Which graphics card is now recommended for the new Mac Pros for the RED?

[Stephen Pruitt]

I know several folks have written on this in the not-to-distant past, but it's time for me to investigate further and make a move. It seems as if the key players are the ATI HD 2600s, the NVIDIA 8800GT and the NVIDIA FX5600.

If I'm just interested in REDability, which one is the best?

Thanks much.

Stephen

[Curran Giddens]

I'd also like to know the answer.

Even if the only official answer I can get is, "When rendering to DPX from RedCine, the nVidia 8800GT is around 15% faster than the stock ATI 2600HD...."

or "... is less than 10% faster...."

[Mat@imageWork]

Sorry guys but I think the code base for REDALERT or REDCINE is not GPU intensive but CPU intensive...Graeme coould probably confirm that. I swear I'm wrong...

[Cüneyt Kaya]

REDALERT is CPU based

REDCINE is GPU based
on a mac it works fine with an ATI Card.
but the new MacPro comes only with a 256 mb card.

The N`vidia has about 1 Gb.

Normally N`Vidia on a Mac means slower render times, but if the GPU RAM is so much higher i dont know anymore.

Best would be if apple writes the proper driver for N`Vidia ( what i dont understand why they are not doing it, because everything they sell (Macbook pro/Mac Pro) can be delivered with a better N`Vidia card.

[Shawn Booth]

I went with the FX5600 and... WOW... Also, using 32GB of RAM and the KONA 3 card.

The files I play with love it all so far.

[Stephen Pruitt]

Hey, Kow. . .

Have you had any difficulties with REDCine or REDAlert files at all with that card????

Thanks so much.

Stephen

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I have the 8800GT in my new mac pro. I have seen no evidence of the current nVidia drivers being slow. This card screams along just great in every application I've run. I would take this card any day over the ATI 2600HD.

As for the FX5600... I would not recommend this to anyone unless they have specific need for the extra functionality. If you have to ask what the extra functionality is, then there's a 99% chance you don't need it. It's really no faster than the 8800GT and all that extra onboard memory is going to do nearly nothing for REDCINE or most applications that are not intensive on large 3D geometry or texture data sets. You will gain a lot more render speed by saving your money and getting the 8800GT and buying another system to aid in the rendering.

REDCINE does use the GPU, but doesn't seem to benefit highly from it. I think it's only processing some of the color data and little else. It also doesn't seem to scale well across multiple CPUs. I haven't had a chance to do serious CPU profiling or benchmarking with it. A couple times I have started to do so, it crashes as it dislikes much else running at the same time, especially other apps that produce any real display output while REDCINE is running. Maybe this weekend I'll take another look at it as I'll be back in town and in the presence of my workstation again.

[Stephen Pruitt]

Chalk up some more great reasoned advice from Jeff Kilgroe.

Thanks, Jeff. . .

Stephen

[Shawn Booth]

Hey, Kow. . .

Have you had any difficulties with REDCine or REDAlert files at all with that card????

Thanks so much.

Stephen

No difficulties with REDCINE, but I don't really use REDALERT.

I chose this card because I also run AE and SHAKE constantly - and yes, it helps tremendously.
But I also attribute a lot of this to the KONA 3 card as well. There's little talk on the forum (as far as I can see) about capture cards and their uses in editing systems. Believe me, there's more use for them than "just capturing".

[Stephen Pruitt]

Okay, Kow. . . enlighten me. . . what is a Kona 3 card?

Stephen

[Shawn Booth]

Okay, Kow. . . enlighten me. . . what is a Kona 3 card?

Stephen

http://aja.com/html/products_macintosh_kona.html

sorry all I'm posting is the link for now - but know it aids in rendering, processing, etc. with editing (wether you're using AVID/FCS/ or whatever)

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The Kona3 is awesome, but I just want to offer this up as clarification. The Kona3 card provides on-board processing for uncompressed QT, HDV, DVCPRO[HD] and ProRes 422 -- in supported applications. It also can acelerate many Apple FCS Dynamic RT functions. It unfortunately does not speed up processing of anything in REDCINE or RED Alert / REDLINE. It does not offer any benefits to the R3D QT Proxies.

As for the FX5600, I haven't been able to do any speed testing of my own as I don't have an FX5600 equipped Mac to test with. But most benchmarks I've seen from similarly clocked cards (5600 & 8800GT) in Windows land and a few posted benches for the Mac, places it about 10-15% faster than the 8800GT card in intensive 3D computations and about 5-10% faster in overall performance. In the end, some will buy it because they need the genlock ability or additional hardware functions for specific software (none of which are used by REDCINE, AE, Motion, etc..). Not to pick on you directly Kowboy, but Shake doesn't make use of any GPU functions or GPU rendering ability. Even a generous 10% overall faster performance assumption translates into very little speed increase in applications like REDCINE, Motion, etc.. Or other apps that don't extensively use the GPU. REDCINE doesn't benefit much from the 8800GT over the ATI 2600HD. It just doesn't make that extensive or efficient use of any GPU functionality. For someone looking to boost REDCINE performance, or speed with the Apple pro apps, that money needed to upgrade to the 5600 would be much better spent on other things. ...Just my $0.02.


Each buyer will have to decide for themselves what card will benefit them most. The Quadro 5600 is the top card for the Mac right now and it comes at a hefty price. As I wrote above, I wouldn't recommend it unless someone has specific need of its unique hardware features or just has extra money to burn... At least not for an editing / compositing workstation. Now if you're going to be running Maya on this workstation at least 20 hours a week, then I would probably highly recommend considering the 5600.

