Speedgrade/Premiere (already have a Rocket card for the machine)?
 
GTX. Done.

You only need to spend the extra on a Quadro if you actually need a few of its unique features. And as of this time, the only unique Quadro features supported by Adobe would be the SDI output option and that's a huge upgrade expense to the Quadro card. You're much better off to use a DeckLink, Kona or similar system. I would talk with Assimilate and see what their current thoughts are on GPUs for Scratch as I'm not up on Scratch that well lately. I guess I should probably pay them a visit at NAB in the next couple days. Personally, I would avoid the Quadro 4000. The 5000 is just OK and the 6000 is really nice. But the new Quadro cards arrive here in about 2 months...

As for the GTX cards, the new ones do have more CUDA cores, but they are a vastly different design from the previous series. The GTX680 is showing to only be about as fast, as a GTX580 for CUDA acceleration at the moment. I'm sure it will improve a bit with driver updates, but don't expect it to be much different/faster in the end. The GTX680 is going to be superior for OpenGL acceleration and other aspects though. It has double the bandwidth for inbound data and nearly 3.5 times the bandwidth for outbound data, due to the PCIe 3.0 spec and the improved design on the output path for the PCIe bus. So for GPU-assisted tasks like H264 rendering and other functions it provides, it should be a good deal faster than the GTX5xx series.

I would recommend one of the 4GB GTX680 models which haven't hit the market just yet. Probably within the next 2 or 3 weeks and they will be hard to get ahold of at first. Cards like the EVGA GTX680 4TW Edition. If you absolutely must buy now and don't want to wait, the GTX580 with 3GB is a great choice still and prices are dropping.
 
Brilliant! Thanks a ton Jeff. I'm not pulling the trigger until after NAB just to see what new stuff may come out.

The GTX580 seems to be a real beast both in terms of size, power and heat. The GTX680 seems a little better. Maybe a little time will allow Adobe to certify the 680 card. I'm currently running a GTX480 thinking that it would be certified and it never was that has meant applying the 'hack' to get the MPE to run with the CS5/5.5 suite.
 
GTX. Done.

You only need to spend the extra on a Quadro if you actually need a few of its unique features. And as of this time, the only unique Quadro features supported by Adobe would be the SDI output option and that's a huge upgrade expense to the Quadro card. You're much better off to use a DeckLink, Kona or similar system. I would talk with Assimilate and see what their current thoughts are on GPUs for Scratch as I'm not up on Scratch that well lately. I guess I should probably pay them a visit at NAB in the next couple days. Personally, I would avoid the Quadro 4000. The 5000 is just OK and the 6000 is really nice. But the new Quadro cards arrive here in about 2 months...

As for the GTX cards, the new ones do have more CUDA cores, but they are a vastly different design from the previous series. The GTX680 is showing to only be about as fast, as a GTX580 for CUDA acceleration at the moment. I'm sure it will improve a bit with driver updates, but don't expect it to be much different/faster in the end. The GTX680 is going to be superior for OpenGL acceleration and other aspects though. It has double the bandwidth for inbound data and nearly 3.5 times the bandwidth for outbound data, due to the PCIe 3.0 spec and the improved design on the output path for the PCIe bus. So for GPU-assisted tasks like H264 rendering and other functions it provides, it should be a good deal faster than the GTX5xx series.

I would recommend one of the 4GB GTX680 models which haven't hit the market just yet. Probably within the next 2 or 3 weeks and they will be hard to get ahold of at first. Cards like the EVGA GTX680 4TW Edition. If you absolutely must buy now and don't want to wait, the GTX580 with 3GB is a great choice still and prices are dropping.

Don't assume the GTX680 will be faster for opengl. They crippled opengl (for non-game apps) after the 285, so that the 580 as 10 times slower than the 285. Unless you are running a game, opengl is most likely going to be very slow.

CUDA in the 680 will vary depending on whether you need 32 or 64 bit float. 64 bit is going to be slower.
 
Don't assume the GTX680 will be faster for opengl. They crippled opengl (for non-game apps) after the 285, so that the 580 as 10 times slower than the 285. Unless you are running a game, opengl is most likely going to be very slow.

