NVIDIA Maximus

[John Bellari]

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=116466&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1629894&highlight=

http://www.nvidia.com/object/maximus.html

"NVIDIA Maximus desktop workstation configurations start with the pairing of the NVIDIA Quadro 600 ($199 MSRP, USD) + NVIDIA Tesla C2075 ($2,499 MSRP, USD)."


So, Nvidia is teaming up a cheap $200 Quadro 600 with $2500 Tesla processor card to smoke pretty much everything for CUDA enabled applications like
Adobe Premiere CS5.5 ...

Of course, other ways to spend $2700 may be multiple graphic cards, multiple CPU, more system memory, PCIe SSD card to imporve system performance...

It will be interesting to see how Adobe, Autodesk and other companies leverage this combination in future software releases.


If only Red could make a CUDA enabled real-time editor... drool

[Imran Farouk]

If say you had a Tesla card...and used Adobe Premiere CS5.5...

Would you end up with basically real time R3D full res? Which is rather pointless so I take it that rendering with a Tesla would just smoke everything, couple a RED Rocket and you have a demon machine for editing...

[Brandon J.F.]

Table 12. Rendering times for the RED project.
Since most RED producers are probably on dual-CPU workstations, I tested preview on the Z600 using the Quadro 4000 card with playback resolution set to 1/4 and Use Maximum Render Quality not enabled for preview. Table 12 shows the results, which were better with the GPU, though not dramatically so.

http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/images/red-preview.png

Table 11. Preview performance for the RED project.
From this particular RED-based project, it appears that CUDA acceleration is definitely a plus for rendering RED-based projects, though performance did not appear to scale with the card as the $423 Quadro 2000 performed similarly to the $1,700 Quadro 5000. If you’re producing RED source footage, you should prioritize CPU cores over GPU cores, and buy a dual-CPU workstation rather than the most expensive graphics card.

http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/choosing-a-graphics-card-for-premiere-pro-cs55.html?page=8

[John Bellari]

FYI:

One thing to note about Maximus, all the benchmarks are against their 1 yr old
legacy Generation Quadro GPU lineup, which is about to change in the next 3-6 months with a
new Quadro based on upcoming GPU.

So, the more I think about it for the next 6 months , nVidia is trying to sell you a $2500 math coprocessor that's
about to be outdated very quickly by a new lineup of GPU with supposedly double to triple the performance anyway.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Nvidi...e-210023.shtml

If you can get the payback now, it's cutting edge. If you have a low end quadro and don't want to pop for a Quadro 5000
or Quadro 6000, it makes sense because you can use it with a next Gen Quadro anyway.

AMD just released a pro Firepro $200 card that's 2X faster than the Quadro $200 card shown in the study.
Also, Intel is now releasing a math coprocessor with 50 cores that should boost Open CL performance
http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/16/i...nna-break-you/

If you can get by for now and wait 3-6 months, I think the benchmarks then will look drastically different.