[Gunleik Groven]

For 3D apps, it's a non-brainer. Go FX!
And if you want to demo Scratch (unsupported in BootCamp). Go FX!
But for other uses...

Gunleik

[Videoteque73]

Jeff Kilgroe should recive a free Scarlet for all the support he provides!!! ;)

[Stephen Pruitt]

I couldn't agree more!

Stephen

[Stephen Pruitt]

I think that's the last option I know nothing about. What's it do? Does it play into RED workflow?

:-)

Thanks much.

Stephen

[Gunleik Groven]

It does if you have a RAID / networksolution / SAN that supports it...


It's one of those "if you don't know what it is, you probably don't need them yet" things :)

Gunleik

[Stephen Pruitt]

Are you telling me that I don't need my RED?

:-)

Seriously, how would one use that Fibre Channel Card??? I'll be needing about 8TB of memory this summer.

Stephen

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The fiber channel card is an interface card for fiber optic communication. Many external RAID systems will use fiber channel as a connectivity option. Fiber channel is a popular interface for very dense and high-speed networking, SAN applications, that sort of thing. FC is a very easy and robust interface, but also a bit expensive considering that eSATA and SAS can provide all the same benefits if only considering storage solutions and not network applications.

If you are buying a Mac Pro now, don't worry about the fiber channel option unless you need it now. Such things are easily added later and one you pick now may not fit your needs in 6 months when you go to buy a new RAID. In the end, you may find that an eSATA, SAS or InfiniBand system may fit your needs better.

[Stephen Pruitt]

Kilgroe to the rescue. . . again. . .

Mucho, mucho danka!

Stephen

[gdv]

I know several folks have written on this in the not-to-distant past, but it's time for me to investigate further and make a move. It seems as if the key players are the ATI HD 2600s, the NVIDIA 8800GT and the NVIDIA FX5600.

If I'm just interested in REDability, which one is the best?

Thanks much.

Stephen

Stephen, you are mostly right about that.
Why don't the Red web site has some info pages about this repeatedly discussed issue?
Because, and I said it before and I am holding to my point, the Red company is making a partial work and let the Red users complete it. This is why this forum is so active and this is part of the Red's PR strategy.
Though I will forgive them if we all end up with a camera that will deliver good, editable images.

[BASSAM MSSALATIE]

I went with the FX5600 and... WOW... Also, using 32GB of RAM and the KONA 3 card.

The files I play with love it all so far.

Your station is pc or mac ?

[Billy McCannon]

MacPro can take up to four graphic cards.

I presume when Jeff is talking about the Fx8800 he is talking about one card. Will three ATI 2600 give a better performance (cost aside) then one FX8800 or are there other factors at play - what other factors?

[Steve Sanacore]

I am confused, whey doesn't Scratch work in bootcamp? I haven't found any app that doesn't work in boot camp with WinXP yet.

[Shawn Booth]

Your station is pc or mac ?

Mac - of course. I can't afford a PC.

[Joe Walker]

I've heard three different stories as to which Macs the 5600 is compatible with. Does anyone know if it will work in a (Quad) Mac Pro Dual-Core Intel Xeon 3 GHz machine?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

MacPro can take up to four graphic cards.

I presume when Jeff is talking about the Fx8800 he is talking about one card. Will three ATI 2600 give a better performance (cost aside) then one FX8800 or are there other factors at play - what other factors?

Yes, only talking about using one video card in the Mac Pro.

The Mac Pro does not have proper EFI and driver support for SLI / Crossfire multi-card operation to start with. Additionally, even though there are 4 PCI-E slots in the current Mac Pro and you can install 4 video cards, not all of the slots are capable of 16 lanes of bandwidth, not all slots can be matched to 8 lanes, either.

With that in mind, even if there was complete multi-card support to use multiple video cards for processing in an SLI implementation, the software would have to be written for and optimized for taking advantage of that. It has been said by others more closely tied to REDCINE that the sort operations used by REDCINE don't benefit from SLI type multi-card arrangements. It's been covered here before in reference to such configurations under Windows... Like in this post (http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?p=151205&highlight=redcine+games#post151205) from Luki.


I am confused, whey doesn't Scratch work in bootcamp? I haven't found any app that doesn't work in boot camp with WinXP yet.

It's not that it doesn't work... It's just not officially supported. SCRATCH will run on Mac hardware if the video card is one of the supported models, but don't expect it to be problem free. There is also no official Mac version of any nVidia card that has SDI outputs and that can be a problem... IMO, if you will be running SCRATCH, it's going to be on a dedicated, customized PC anyway. The cost of a competent workstation is a small piece of the puzzle when assembling a complete SCRATCH post workflow.

[Dane Brehm]

With the New 4K Samsung HDTV's coming out what is the best graphics card for Sony DCI Spec 4k? Kona or Beyond.......

Jeff have you done any work with the WIDE GAMUT Sony Colorspace thru HDCAM SR 4:4:4 dual-link ingestion?

Amazing stuff.

[mgmansell]

http://aja.com/html/products_macintosh_kona.html

sorry all I'm posting is the link for now - but know it aids in rendering, processing, etc. with editing (wether you're using AVID/FCS/ or whatever)

I've been all over the Kona website and I can't seem to find a price anywhere. Has anyone recently bought one and know how much they are?