Where did you get that info? They have done no such thing. I practically live in OpenGL accelerated applications -- Maya, XSI, Lightwave, Modo, Pro/E and more. The only thing that is crippled in nVidia land is OpenCL and it's not so much that it's crippled intentionally, but rather as a byproduct of the current implementation as it takes a back-seat to CUDA. I also write my fair share of OpenGL code too...

Still waiting for the 4GB GTX680 cards here, but my GTX560 and GTX580 cards are smokin' compared to the GTX285. Yes, in OpenGL. It's not like there's a little leprechaun in there that shifts the card into low gear if they think you might be running something that qualifies as a game. Maya and XSI typically prefer the Quadro cards because of their support for the additional hardware buffers, but these days that factor is relatively insignificant. Where the Quadro cards shine is in precision for edge and point rendering. You get far fewer gap anomalies and artifacts with the Quadro series in their higher precision modes than you do on the GTX cards. But unless someone is running Pro/E or similar on a system on a regular bases, I don't know that I would recommend the Quadro card. I own plenty of Quadro cards too... I often question why I've bought them when I get better performance on other systems with a regular GTX card.

There are indeed some OpenGL functions that are optimized differently between the driver sets of the Quadro and GeForce families. And yes, this can lead to different levels of performance with those functions.

CUDA in the 680 will vary depending on whether you need 32 or 64 bit float. 64 bit is going to be slower.

Yes, the 64bit performance will be quite a bit slower than 32bit on the 680.
 
As Jeff points out, GTX has its merits. However, consider waiting for benchmarks before jumping in. The official preliminary recommendation for Speedgrade is Quadro 5000/6000. Quadro comes with extra features - including 10-bit monitoring, better warranty/support, SDI outs [select models] etc. - and drastically better performance in some cases (certain OpenGL vector functions and double-precision compute). For everything else GTX is the better choice. As for GTX 580 vs GTX 680, it depends on the nature of the compute, varies from app to app. As of now, GTX 580 3GB is a fine choice - prices are dropping drastically (clearing out inventory + the $350 HD 7870 is faster) and for under $400 it's a good deal. As I posted in the other thread, here's some compute benchmarks, GTX 580 is still faster in most situations. It wins in the ComputeMark benchmark but that is DirectX 11 based, and given the multi-platform nature of Adobe CS I doubt DirectX will be leveraged. Even so, there's no Adobe benchmark on that site, so that's something worth looking out for.

As for the GTX cards, the new ones do have more CUDA cores, but they are a vastly different design from the previous series. The GTX680 is showing to only be about as fast, as a GTX580 for CUDA acceleration at the moment. I'm sure it will improve a bit with driver updates, but don't expect it to be much different/faster in the end. The GTX680 is going to be superior for OpenGL acceleration and other aspects though. It has double the bandwidth for inbound data and nearly 3.5 times the bandwidth for outbound data, due to the PCIe 3.0 spec and the improved design on the output path for the PCIe bus. So for GPU-assisted tasks like H264 rendering and other functions it provides, it should be a good deal faster than the GTX5xx series.

Unfortunately the only chipset GTX 680 supports for PCIe 3.0 right now is Z77 for LGA1155. The notable omission here is X79, where it would default to PCIe 2.0. Hopefully it will be enabled by a driver update in coming months. The H.264 rendering is faster due to the NVENC fixed function encoder. AMD and Intel have them too with VCE and QuickSync respectively. Otherwise, the primary bottlenecks for massive amounts of data - memory interface and render output units - were 50% greater on the GTX 580 clock-for-clock. Though offset by higher clocks on GTX 680 and a more efficient ROP array, it only just matches GTX 580, with no advancement.
 
NVidia Maximus Config

NVidia Maximus Config

Best of both worlds?


http://www.nvidia.com/object/maximus.html
NVIDIA Maximus-powered workstations solve this challenge by combining the visualization and interactive design capability of NVIDIA Quadro GPUs and the high-performance computing power of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs into a single workstation. Tesla companion processors automatically perform the heavy lifting of photorealistic rendering or engineering simulation computation. This frees up CPU resources for the work they're best suited for – I/O, running the operating system and multi-tasking – and also allows the Quadro GPU to be dedicated to powering rich, full-performance, interactive design.





