Video Card for Mac Pro

[Chris L]

I am new to RED, and while customer support has been very helpful they have left one question unanswered.
Will I need One or Two video cards?
I plan on editing with the newest model Mac Pro, and I know I will need atleast one Graphics Card(I'm thinking Radeon 6970) and a Red Rocket. That takes up the dual-lane x16 lone as well as the other x16 slot. I want to know If I should add a second graphics card to an available x4 slot. Also, what graphics card do you recommend? It must be compatible with Mac OS X as I will be editing in FCP and AE. Any help would be great, thanks!
By the way my monitor setup I plan to use is:
One 27" Monitor at 2560X1440 pixels
One 30" Montior at 1560X1600 pixels
and Four 20 inch 1600X900 monitors setup in a 2X2 array for viewing 3K footage via quad-DVI
I plan on getting the RED Scarlet when it is released
Thanks!

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Uh ... don't do that.

First off the Rocket works perfectly in a x4 slot. It actually works in an x1 slot. You probably don't need a Rocket though. Not for Scarlet 3K footage.

You should have a solid video card in your x16 slot.

You can drop another video card for CUDA in the 8x slot, I recommend a Quadro 4000.

Then I recommend Resolve Lite for your ingest and media conversion needs.

I recommend using Premiere Pro for editorial. I don't like Premiere, but its a much better solution right now than FCP 6 or 7, and FCP X needs more time to mature into a usable product.

Now, as far as "real" monitoring goes, I'd hold off if you can.

The real resolution of a Scarlet 3K camera will probably be fully viewable in a 2560x1440 display.

A quad set of monitors will never give you a good picture - all those bezels will trash the image. I'd pretty much trash that idea.

Red is set to make some projector announcements, and 4K is probably going to be a part of them.

If you have to do broadcast monitoring right now, then I'd pick a BlackMagic Decklink Extreme card and a plasma HDTV.

[Chris L]

Okay thanks! I agree that the Quadro 4000 is much better than the 6970, but it only supports two monitors. and adding a second card would be overboard on the mac pro's power supply. How would having one of each work? Or would that not be a good idea? I need ATLEAST 3 monitors, preferably four. And i dont mind the bezel by the way, i figured out a work around tht limits space between. Also, when i contacted ReD directly they recomended a rocket for scarlet footage, and they said it needs an x8 slot... Are you sure the newest model works in x4?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Why do you need all these monitors? Serious question.

Rocket works best in an X8 or better slot, obviously. But it will work just fine in an X4 or even an X1 slot, the lesser slot just restricts the bandwidth available to the card. For 4K at 24fps, an X4 slot is fine. For anything 3K, you're also fine. IMO, with a new 12-core system and just about anything on that level moving forward, I'm not sure if the Rocket is really an advantage.

If you use Adobe Premiere, you will want an nVidia card for CUDA acceleration to maximize your software's abilities. CUDA capable cards also help accelerate Resolve more so than a card that only supports OpenCL (ATI). For someone driving multiple monitors and running CUDA apps, especially Resolve, running dual Quadro 4000 cards (one in slot 1 x16, the other in slot-4 x4) inside the Mac tower, can be a very powerful combination. Probably the most ideal, except for cost.

[Chris L]

I have one monitor dedicated to editing screen, one to preview, and a third for anything else i have open sometimes i make soundtracks in garageband (logic/reason once i get it) and sometimes i have AE open on the side. Also the occasional facebook too haha

[Chris L]

And thanks to both of you! Ithink I'll go with the dual Quadros and Rocket, just to be safe and future-proof.

[Blair S. Paulsen]

I have been waiting for Apple to introduce a new tower for at least 2 years and I can't wait much longer. Sooo, do I:

Pop a Quadro 4000 and a Red Rocket into my 2008 MacPro?
I am concerned that the PCI lane implementation in that model will hamstring it, CPU/Mobo is 3 years old, etc. Upside is that I could move the Rocket and possibly the nVidia into a new system down the road, though both may be essentially obsoleted by newer tech within a year or two (eons in microprocessor terms).

Throw down for the 12-core Westmere?
With 16GB of RAM it's close to $6,000, plus I would still want a Quadro 4000, HBA, Kona 3G but would forego the Rocket hoping for CPU speed sufficient to manage monitoring at 1/2 res. Would expect nVidia GPU via Mercury/CUDA to allow responsive native R3D editorial in CS5.5.1 with no worse than 4x real time transcodes/renders. If I had the right project to cover much of the cost I could still add the Rocket later, though that might be problematic due to slot count.

