Best graphics card for current 12 core mac tower?

[Tucker Spofford]

What's the most powerful card I can put in the current 12 core mac tower, that will accelerate Adobe Premiere and After Effects CS6?

I think it's the Nvidia GTX 580? Or is the GTX680 also compatible?

[Tom.Wong]

gtx 580 will work right away with latest nvidia drivers for lion, not sure about 10.7.4 though, that broke nvidia drivers as every update does, not sure if they fixed it yet.

however the 580 may overdraw the power existing in the tower, as the PSU wasn't meant to handle that much power consumption. not sure about the 680 but i'm sure it draws even more power. you may have to look into a external powering solution for the 580.

best bang for the buck in my opinion are flashed 470's. they wont' over draw your system, and still have a lot of cuda power for the system.

[Tucker Spofford]

What goes into flashing them? Is it easy and stable? Also will the system recognize more than one 470?

[Johnny Friday]

gtx 580 will work right away with latest nvidia drivers for lion, not sure about 10.7.4 though, that broke nvidia drivers as every update does, not sure if they fixed it yet.

however the 580 may overdraw the power existing in the tower, as the PSU wasn't meant to handle that much power consumption. not sure about the 680 but i'm sure it draws even more power. you may have to look into a external powering solution for the 580.

best bang for the buck in my opinion are flashed 470's. they wont' over draw your system, and still have a lot of cuda power for the system.

Tom, are you saying that no cuda acceleration then with any of the NVIDIA cards with 10.7.4 ? I've got a Quadro 4000 and on 10.7.4 and latest NVIDIA drivers/firmware/Cuda....and not sure i get anything out of the card...maybe this explains things....but are you sure about this?

Thanks....

[Josh Beadle]

Jeff Kilgroe has written extensively and accurately on this topic

[Tom.Wong]

Positive. Apple updates have been killing nvidia drivers since 10.6.6. U gotta be careful nd wait before ne os update. Id keep an eye out for new nvidia/cuda drivers. Should fix ur woes

[Johnny Friday]

Positive. Apple updates have been killing nvidia drivers since 10.6.6. U gotta be careful nd wait before ne os update. Id keep an eye out for new nvidia/cuda drivers. Should fix ur woes

That likely explains the incredibly poor performance i get now....at least i hope so....thanks Tom

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I've got a PNY GTX580 3GB card in an '09 Mac Pro right now. Running OSX 10.7.4 and latest nVidia drivers... Here's the pros/cons of that configuration:

Pros:

It's cheaper than a Quadro 4000 and is a badass card if you also boot into Windows or Linux on the same system. CUDA performance is great -- a little better than the Quadro 4000, even when running on the Mac and given the other shortcomings I'm about to list. Under Windows, it screams, it smokes the Quadro 6000 in everything but OpenGL performance when in Windows. And that comes down to different driver optimizations.


Cons:

Drivers do not currently support proper power management or monitoring, fan control, etc.. for the card. It really does need a hack to work 100% properly. Drivers only see and allow for using 2GB of that 3GB onboard RAM. OpenGL performance is abysmal -- Cinebench scores are 30% less than the Quadro 4000 and so is overall OpenGL performance in apps like Maya, Lightwave, etc..

So... GTX580 makes a great secondary GPU in a PCIe expander for CUDA processing. Cheaper than a Tesla card and almost as good. Great primary card if you will be spending most of your time in Windows or Linux, but it's a dog in OSX unless we start hacking some config files and whatnot to make it work properly.



All things considered, I think the best card to buy for a current Mac Pro (or 2009 model, possibly '08 model if you still think it's worth spending money on) is the Quadro 4000 Mac Edition. It's officially supported, although the superior drivers come from nVidia, not Apple, so OSX updates tend to break compatibility with the latest "good" drivers until nVidia releases their updates a week or so later. IMO, not a big deal, on a production system no one should ever jump on a new OS update when first released.

The Quadro 4000 is a solid card, only takes one slot width and one 6-pin power connector. Two of them fit great inside a Mac Pro for additional CUDA acceleration in Resolve. If you need more 3D / OpenGL horsepower than what the Qudro 4000 gives you, then you probably should be looking at a Windows or Linux box for your software anyway. For 2D performance it does great. Personally, I think some of the ATI cards handle better under OSX for 2D performance and overall smoothness in running the GUI. The ATI 5870 isn't a bad card either and has decent OpenCL performance for FCPX. It's not on the supported list for CS6, but I believe you can change the text in the config file to make it work, just as you can with nVidia cards for CUDA. MPE does support OpenCL now, but it's not as complete or robust as the abilities with CUDA.

[Tucker Spofford]

Thanks for the detailed response. We are planning to get the GTX 570. Are you using an external power supply with the 580? And if not how are you powering the 580?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

You can power the 580 fine as long as it's running at stock speed. You need a 6-pin to 8-pin adapter for one of the PCIe power cables.

That said, I don't recommend the card in the Mac. I've played with it more today and it's just not a good way to go in OSX, none of these GTX5xx cards are. Get the Quadro 4000 Mac edition. Used ones are about $150 more than GTX580, but overall performance is better and to have proper support is huge. While I stated above that CUDA performance is good on OSX, I have to retract that somewhat. It can be good, but can be bad. Only time it's good is if the drivers aren't' flaking out and you're running it as a secondary GPU for processing in Resolve. Otherwise the card is like dragging a power-sucking boat anchor. Get the Quadro.