I'm building a new PC that will be running ScratchLAB and Adobe CS6 suite. One thing I can't nail down is the GPU. Almost all of the setups I have seen listed for higher end systems all use the Quadro line of cards (I was thinking of the Quadro 4000 or 5000) but the newer GTX line are now PCI3.0 enabled, have A LOT more CUDA cores and are a fraction of the price. I've gone through the Adobe forums and the resident hardware guru (Harm) over there seems to favor the GTX line but then again it seems like most folks over there are working on h.264 and AVCHD files.

What would the ideal card for working with R3D media in ScratchLAB/Speedgrade/Premiere (already have a Rocket card for the machine)?
 
Hmmmm...so, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like a bit of a guessing game as to how to best set up for Adobe's new pipeline/workflow. Currently I see ScratchLAB using the GPU when working/grading and then rendering out to Quicktimes/MXF seems to go to the CPU (this works well in the sense that you can be rendering and working at the same time without working on a slug of a machine). Premiere uses a lot of CPU power but then uses the GPU to work on realtime effects and video decoding but I've never seen my GPU even hit 40% load, usually it sits around 5%-10%. When rendering out I've seen Premiere use maybe 10%-15% of the GTX480 I currently have but Adobe Media encoder (that I typically use) just pushes every thread on the CPU to 100% and the GPU sits idle.

As far as over all system performance I currently have an i7 960 @3.2Ghz, 12Gb RAM, GTX480 with a Red Rocket (3 year old machine). I can playback, edit, grade DSLR, C300 and Red media all in real time no problemo. What I'd like to get is increased render performance . It seems to me that the place to spend money is on CPU(s) unless the Maximus configuration is going to take over render duty.

NAB opens tomorrow so I hope Adobe will post system spec's or even better, suggested system configurations.
 
Where did you get that info? They have done no such thing. I practically live in OpenGL accelerated applications -- Maya, XSI, Lightwave, Modo, Pro/E and more. The only thing that is crippled in nVidia land is OpenCL and it's not so much that it's crippled intentionally, but rather as a byproduct of the current implementation as it takes a back-seat to CUDA. I also write my fair share of OpenGL code too...

This thread has many, many posts on opengl issues showing the sad comparisons between 285, 580, and Quadro 6000. Pay attention to the glReadPixels call times - and the memcpy speed (which shows what the speed could be if not crippled) . The 580 should be faster than the Quadro 6000, but it's not (unless you use CUDA in place of the glreadpixels call).

http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=291789#Post291789

Some programs may have circumvented the crippled calls by using CUDA (as suggested within this thread as a fix a few posts down), but I believe you'll find that using directX is preferred for many programs due to these issues (3dsMax, 3DCoat, etc. users certainly go directX). BTW - Depends on the # of polys you're moving.

This behavior by nVidia is due to an attempt to prop up their Quadro cards, with lesser chipsets that nVidia sells directly - to squeeze as much profit as they can from their non-gaming users.

BTW - originally found out about this on Newtek's Lightwave forum, when I was asking advice on a new card.
 
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Quadro comes with extra features - including 10-bit monitoring, better warranty/support, SDI outs [select models] etc. - and drastically better performance in some cases (certain OpenGL vector functions and double-precision compute). For everything else GTX is the better choice.

Quite correct. As a pure processing unit for most of the things people here are concerned with - scaling, color correction, general graphics processing - the GTX580 is probably the best available card. The Quadro series is intended for applications that involve texture mapping and vector graphics processing, such as 3D animation/rendering programs like Maya, 3D Studio Max, Softimage, Autocad, and the like. The Quadro cards do a great job for those type of applications, but for general purpose GPU power, the GTX series is a better choice - and considerably cheaper as well.
 
