RED Rocket XL On the Horizon?

[Ryan Hamelin]

Hey guys,

Just curious if anybody has any thoughts about the usefulness of the RED Rocket-X Cards moving into an 8k workflow.

It seemed in the early going that the cards weren't even compatible with Helium/Monstro footage, but I know there's been a patch released for RCX to make Helium compatible and that DaVinci Resolve just updated with a fix for Helium files displaying as "Media Offline" in its editing panel.

The original RED Rocket X was announced at NAB 2013: http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?97867-NAB13-RED-ROCKET-X with the original Rocket preceding it in 2011. It feels like we're more than overdue for an upgrade considering how much sensors and compression formats have changed since then. There also seems to have been an uptick in postings of cards for sale from various companies and post houses in recent weeks, and I'm curious if anybody's heard anything about a forthcoming announcement.

Does it make sense to use a RED Rocket-X in conjunction with a Titan or Quadro GPU to get the best performance with 8k footage? Or was the X really just a beast in the 6k space when there wasn't anything else competitive on the market a few years back.

TLDR; Any rumors of a new RED Rocket card? Does the RED Rocket-X even matter anymore in a world of Titan and Quadro GPUs?

 

[Jason Diamond]

I believe the update was to support Dragon 8K VV not Helium.

 

[DJ Meyer]

The Rocket-X within RCX is currently compatible with Helium - and does help particularly on lower core count machines.

I don't think you'll ever see another Rocket card - Jarred has been hinting with varying degrees of subtlety for a couple years now that GPU is the future for .r3d

 

[Jason Diamond]

Hmmm Thats good, I've been using GPU mainly. The link for the Rocket X installer last update from 7.28.16 says "Support for Dragon 8K". Was there a beta release somewhere else that specified Helium support?

 

[DJ Meyer]

Hmmm Thats good, I've been using GPU mainly. The link for the Rocket X installer last update from 7.28.16 says "Support for Dragon 8K". Was there a beta release somewhere else that specified Helium support?

I don't know when it was added but just now when I open up some Helium 8K footage, I hear the rocket-x fan spin up and it starts caching a lot faster than if turn it off. This is an a machine with a i7-6950x and Titan Pascal.

Edit: To be more specific...using Red Player 50.x

i7-6950x @ 4.1 Ghz, 128 RAM, 2x Titan Pascal, Rocket-X

Helium 8k HD 8:1

with Rocket-X + GPUs enabled: 8K full debayer playback is smooth
with Rocket-X disabvled, GPU only: must drop to 1/4 debayer for smooth playback, 1/2 stuggles, full=slideshow

 

[Jason Diamond]

sweet. that
Titan Pascal does a lot of work

 

[Bastian Meier]

If I remember correctly there was a statement that RED is not gonna make a new Rocket since the GPUs have progressed so much with the processing power of the R3D Files.

 

[Bastian Meier]

Here is a look at one of Jarred's posts

As for the RocketX and Helium.. as you know we have been focusing our efforts on GPU decode for the last while.

So yes Rocket-X plus a good GPU is gonna get you around 24fps Full 8K on Helium.

But you can also get close to that full 8K 24fps with a new Titan-X GPU and Intel's largests core Xeon in a dual cpu box without the Rocket-X.

I love you Rocket-X but in a year or two I think we should be at the point where GPU + CPU puts you out to pasture.

Nvidia is just dominating right now and their GPU's are advancing so quickly it's the horse I would bet on.
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[Ryan Hamelin]

Good find! It's sad to think that dedicated hardware is going out the window, especially when it seems as though using the card in tandem with high powered GPUs does improve performance, at least somewhat.

Does anyone know how the Rocket-X performance boost compares to simply purchasing an additional GPU? Reports seem to conflict on whether or not the benefit is still wortwhile, even at a $2,500 used price point.

Here is a look at one of Jarred's posts

 

[Michael Lindsay]

RRX can

process fully (wavelet decode, debayer, scale) Monstro in legacy mode..

process partially (wavelet decode) Helium in IPP2 mode..

So going forward it is great for editorial with dragon and monstro but needs a fair bit of GPU help in a carefully balanced system to do IPP2 fast ..

