NVIDIA announces new card...Apple "excited"!

[shaftbond]

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/nvidia-ships-128core-graphics-cards-for-highend-film-editors-graphics-pros-apple-excited-241478.php


...these parallel processing monsters have the rough equivalent of 128 1.35GHz processors cranking away at graphics in a whole new way.


...folks like Adobe, Apple, Avid are excited about this concept. It gives them much, much higher levels of performance.


Meanwhile, these graphics cards aren't cheap, where the Quadro FX 4600 will retail for $1995, and the Quadro FX 5600 will run $2999. NVIDIA didn't say what its highest-end Quadro Plex VCS model IV will cost.

[Evin Grant]

4K at home, here we go.

[Thomas Mathai]

You can guess how much Model IV


The NVIDIA Quadro® Plex 1000 is now available for purchase from the NVDIA Store!

Model l
Price: $17,500

Model ll
Price: $20,500

Model lll
Price: $24,500

The NVIDIA Quadro Plex 1000 is designed to interface with industry-standard workstations and servers to deliver advanced visual computing scalability for the most demanding professional applications.

Available in three distinct models NVIDIA Quadro® Plex 1000 is architected to meet your specific application requirements.

[Emmanuel Cambier]

Yeah but the Quadro FX 5600 at $2999 deserves our attention I think.
What kind of performances could we expect from it?

[Thomas Mathai]

Yeah but the Quadro FX 5600 at $2999 deserves our attention I think.
What kind of performances could we expect from it?

Pretty much twice the bandwidth as the 5500, assuming the software supports it.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Cool. nVidia has finally pushed their Quadro line of cards beyond their consumer cards for the first time ever. No more paying an extra $1K premium just to get hardware overlay planes and support for multiple stencil buffers and more than 8 hardware lights.

Hey, and one other bonus, I bet the FX5600 will run Aero smoothly.

I'd love to say that I could really benefit from two 5600s in SLI in a new 8-core Mac Pro or PC, but most graphics/3D applications still can't even scratch the surface of what current graphics cards can do, let alone benefit from it. Soooo.... I'll wait to see the next round of pro apps from Apple and others before I plunk down the $3K for a new video card. Sure, it will probably run HalfLife 3 at 4K and hold solid at 120fps doing it, but I'm not going to pay $3K for a card and borrow a 4K display/projector to find out.

[Bruce Allen]

I totally agree with Jeff. The new Quadro 5600 / 4600 systems are just slightly tweaked Geforce 8 series (which has been out on the PC for several months) cards. And no, you can't do 4K easily with one. Also, The "128-core" stuff is part true, part hyperbole - one of those cores can't do very much on its' own and isn't nearly as powerful as one of the 8 cores within Cell, for example.

The Quadro Plex system is very interesting and also shows the way that things might very well go in the mainstream future with outboard PCI Express. It could form part of a 4K finishing system. It wouldn't be a very fast 4k finishing system, though. And it's difficult to call it "desktop" if your "desktop" hardware tops $50,000. It would make a very nice 2k competitor to discreet fire / inferno or quantel or avid adrenaline hardware. That is, if someone can write a really nice software package to go with it. Maybe they will.

Jeff is absolutely right - wait for a shipping software package that takes advantage of what the card can do before you buy. Of course, if you're doing 3D, that time might be now, what with Gelato (nVidia's interesting hardware-accelerated final render acceleration tool) and all.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Being a regular user of Modo, Lightwave, Softimage|XSI and Maya, I can say that there's really no advantage to buying a Quadro anything. My 512MB 7800GTX|OC that I paid $480 for about a year ago runs circles around an FX4500. The FX4500 is tired and old and has been outdated for a while... Most people don't realize it, but the $250 X1900XT upgrade for the current Mac Pro is the most powerful GPU option currently available (from Apple for that system). There are only specific reasons to choose an FX4500 card and it's not 3D performance. You pick it when you have a specific application you need to run that requires one of it's few special features -- hardware overlay planes for eample. Maya and XSI can use this feature, but you don't get a performance advantage from it. Pro/E uses it and it does help, but Pro/E and SolidWorks benefit more from the multiple hardware stencil buffers and stipple masking. ...Not supported on the GeForce series of cards. For most users doing 3D and if pushing polygons and texel performance is what you really care about, A GeForce 8 series is a far superior buy at a much lower cost vs. the FX4500, which sat atop the GeForce 6 level architecture.

Now, the F5600 does one-up the GeForce 8, but that won't be the case in about two or three weeks when they start shipping faster 8850 and 8890 cards.

The Quadro line is not exactly about performance. It's about support of specialized features for pro-level applications. Make sure your application needs those features before you spend all the extra money. Otherwise, you're just buying a very expensive GeForce 8600GTX card. I do have an FX4500 in one of my G5 quad systems, but I bought it for two reasons. One, it was (up until the X1900GT after-market card released in January) the only card that allowed connecting dual 30" displays at 2560x1600 to a PCI-E G5. The other reason was I needed the genlock port for 3D shutter glasses for a project. ...Specific needs. Other than that, it performs no better overall than the 7800GT card I swapped out of this G5 and actually falls short of the 7800GT for raw texel rates.

Now the QuadroPlex system is interesting - as Bruce put it. This setup is truly awesome and with applications that can take advantage of it, all I can say is wow. Think of the potential. But people who dream of using a QuadroPlex system to push more polygons in Maya, it doesn't work that way. Most 3D apps and I'll point the finger at Lightwave, Maya, MAX, even XSI and Modo all still have OpenGL implementations that are rather generic. They are far more CPU dependent than GPU accelerated... You'll see bigger performance boosts in your 3D apps by stepping up to more RAM (if the app supports it) and a faster CPU than you will by swapping in a faster video card.