This thread has many, many posts on opengl issues showing the sad comparisons between 285, 580, and Quadro 6000. Pay attention to the glReadPixels call times - and the memcpy speed (which shows what the speed could be if not crippled) . The 580 should be faster than the Quadro 6000, but it's not (unless you use CUDA in place of the glreadpixels call).

http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=291789#Post291789

Some programs may have circumvented the crippled calls by using CUDA (as suggested within this thread as a fix a few posts down), but I believe you'll find that using directX is preferred for many programs due to these issues (3dsMax, 3DCoat, etc. users certainly go directX). BTW - Depends on the # of polys you're moving.

This behavior by nVidia is due to an attempt to prop up their Quadro cards, with lesser chipsets that nVidia sells directly - to squeeze as much profit as they can from their non-gaming users.

BTW - originally found out about this on Newtek's Lightwave forum, when I was asking advice on a new card.

At first glance it would seem that Nvidia is deliberately crippling GeForce drivers to create artificial product segmentation, and that may be true to an extent, but it is a much more complex issue. Firstly, this is a practice that has gone by for nearly a decade now, and extends to AMD's (and formerly ATI's) FirePro line as well. If you look at the benchmarks, it is clear that Quadro performs dramatically better for certain OpenGL functions than GeForce. But at the same time, something that is often overlooked is that Quadro cards perform disproportionately poorly in DirectX games. The drivers are simply tuned for different usage scenarios and clearly there are compromise made for each set. Now, compute is much less dependent on drivers than OpenGL or DirectX, but we will get to that later...

Up until G80, GeForce cards could be flashed with a Quadro BIOS, with Quadro drivers installed. Performance went up in applications like SolidWorks, down in Crysis, but it still lagged behind the real Quadro it was trying to emulate. There are several documented cases of 8800 GTX being turned into Quadro FX 4600 or 5600 but falling behind the real deal. So it goes beyond just drivers. For starters, the functions that are accelerated are mostly FP64, and Quadro GPUs feature a much higher FP64 / double-precision floating point rate. Quadro 4000/5000/6000 do FP64 at 1/2 FP32 (single-precision) rate, while GTX 580 does only 1/8 rate (GTX 680 is 1/24th!). This is again binning more than artificial segmentation as FP64 ALU transistors are much more densely packed than FP64 and much less likely to clock up to spec. If you look at the micrograph of GF100/110 it is easy to spot the FP64 ALUs bunched up on the lower right of every SM. Those that can hit 1/2 rate go Quadro, the rest go GeForce. This is much the same way Scarlet sensors are binned from Epic. Those that can do 96fps at 5K go Epic, the rest are pegged at 12fps and go Scarlet. In addition to this, Quadro feature ECC memory, greater frame buffers (Quadro 6000 is 6GB), more refined VRMs, etc. (probably many more minor differences I am not aware of) over and above the other features. All of this at the cost of maximizing power efficiency, which means GeForce cards are clocked much higher with greater voltage than their Quadro counterparts. This would also be a good time to point out that Quadro 6000's GeForce counterpart is GTX 480, not GTX 580. Also, much of this is not as severe in the Radeon / FirePro line, where the FirePro is much closer in price and performance to Radeon and Radeons are not hobbled for double precision as much. Nvidia has establish showstopping mind-share over the Quadro workstation GPU market though - much like Apple in the film and music industries - further enhanced by CUDA. DirectX is awesome - but sadly exclusive only to Windows.

Getting back to compute, if single precision compute is all we want, go GeForce, there is no doubt about it. Like with gaming, all of Quadro's OpenGL optimizations count for nothing, and the compromise to get there actually affects single precision performance. Fortunately for us, most of our relevant CUDA usage scenarios leverage single precision, or in more familiar terms, 32-bit floating point operations. There are fair amount of double-precision oriented compute (CUDA/OpenCL) apps out there which still run faster on Quadro 6000 than GTX 580. Obviously this is only comparable when you consider two identical silicons or at least based on the same architectures. The choice becomes harder between GTX 680 and GTX 580... In any case, can't go wrong with GTX 580 3 GB now selling for under $400.
 