Go Hackintosh?
Obviously I would get more horsepower for the buck, but how serious are the "gotchas"? Will the sys/admin overhead require any command line/programming chops?

Go Windows?
Limited ProRes profile. I am a 25 year Mac guy so I find managing a PC is a chore, so it would require me to hire out some admin/IT.

If I knew when (or if) Apple was going to release a new tower that included Thunderbolt, newer mobo/bus/etc then the calculus would be much easier.

Soooo, if Jeff or Daniel or anyone else has any feedback, including questioning some of my assumptions above, please do so. Better now than after I spend the coin... ;-)

Cheers - #19

[Josh Beadle]

The tower is next up on Apple's roadmap me thinks. I'm waiting also

[Alexander Ibrahim]

I have been waiting for Apple to introduce a new tower for at least 2 years

Wait, what?

Apple has introduced a new model of Mac Pro pretty much every year.

I mean I have a 2010 Mac Pro 8 Core that will run crazy rings around that 2008 Mac Pro you have.

Apple hasn't tried to make the Mac Pro "sexy" like it does the iThings, but there is serious improvements in power.

I just did a test on my 8 core 2010, in Resolve with no CUDA card, with the base 6GB RAM and an ATI 5770

I get 12fps on 5K Epic footage 1/2 res good

I get 18 fps on 5K Epic at 1/4 res good.

That is with one node with primary corrections in place.

With the Quadro 4000 in, its real time 1/2 res good with everything I've thrown at it.

They look the same, but really they are almost entirely different.

As to your options ... there is no way I'd buy a workstation class computer now. Apple is prepping a Mac Pro with Thunderbolt. Also, the next generation chipset is coming ... so its pretty much a no brainer to wait unless you have an urgent need immediately.

Still ... this new tower may look exactly like your 2008 Mac Pro ... but it will run rings around my 2010 Mac Pro.

Looking a bit further ... Apple really sees Thunderbolt as a replacement for PCIe. I don't think they will stop making a Mac Pro ... but I think they are looking at ways of changing what a pro level workstation is. Thunderbolt is a huge part of that.

[Chris L]

MY only question is how would Apple go about inplementing thunderbolt... since it is also displayport technology, any monitor attached to it wouldnt be able to access graphics from the graphics card... unless Apple could route the PCIe lanes to the thunderbolt port.... can they do this?

[Dustin Cross]

Thunderbolt is not fast enough to replace PCIe!
Thunderbolt is currently 10Gb/s
A single current v2 x16 PCIe slot is 80Gb/s
v3 of PCIe is already defined and a x16 slot of that can do 160Gb/s.
Thunderbolt is planned to max out at 100Gb/s some day far in the future.

Red Rocket is a one generation old x8 PCIe 1.1 card. x8 PCIe v1.1 is 20Gb/s, so a Red Rocket could saturate a Thunderbolt bolt all alone.

A bunch of Thunderbolt ports is not going to cut it for a pro system. Thunderbolt will replace firewire and USB, not PCIe.

It won't even replace eSATA unless there are lots of ports. eSata is capable of 6Gb/s per port and there are cards with 24 ports. eSata is limited in what devices you connect to it though.

You will want Thunderbolt, PCIe, and eSata in systems for awhile to come.


Dusty

[Josh Miller]

Same boat. Sad when I saw this this morning: http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/21/intel-chip-delays-suggest-no-new-mac-pro-until-at-least-early-2012/ I was hoping it'd be out by the previous estimate of mid Nov.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Wait, what?

Apple has introduced a new model of Mac Pro pretty much every year.

I mean I have a 2010 Mac Pro 8 Core that will run crazy rings around that 2008 Mac Pro you have.

I think Blair means that the current Mac Pro design or the aluminum tower as it is now, was introduced in 2003 with the Mac G5. Since then, it has undergone little revision in terms of the outward design. Most people admire it for its construction, but hate it for it's lack of utility. It's high-time that Apple updates it.