Just food for thought there. And I don't think a lot of people realize this unless they have spent a lot of time with 3D applications over the years. Also many don't realize that most GPU advancements over the last couple years have been related to texel and shader operations, not necessarily vertex and polygon operations.

[Tom Lowe]

Isn't this kind of overkill for people wanting to edit REDCODE RAW 4K at 27MB/s or whatever it is? We are not talking about big numbers here. David from Cineform said they were editing multiple streams of 4K footage with a top-end PC system half a year ago with their Prospect HD.

Are you guys talking about needing this kind of power for 3D apps mainly?

[Bruce Allen]

Tom, the idea is that in the future, you can do GPU-based blurs, film-style dissolves, resizes, secondary color corrections, vignettes etc, in 4K in real time on the graphics card. Eg we have a DaVinci / Inferno - level of immediacy or better. Look at Discreet Lustre - they do a bit on the GPU but in the future it will be a LOT more.

I'm the first to admit that we're not there yet (see my "4K finishing folly" post). But a Quadro Plex takes you tantalizingly close for 2K.

Also, let's admit it, wouldn't it be better if RedCine didn't exist and the GPU could just de-compress the footage in realtime in Avid / FCP?

Bruce
www.boacinema.com

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Yep... The hardware is mostly there today -- at a premium price. The bigger issue is waiting for the software to catch up and jump on the GPU bandwagon. It is finally starting to happen now. GPUs aren't just for games and 3D artists anymore. Just be sure your applications actually support the fancy GPUs and features before you spend big money on a video card though. For now, I can assure you that a $3K Quadro 5600 isn't going to perform any better than a $600 GeForce 8800GTX in 99% all software out there. But if you run the one or two applications where it will, then that extra cost is trivial and may be worth every penny.

[Tom Lowe]

Tom, the idea is that in the future, you can do GPU-based blurs, film-style dissolves, resizes, secondary color corrections, vignettes etc, in 4K in real time on the graphics card. Eg we have a DaVinci / Inferno - level of immediacy or better. Look at Discreet Lustre - they do a bit on the GPU but in the future it will be a LOT more.

I'm the first to admit that we're not there yet (see my "4K finishing folly" post). But a Quadro Plex takes you tantalizingly close for 2K.

Also, let's admit it, wouldn't it be better if RedCine didn't exist and the GPU could just de-compress the footage in realtime in Avid / FCP?

Bruce
www.boacinema.com

Well Cineform is saying they were doing 4K two-stream dissolves (and, I believe, realtime CC) on a PC many months ago, just using a good processor. Considering that new firebreathing 4- and 8-core PC chips are just around the corner, this should be more than enough power to handle most of what editors will want to do with REDCODE 4K footage, will it not?

[Rob Lohman]

Just to clear, that quoted performance is not for a 4K real-time decode but a smaller preview size decode from a 4K source. Not to say it's not impressive, but just to avoid any confusion over what it exactly means.

I can see how someone would want to edit on a laptop or don't want to invest in the latest hardware. One thing is for sure, it will always be faster in DV or say DVCPRO than in 4K REDCODE (or whatever 4K) on the same machine. That's just how things work.

That being said, if you want to edit 2K or 4K and you have a powerful enough machine with a software application that supports those resolutions then by all means do so.

[Bruce Allen]

That being said, if you want to edit 2K or 4K and you have a powerful enough machine with a software application that supports those resolutions then by all means do so.

May that day come soon!

Bruce

[Joe Carney]

Speaking in part ignorance here, but Adobe is endorsing OpenGL for all their apps for hardware assisted rendering and preview. But from this thread, I'm getting the impression the high end gamer cards are just fine for this?
Yet I'm also reading from various post processing software companies that the QuadroFX line is preferred over the high end gamer cards.

Joe C.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Yet I'm also reading from various post processing software companies that the QuadroFX line is preferred over the high end gamer cards.

I guess we'll have to see what Adobe actually delivers. In most situations, with most pro applications, there is no added benefit to getting a Quadro card. They are no faster, they just add some more features, which may or may not be used by the software. Caveat Emptor.

[Bruce Allen]

Speaking in part ignorance here, but Adobe is endorsing OpenGL for all their apps for hardware assisted rendering and preview. But from this thread, I'm getting the impression the high end gamer cards are just fine for this?

Yes, gamer cards do openGL very well. AFAIK Their drivers implement 95% of the openGL calls very well (the ones coincidentally that are also used by openGL games - see Quake, etc). They deliberately do not implement the remaining 5% needed by certain professional applications. Eg things like stencil buffers.

Quadro also has other advantages, eg Genlock. Also, Quadros are usually not as aggressively-clocked as their gamer equivalents - which leads to more stability, which is something I think that professionals are pretty interested in.

Also, bear in mind that quite possibly, the Quadro drivers do not make as many (potentially risky) speed optimizations as the always-on-the-edge gamer systems. But I'm not sure about that - it would seem to be a waste of programmer effort.

A coding buddy from my Comp Sci undergrad years in South Africa now works at nVidia. I will ask him about what he can reveal without breaking NDA.

Adobe's endorsement of Quadro might be as simple a thing as that if they endorse Quadro, they only have to make sure their software works with that card. If they endorse "GeForce 8", they might have to test cards from all of the different card manufacturers... don't see how those cards are that different, though. But if you bought a GeForce 8 with an aggressive factory overclock and then it crashed After Effects / Premiere, you'd be pissed off if Adobe was endorsing it on their webpage, right?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

[Bruce Allen]

Just curious, Rob, how much faster you are finding GeForce 8 over the previous generation (GF7, current ATI) for REDCINE?

Of course I don't know how you give the GPU to do, versus the CPU, so I guess it doesn't make much difference...

Thanks

Bruce