So with helium it does the job of about 28+(physical Xeon) cores but needs to hand to GPU for the rest after the de-wavelet for IPP2

 

[Zack Birlew]

Yes, that was my understanding as well in regards to GPUs taking over the R3D workflow. Still, I think RED could have helped things along by dropping the price significantly once Rocket X cards started to become less relevant. As it is now, I'd be more inclined to invest in a secondary GPU than try to get good deals on used Rocket X cards as I tried to do with getting a Rocket 1 for my RED One MX. It just became a toss up as to whether the card would even work and diminishing returns compared to what a modern GPU could do alone.

 

[Michael Lindsay]

Thanks for shareing ...

It is great to have as much real info here as possible.. someone I know recently bought an extra 1080ti (dual GPU) so to process Red rushes faster after reading some posts here.. and ended up with zero improvement as he had no RRX and only 12 cores of CPU.

I recently built a new Thunderbolt 3 Hackintosh system (GA-Z270X-G9 - i7 7700k 4.2 GHz - GTX 1080, both Win10 and OSX 10.13.1) to work with Epic-W 8k R3D material, and I also picked up the new TB3 Sonnet III chassis for my Rocket-X (connects as PCI-e x8 lane), my transcodes tests have been in Redcine-X 50.1 on High Sierra, the results are below. The system runs at about 70-75% of its system resources used while transcoding 8k R3D files (HBA Areca Controller and 8 TB SAS Raid5).


8k R3D (rocket-x full debayer) to 4kHD ProRes aprox 25-28 fps, 2:00 min clip takes avg 1:45 min
8k R3D (rocket-x, full debayer) to 1080p ProRes aprox 35-36 fps, 2:00 min clip takes avg 1:20 min

8k R3D (GPU, 1/2 debayer) to 4kHD ProRes aprox 7-8 fps, 2:00 min clip takes avg 7:00 min
8k R3D (GPU, 1/4 debayer) to 1080p ProRes aprox 18-20 fps, 2:00 min clip takes avg 2:30 min


As you can see with these real world tests the Rocket-X does improved the transcodes times by quite a bit, but you really need a system that can actually make use of the Rocket-X. My old GA-Z87X-UD7 system with a GTX 770 OC is about as fast with the Rocket-X in a thunderbolt 2 chassis (PCI-e x4 lane) as my new system is with only using the GPU in that system (GTX 1080). The older system just can't handle 8k files, but it does perfectly fine with 6k and 5k R3D material.

 

[Michael Lindsay]

Red is def doing a lot on the GPU but NOT the biggest computational hurdle... 'the de-wavelet'

from my testing the biggest computational challenge it seems with R3Ds is the de-wavelet. And outside of a RRX this is 'always' done on CPU..

Now in legacy mode I can use an old mac laptop and the RRX in a TB2 chassis and still get faster than RT for 6k (assuming not bandwith limited by drives or buss to drives) BUT with IPP2 you can really only decode large red files (8k) with more then 4gb of Vram and 8gb is ideal.. this rules out a Mac laptops using a TB2 or 3 chassis

I suspect it wont work but I'd like to try a ext chassis with a 1080ti or similar and a RRX?... if this worked I'd love to put one together. but I don't know if when the RRX hands of the pre-debayer pre scaled decoded file to GPU if this can happen within the chasis or if it needs to take the journey back to the computer and out again...?? I also don't know if that really matters..

the challenge going forward is there is now 3 types of R3D files (actually 4 but I am ignoreing MX) and they all have different decode computational profiles..

from testing 8k Dragon, Helium and Monsto and assuning I normalise the decodes times and use IPP2
Dragon decodeing is CPU heavy and using simple scaling and debayering the GPU is much less heavy
Monstro decodes useing more GPU but seem not too bad
but Helium is slower and also uses more CPU proportionally..

as Red tweaks the software I am sure this may change

Now you can force Monstro to decode using legacy (non IPP2) on a Redrocketx and this works well... but not Heilium.. (on a side note I am please that Monstro seems to be more of a tweaked Dragon chip)

I have a RRX for sale becuase I am building at least a 28 core v4 2.6gig xeon machine after Xmas for rushes.. and from my testing a 1080ti will not be fully fully utlised in rushes creation even with that many cores decoding those wavelets.. Cores matter! ...unless you have a RRX in the system

BUT if I could buy a new chassis and pop in the RRX and 1080ti and get ok performance with IPP2 and 8k I may try and do that instead.. Even if it only macthed what I get in legacy mode currently it would still be worth it..