Communigate Pro AE-List@media-motion.tv Message 54850

Hacking GTXs into Quadros. Funny, and not for the faint of heart.

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/hacking-nvidia-cards-into-their-professional-counterparts/

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/hacking-nvidia-cards-into-their-professional-counterparts/msg207550/#msg207550

From: After Effects Mail List [mailto:AE-List@media-motion.tv]
Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2014 11:37 PM
To: After Effects Mail List
Subject: Re: [AE] What's the state of Ae on new MacPros?

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.

On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 11:05 PM, Jim Curtis <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote:

I've been reading some articles today whose authors call the GTX series a gaming card, and that the Quadro is the series for professionals. And they're about a thousand dollars more expensive. Downside for GTX is said to be they run louder and hotter.

Any thoughts on that?

I don't mind paying more to get the best for my needs. Being on Mac, my choices are more limited. I don't want to run a hack. Dependability and support is critical.

Why did you go with a GTX and not a Quadro?

On Aug 13, 2014, at 9:42 PM, rendernyc <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote:

The quadro 4000 is a very weak CUDA card... its misleading due to naming and marketing.

i sold mine a while back and bought a GTX570 2.5GB card and see a performance increase of 2-3X

i would check out a card like a 770 or 780 perhaps... something like that and the CUDA performance will receive a huge boost

On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 10:36 PM, Jim Curtis <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote:

Hey Steve,

Didn't you used to have a Quadro 4000 in your MacPro3,1?.

That's what I have now, and I'm wondering if it'd be worth it to upgrade. Other than the CUDA card, our systems are pretty similar, and I

I get a variety of source footage… a lot of MP4 variants, and lately 2K ProRes4444 from an Alexa. My system can't play that unprocessed in real-time at Full quality. That's curious, because I can play 4 streams of 1080 ProRes 422 easily. CUDA seems to make a big difference in playback of the PR4444. WIth it off, my CPU meters max out; with it on, they go down around 50%.

Being able to play at least one stream scaled to 1080 with some accelerated color effects at full res without dropping frames would be nice.

On Aug 13, 2014, at 1:50 PM, Steve Oakley <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote:

my 2008 mac tower, K5000, SSD system drive, 3X3TB raid eats thru 1080 editing all day long with good responsiveness. I’m talking 8-10 layers in PP with 1-2 video layers where one is often some h.264 format, 1 ProRes, maybe one ProRes 4444 + alpha, static graphics, lumetri from speed grade. where this system probably suffers is decoding the h.264 formats where 2-3 layers will get boggish a bit.

OTH I am finishing a shot in 4K GH4 edited in 1080 on my imac i7 and its gone well. since its a 2.93gh / much faster ram bus machine it decodes h.264 a lot more smoothly than the 2008 machine.

so a used 5.1 tower should be a consideration if you want the PCIe slots, and a loaded 27” iMac with nV GPU could be a really nice compact machine. I’m somewhat waiting for an update iMac with 6core i7.

On Aug 13, 2014, at 1:30 PM, Tony Romain <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote:

This is exactly what I've been hearing as well. Unless the software is written from the ground up to take advantage of the updated hardware specs/architecture on the new mac pros, the speed boost is negligible.. Especially for the price.

Would def just spend your money upgrading video cards, ram, DEFINITELY replace your system drive with an SSD as well as get an additional SSD for use as a AE disk cache… they are super cheap these days

Can't stress enough how awesome the switch to an SSD system drive was…

danny princz

vimeo.com/rendernyc

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