As for the internals, they have not been updated for 2.5 years at this point. OK, not true, Apple has offered a few updated CPU offerings. This isn't entirely Apple's doing, it's Intel's. You see, the 5520 series chipset that hosts the past few models of Xeon CPUs has been around for 3 years now. King of the hill, nothing else has been released to replace it. The CPUs themselves have been improved and the relative front-side bus speeds and memory controllers (which are hosted on the CPUs) have improved to allow for faster RAM. Although, if you were to buy a Mac Pro now and compare it to the early 2009 Mac Pro, the only differences would be the CPUs that are shipping today and you would have a newer ATI video card by default. Faster memory to take advantage of the newer CPUs. Same everything else. You can buy an early '09 Mac Pro, and drop the latest Westmere 6-Core CPUs into it along with 1333MHz DDR3 RAM and a Radeon 6970 and viola, you have a current Mac Pro.

New Mac Pro systems are over-due. ...But so are new Xeon workstation offerings from every other major vendor. As for when it might happen, it's anyones' guess. It seemed pretty cut and dry a few months ago, based on Intel's roadmap, but that's been thrown out the window it seems. See my post from earlier today in a parallel thread: http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?64966-Mac-Pro-Re-Design&p=843756#post843756

I wish I had some advice for Blair and others in the same boat. The 2008 Mac Pro is definitely dated. It's memory performance is a serious bottleneck -- you have to run Resolve in 8bit mode to keep performance at manageable levels. I'm not sure if I would recommend buying a new Mac Pro at this time. Sure, if Blair needs one, he needs one and it will serve well for a while. I think there's a safe bet that no new Mac Pro will rear its head within the next 30 to 45 days -- Intel has to announce that they're manufacturing a new chipset. OTOH, it's been a while since Apple refreshed the Mac Pro and we could see a spec-bump of the systems anytime between now and the end of the year, I think. This is especially more likely if Intel is going to push and go for the next iteration in their roadmap as many are now starting to consider a real possibility. There are some E-Series Xeons which would be a nice upgrade to the current offerings that will work in the system with only a routine EFI update. Throw a couple new CPU options and an updated GPU or two at us and away we go.. "2011 Mac Pro". I think that might just happen within the next 15 to 30 days, if Intel is going to wait for the next best thing early next year.

[Alexander Ibrahim]

MY only question is how would Apple go about inplementing thunderbolt... since it is also displayport technology, any monitor attached to it wouldnt be able to access graphics from the graphics card... unless Apple could route the PCIe lanes to the thunderbolt port.... can they do this?


That's exactly what it already does right now!

You are aware that Thunderbolt is available on every Apple except the Mac Pro today, right this red hot second. Right? You know you can attach any x4 PCIe card in an expansion chassis? There are a number of video i/o boards available now from Black Magic and AJA and Matrox that work with Thunderbolt right now.

You can hook up two Thunderbolt displays to a MacBook Pro or an iMac and run all three displays.

The video cards available limit the Mac Mini and MacBook Air to two displays I believe ... but I don't have one of those.

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Thunderbolt is not fast enough to replace PCIe!
Thunderbolt is currently 10Gb/s
A single current v2 x16 PCIe slot is 80Gb/s
v3 of PCIe is already defined and a x16 slot of that can do 160Gb/s.
Thunderbolt is planned to max out at 100Gb/s some day far in the future.

Red Rocket is a one generation old x8 PCIe 1.1 card. x8 PCIe v1.1 is 20Gb/s, so a Red Rocket could saturate a Thunderbolt bolt all alone.

A bunch of Thunderbolt ports is not going to cut it for a pro system. Thunderbolt will replace firewire and USB, not PCIe.

It won't even replace eSATA unless there are lots of ports. eSata is capable of 6Gb/s per port and there are cards with 24 ports. eSata is limited in what devices you connect to it though.

You will want Thunderbolt, PCIe, and eSata in systems for awhile to come.


Dusty


You keep saying that, and it makes it no truer.

The Rocket works really well as a x4 card ... which Thunderbolt supports.

So does the Decklink 3D from Black Magic, which is basically what a UltraStudio 3D is.

It is exactly PCIe x4 over a copper cable, plus daisy chainable displayport.

Thunderbolt will scale very nicely going forward.

When PCIe 3 shows up, Thunderbolt will probably be able to signal at 20GB/s full duplex, plus displayport.

Its designed to become optical capable and scale to at least 100GB/s full duplex. That's a PCIe 3 x16 slot once the fiber version ships.

