I had dual Q4000’s actually… they are gone. The Q 4800 I had ( puny 192 cores ) in some ways was faster with resolve. K5000 is a vastly better card. rendered some AE raytrace with it last nite :) works great with resolve and SG.
a PC ROM nVidia card will work fine on your mac, you just don’t have any display until the desktop finally loads up. so if you can live with out the boot screen a PC card will do. there are mac rom flashed cards on ebay too.
GTX cards are fine for most people’s uses. Quadro cards are designed to run 100% 24/7. They are bullet proof, but come with the price. I never worry about it working under heavy loads of 12hr edit days or long AE ray trace renders. for less demanding things a GTX will do you fine. just go with the most Vram you can get.
lets also be real. processing a couple layers of 1080p30 in PP CC isn’t taxing those cores unless you have a pile of filters per layer. GPU monitoring reveals there is generally a decent amount of headroom, which is good. One of the differences isn’t getting data onto the card, but getting it off and into your Vout card. I think in this respect quadros probably do better.
you also need to balance your PS output abilities too. you can run dual GPU’s on some macs, but require external PS for the 2nd card. This matters if you want to run resolve full out with a lot of nodes. for most uses though you won’t need to go this far.
S
From what I have learned in years of testing:
Quadro line has optimized, heavily supported drivers for 3D viewport performance. Quadros are generally optimized for precise, accurate work and high-poly count scenes in Maya, Max, C4D, autoCAD and industrial modeling like Rhino etc. There are benchmarks that prove this. If you do a lot of 3D high-end prototype work they are great.
The GTX series are optimized for OpenGL and Direct3D performance - in a word, gaming. However they have nearly equivalent CUDA performance as quadro series (depending on series). And most often, better.
However, after the GTX 580 was released, Nvidia realized the GTX cards were cannibalizing the "pro" market and hobbled CUDA performance on 6xx and 7xx series cards vs. the equivalent Quadro cards. Although the 780 has performance rivaling the 580. For example even a GTX 480 will do much better on CUDA benchmarks than a Quadro 4000. Although typically the quadros have more VRAM, run quieter and are more stable.
Currently the GTX 580 3GB edition is still the sweet spot of price::performance ratio for CUDA processing. A GTX Titan or Titan Black will outperform the card but at double the cost. (although haven't checked the market - 580s are harder to come by now).
However, the GTX series are more or less the exact same hardware as the equivalent Quadro series, except the QA is not nearly as rigorous - more errors are allowed, and frequently they disable certain additional pipelines and channels as a result. Floating point performance isn't as accurate, unless enabling double precision.
Overall, unless you are aiming to do multi-million poly scenes in realtime 3D previz, you are almost always better off with a high-end GTX card. I have two GTX titans running SLI for the same price (or less!) than a K5000, with about 2x to 3x the raw performance in AE. Currently the Titan (or Titan black) is the best performing CUDA card available, and has surprisingly low power draw and a full 6GB VRAM per card.
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