Found this on MAXIMUS

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/nvidia-and-adobe-solutions/nvidia-maximus-technology-with-adobe-premiere-pro/


Best of both worlds?


http://www.nvidia.com/object/maximus.html
NVIDIA Maximus-powered workstations solve this challenge by combining the visualization and interactive design capability of NVIDIA Quadro GPUs and the high-performance computing power of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs into a single workstation. Tesla companion processors automatically perform the heavy lifting of photorealistic rendering or engineering simulation computation. This frees up CPU resources for the work they're best suited for – I/O, running the operating system and multi-tasking – and also allows the Quadro GPU to be dedicated to powering rich, full-performance, interactive design.
 
At first glance it would seem that Nvidia is deliberately crippling GeForce drivers to create artificial product segmentation, and that may be true to an extent, but it is a much more complex issue. Firstly, this is a practice that has gone by for nearly a decade now, and extends to AMD's (and formerly ATI's) FirePro line as well. If you look at the benchmarks, it is clear that Quadro performs dramatically better for certain OpenGL functions than GeForce. But at the same time, something that is often overlooked is that Quadro cards perform disproportionately poorly in DirectX games. The drivers are simply tuned for different usage scenarios and clearly there are compromise made for each set. Now, compute is much less dependent on drivers than OpenGL or DirectX, but we will get to that later...

Up until G80, GeForce cards could be flashed with a Quadro BIOS, with Quadro drivers installed. Performance went up in applications like SolidWorks, down in Crysis, but it still lagged behind the real Quadro it was trying to emulate. There are several documented cases of 8800 GTX being turned into Quadro FX 4600 or 5600 but falling behind the real deal. So it goes beyond just drivers. For starters, the functions that are accelerated are mostly FP64, and Quadro GPUs feature a much higher FP64 / double-precision floating point rate. Quadro 4000/5000/6000 do FP64 at 1/2 FP32 (single-precision) rate, while GTX 580 does only 1/8 rate (GTX 680 is 1/24th!). This is again binning more than artificial segmentation as FP64 ALU transistors are much more densely packed than FP64 and much less likely to clock up to spec. If you look at the micrograph of GF100/110 it is easy to spot the FP64 ALUs bunched up on the lower right of every SM. Those that can hit 1/2 rate go Quadro, the rest go GeForce. This is much the same way Scarlet sensors are binned from Epic. Those that can do 96fps at 5K go Epic, the rest are pegged at 12fps and go Scarlet. In addition to this, Quadro feature ECC memory, greater frame buffers (Quadro 6000 is 6GB), more refined VRMs, etc. (probably many more minor differences I am not aware of) over and above the other features. All of this at the cost of maximizing power efficiency, which means GeForce cards are clocked much higher with greater voltage than their Quadro counterparts. This would also be a good time to point out that Quadro 6000's GeForce counterpart is GTX 480, not GTX 580. Also, much of this is not as severe in the Radeon / FirePro line, where the FirePro is much closer in price and performance to Radeon and Radeons are not hobbled for double precision as much. Nvidia has establish showstopping mind-share over the Quadro workstation GPU market though - much like Apple in the film and music industries - further enhanced by CUDA. DirectX is awesome - but sadly exclusive only to Windows.

Getting back to compute, if single precision compute is all we want, go GeForce, there is no doubt about it. Like with gaming, all of Quadro's OpenGL optimizations count for nothing, and the compromise to get there actually affects single precision performance. Fortunately for us, most of our relevant CUDA usage scenarios leverage single precision, or in more familiar terms, 32-bit floating point operations. There are fair amount of double-precision oriented compute (CUDA/OpenCL) apps out there which still run faster on Quadro 6000 than GTX 580. Obviously this is only comparable when you consider two identical silicons or at least based on the same architectures. The choice becomes harder between GTX 680 and GTX 580... In any case, can't go wrong with GTX 580 3 GB now selling for under $400.

The calls they crippled have to do with reading memory. Rendering programs use this a lot, whereas video games write to memory a lot. It's not a deficiency of the chip, as the same chip can use CUDA calls to read the same memory at 'normal' speed.