Also ... you can have multiple display ports.

Its not a panacea, but then again we aren't coming up with a pile of tasks to over run the PCIe bus right now. Most x16 GPU's can run just fine in a x8 slot with just a tiny performance drop. That's why you can run a Thunderbolt and a GPU on the same x16 slot.

Thunderbolt kind of rocks.

[Dustin Cross]

Alexander,

What I said is 100% true. Please point out one thing I state that is not true.

You are correct it is basically PCIe x4, but in the current implementation half of the bandwidth is taken away.

Yes a Red Rocket will work in x4, but not at full speed.

Decklink cards are x4 cards to begin with.

You are also correct that most x16 GPUs will run with only slight performance decrease in an x8 slot.

How does any of that make my statement false?

You are saying that if you stick a fast device in a slower port it will slow down, but still work. I am say Thunderbolt is a slower port and cant run things at full speed.

What you are missing is that lots of people think Thunderbolt is faster than PCIe and they will be able to put all their cards in Tunderbolt PCIe expanders and it will be blazing fast. I am pointing out reality.

I am not saying we dont want Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is going to be great.


Dusty

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Am I correct in assuming that due to Apple's proprietary control over hardware/OS/etc that attempts to install your own hot rod CPU would fail?

What could I swap out in my 2008 tower and what is embedded in the architecture?

I guess what I am wondering is:

could I do a major transplant surgery (CPU, GPU, etc) and end up with at least 90% of what an in stock 12 core Westmere w/16GB RAM can do? Can you buy a new school mobo from Apple ala carte? IF so, at what cost?

Yes, I would want to replace the power supply and perhaps the fans while I'm at it.

If anyone can link me to more info on this subject I can stop burning bandwidth on RedUser.

That said, if you have read this far and you happen to have a newer MacPro tower with a Rocket in it that you need to sell in the near term ping me by PM as that might be a good option to keep me going until Apple makes their move.

Cheers - #19

[Dustin Cross]

Blair,

You can upgrade most stuff in your 2008 MacPro, but not everything. Here is an article that goes over changing the processor in a 2008 Mac Pro:

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/faq/mac-pro-how-to-upgrade-processors.html

You can't speed up bus and memory. You are not going to match the performance of a newer faster system. You can add more memory, faster video card, and lots of other stuff, but in the end it will most likely cost more than buying a used or refurbished tower. Plus if you sell your 2008 you can recoup even more of the cost.

I really like the price point of the 2009 4,1 8 core Macs. You can even find then refurbed from Apple with like new warranty.


Dusty

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Any idea if I can deal directly with Apple and just pay them to swap out the innards including the busses? Pretty much everything but the frame/mounts/case.

I say this not just because I'm trying to save a buck, but from an environmental POV. Other than the bad manners of not fitting neatly in rack mounts, the aluminum MacPro tower is a nice bit of casework and with care could last a couple decades.

Apple could milk the "green" PR and, at the risk of sounding preachy, just do the right thing because they can and accept the positive PR as a parting gift.

You may now return to your previously scheduled camera forum ;-0

Cheers - #19

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Alexander,

What I said is 100% true. Please point out one thing I state that is not true.

You are correct it is basically PCIe x4, but in the current implementation half of the bandwidth is taken away.

It is not "basically" PCIe.

It is PCIe 2.0 x4 and dual display port 1.2

Thunderbolt is currently a 10Gbps system. That's 1.25GB/s. It's also full duplex.

PCIe x4 v2.0 is 2GB/s total bandwidth.

So ... Actually a full Thunderbolt is as 25% faster than PCIe x4 under certain use cases.

Interestingly, you can get two Thunderbolt ports using a single PCIe x4 slot.


Yes a Red Rocket will work in x4, but not at full speed.

Actually a Rocket is a PCIe 1.1 x8 card. It does run well in PCIe 1.1 x4 slots, but that causes reliability issues if I recall correctly.

It works perfectly in a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot at full speed.


Decklink cards are x4 cards to begin with.

The Decklink Extreme 3D+ is a PCIe 1.1 x4 card.

It works at full capacity in PCIe 2.0 x2 slots - but the only PCIe 2.0 system I've ever owned is a Mac Pro, whose slowest slot is PCIe 2.0 x4.

I'll say it again, you can run full 1080p 3D over Thunderbolt. In fact, if you can think of a reason to try it, you can use two of them on an iMac.


You are also correct that most x16 GPUs will run with only slight performance decrease in an x8 slot.

What's very interesting is that even the top end Quadro cards today have only a very slight hit from PCIe 2.0 x8

That's interesting because it means that 4GB/s is a thresh hold of usability today. It's sort of like using SATA 2 (3Gbps) with a single spinning disk drive - the drive can never saturate it ... so you only need to advance for features not bandwidth.


How does any of that make my statement false?

The devil is in the details ... but don't sweat it I mis stated some details too!


You are saying that if you stick a fast device in a slower port it will slow down, but still work. I am say Thunderbolt is a slower port and cant run things at full speed.

I am not saying that at all!

I'm saying its very rare to have a device faster than Thunderbolt. I believe only graphics cards, the DeckLink 4K and some SAS and Fibre Channel cards fully utilize x8 PCIe 2.0.

Everything else works well in PCIe x4 and a lot of that stuff has tons of overhead.

Thunderbolt is stupid fast.


What you are missing is that lots of people think Thunderbolt is faster than PCIe and they will be able to put all their cards in Tunderbolt PCIe expanders and it will be blazing fast. I am pointing out reality.

Other people's ignorance has no impact on reality. It's not my fault they don't know, and I'm not on a general education crusade.

That said, I think Thunderbolt is faster than you think. Those people you think are mistaken are actually half right! Thunderbolt is faster than a lot of PCIe interfaces, and faster than a lot of PCIe cards.

You can put most PCIe cards in Thunderbolt chassis without slow down. I think you'll find that they'll only be releasing one PCIe card Thunderbolt expanders, because that is all that makes sense in practice - for now.


I am not saying we dont want Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is going to be great.

Ah yes ... perfect agreement. Maybe just one point ... but I'll take it! ;)

Looking to the future ... Thunderbolt is designed to use the PCIe interface directly.

When PCIe 3.0 becomes available it will scale, and use a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot.

If the cables can handle it, you'll see 20Gbps full duplex Thunderbolt.

The kicker is that PCIe 3 is much more efficient than PCIe 2 ... even if the copper thunderbolt cables can't handle 1 more bit per second than they are rated for, the adoption of PCIe 3 will still increase Thunderbolt capacity by 18% due to encoding improvements! That means that a 12Gbps Thunderbolt will be possible for "free!" I expect that 20Gbps Thunderbolt can be supported on the existing cables, as you may have noticed they seem a bit over engineered. I believe that's because there will only ever be two kinds of Thunderbolt cable - copper and optical. I don't think we'll see different speed rated copper ... and once you go fiber, everything related to bandwidth depends entirely on the endpoints.

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Any idea if I can deal directly with Apple and just pay them to swap out the innards including the busses? Pretty much everything but the frame/mounts/case.

I say this not just because I'm trying to save a buck, but from an environmental POV. Other than the bad manners of not fitting neatly in rack mounts, the aluminum MacPro tower is a nice bit of casework and with care could last a couple decades.

Apple could milk the "green" PR and, at the risk of sounding preachy, just do the right thing because they can and accept the positive PR as a parting gift.

You may now return to your previously scheduled camera forum ;-0

Cheers - #19

So basically you are willing to buy almost a whole new computer, but want to recycle your case? That about it?

You can probably get your friendly neighborhood mac repair shop to order that parts you need to do this for yourself.

I doubt very much that you'll ever get Apple to do this for you ... an individual can't normally order the parts you need from Apple at all.

It's probably cheaper to just buy a refurbished 2009 Mac Pro and get what ever CPU you want after market.

Recycle the old machine by selling it to someone who needs it.

[Blair S. Paulsen]

I've resold older machines to fund the new hotness dozens of times over the years, I know the drill. I guess my visit to the electronics recycling facility made me wonder if perhaps there was a better way. Just railing at the disposable world we live in. In any case, RedUser is not a political forum so I'll just leave my public plea to Apple as my closing take.

Cheers - #19

[Dustin Cross]

Alexander,

If you connect a GPU, Red Rocket, Raid card, and Blackmagic card to a system via a Thunderbolt connection will they all run at the same speed as they would directly connected to PCIe?

No!

Therefore Thunderbolt does not replace PCIe!


Dusty