This is why opengl for 3dsMax is dog slow with a GTX-580, and not even the default. Do some googling for "nvidia opengl crippled". I was very depressed when I saw what they had done.

As for your advice, I've got a GTX-580 Classified Ultra with 3GB. Of the choices out there, it may be the best.

At some point, if I ever get time, I'll probably run some tests and then put my GTX-285 in and see how much it affects different programs - but I'm pretty sure Lightwave, as it relies on opengl a lot, would certainly be affected.

EVGA has lifetime warranty support, and if you pay them a bit more, cross shipping. But EVGA won't be able to help at all if you can't install the drivers.

nVidia's CUDA is what I really wanted, as I have a lot of programs that use that.

Of course, I'm unable to install any of the drivers after 270.61, as their install programs after that version were changed and fail. It's like they hired a monkey to write the installs, it's very shoddy. Lots of users are having problems just installing.

If you check on the EVGA and nVidia forums about the new driver releases, it's pretty scary. All kind of memory leaks that will crash YouTube vieiwng, and pretty much hammer more complex uses. New drivers != better drivers.

I hope nVidia gets its act together. They would make more money by not alienating customers and just producing the best product they could. They have certainly made me very hesitant to buy any newer cards from them - due to my experiences with upgrading the 285 to the 580 - and there are a lot of pissed off people (first noticed on the Newtek forums) that have switched to ATI (which, of course does not have CUDA and has it's own issues).

Sometimes, it's hard to win - and by winning, I mean to throw money at a problem and fix it.
 
Thanks Les, I did some reading through the forums, but I can't really find any objective information and am surprised no one has officially investigated and analyzed the matter. Certainly seems fishy though.
 
Its not the cards that are crippled in opengl (and somewhat cuda) performance, its (mostly) the driver.


Get a GTX47/80 card, change its device id and soft straps to a quadro 6000.
Add a second GTX57/80 card, change its device id and soft straps to a Tesla M2090.
You need to stay in the same architecture, GTX4xx and Quadro4/5/6 = GF100, GTX5xx and Tesla M2090 = GF110


mem copy gets about a 40% boost, other performance is increased slightly, the "quadro" would be used for display in adobe while the "tesla" would be used for mercury.


With a gtx 590, I could get the second M2090 to register device inquiries, but windows would always show it not working in device manager, and resolve would not see it, so probably best avoided.


Your primary limitations over a "real" setup is vram and no 10bit displayport on windows.
add a cheap firepro or quadro600 if you want the deep color display in photoshop.


If you are working with 5k red files, using cuda, about 1 layer per gig of vram.


(5120x2700)/(65536/4) = .84375 gigs


So your 3gig gtx580/ 2.5g gtx570 gets you 3 layers, a 6gig M2090 gets you 7 layers


Don't blame nvidia for trying to make some money
 
Its not the cards that are crippled in opengl (and somewhat cuda) performance, its (mostly) the driver.


Get a GTX47/80 card, change its device id and soft straps to a quadro 6000.
Add a second GTX57/80 card, change its device id and soft straps to a Tesla M2090.
You need to stay in the same architecture, GTX4xx and Quadro4/5/6 = GF100, GTX5xx and Tesla M2090 = GF110


mem copy gets about a 40% boost, other performance is increased slightly, the "quadro" would be used for display in adobe while the "tesla" would be used for mercury.


With a gtx 590, I could get the second M2090 to register device inquiries, but windows would always show it not working in device manager, and resolve would not see it, so probably best avoided.


Your primary limitations over a "real" setup is vram and no 10bit displayport on windows.
add a cheap firepro or quadro600 if you want the deep color display in photoshop.


If you are working with 5k red files, using cuda, about 1 layer per gig of vram.


(5120x2700)/(65536/4) = .84375 gigs


So your 3gig gtx580/ 2.5g gtx570 gets you 3 layers, a 6gig M2090 gets you 7 layers


Don't blame nvidia for trying to make some money
Are you saying you're installing the Quadro drivers after changing the device id's?

Do you have specific instructions for this?

I've got a GTX-580.
 
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