GTX570 has all the same restrictions. The driver support is there to make those cards work, but they don't work well. Not by a long shot with the current OSX and driver implementations. If you run these as a secondary CUDA GPU, you will need a primary GPU that doesn't use additional power connectors, or will need to pull power from somewhere else. In a 2008 Mac Pro, you can pull from the optical bays. In a 2009 and 2010 Mac Pro, you would need external power.

If you need a dual-GPU setup for Resolve, but want your primary GPU to also offer decent acceleration, your best bet is to go with the Quadro 4000 as your primary GPU and then use another for the second, or use a PCIe expansion box that can take other cards and put a GTX580 out there solely for CUDA.... And pray it works when you need it to.

[Josh Beadle]

And Jeff continues to be the gold standard for technical information

[James Drake]

Jeff has the best knowledge on the cards for sure.

Just to throw in my random opinion, I'm running a GTX 570 on my Mac system (10.7.3) and am pleased with the performance. Of course, I don't own a Quadro card to know what ultimate GPU speed looks like... but switching between software acceleration and GPU MPE is a big difference.

[Will Keir]

Josh, maybe you can give him the link too?


Jeff Kilgroe has written extensively and accurately on this topic

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

Take a look at this thread:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1360927

Seems to be a lot of happy GTX 5xx users. I'm waiting for a power cable for my card, I'll post my results (moving from the default ATI-card)...

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Rounded up two new cards to add to the mix -- EVGA GTX570 w/2.5GB and ASUS GTX 560 w/1.5GB.

Preliminary test results mostly confirm what I've found before. The cards work just fine, but the drivers don't bother to interface with them and control them properly for power management, fan speed, etc.. The Apple EFI is specifically locking out unapproved or non-AEFI video display adapters from logging entries in the EFI device table and the EFI system won't pull a BIOS entry (as it normally would) for these non-AEFI display cards. So we get errors in Profiler when we try to view the PCIe adapter list with one of these cards installed.

Some of the cards are being locked to 2.5GT/s interface mode, but not all. It's not a PCIe 1.x downgrade as the MacVidCards guy is claiming, the cards are still interfacing in v2.0 mode. But most of these cards, nVidia and ATI, will fall back to 2.5GT/s transaction mode when in idle or low-power state, as Subhadip Sen pointed out earlier in this discussion. The OS is holding them there without proper driver interaction and/or proper EFI table entries. I also find it curious that the same restrictions to the EFI table are in place when entering the bootcamp loader and subsequently starting Windows. Crippled performance in Windows on a Mac when running these cards. Nice, Apple...

Now for the curious part... We're not seeing this issue on Hackintosh systems. Most boot loaders on the Hackinmac systems like unibeast/multibeast, etc.. hash together an EFI table of sorts from UEFI and BIOS entries on the PC. It pulls the data from these video cards and there becomes a proper table entry for them. The cards work as they should in OSX on a Hackintosh! But on a real Mac Pro, the cards are crippled. So, there are a few ways around this...

1> flash the cards with a proper EFI to enable the missing control. That's what this MacVidCards guy is doing with his and he seems to be doing a pretty good job. Of course, he can only go as far and enable as much as what the current nVidia drivers will allow. For example, he's not going to squeeze more than 2GB of usable RAM out of a Quadro 6000 under OSX.

2> Leave the card be and hack the nVidia drivers. By doing this, we don't get the EFI boot screens and other pre-OS functionality / menus / etc.. Can't have the ability to profile the installed PCIe cards and other little issues will still be there. We would have to re-do a new hack each time OSX updates and nVidia releases new drivers. This is hardly an efficient solution.

3> Retro-fit an EFI profiling utility that can intervene at boot time or shortly after and construct proper EFI table entries where needed. Essentially doing on the Mac what is being done on the PC Hackintosh. I don't know if this is possible and how much access without major hacking is possible. So far it seems like option #1 is the way to go unless #3 proves to be a lot easier than I imagine it is. I'm pretty sure we'd be treated to a panic screen if we tried to mod the EFI table once the OS takes hold.


I really don't understand the purpose behind crippling the display adapters. This is an OSX 10.7.x thing where nVidia has actually included support for these cards in the drivers, but has crippled them if they don't have a proper Apple EFI installed. I wonder if this is per an Apple request or what's going on. I'm thinking it is an Apple restriction as apprently ATI cards have the same issues, but I haven't done any testing with them. Previously in 10.6.x, we could mod a kext file or two and the cards would work just fine after flashing them, some even without flashing (just no pre-OS EFI functionality). The new drivers on 10.7 don't have the same configuration files to mod, it's all in-built into the drivers. Although, config files may be tucked inside one of the driver files and I just haven't poked around in there to try and find that stuff yet.

I might poke around a bit more with the drivers, but I think most of my work here is done. So when it all comes down to it, I recommend the Quadro 4000 Mac Edition right now, until something better comes along.

If you want to go a different route and try to squeeze some better CUDA and gaming / light-duty OpenGL performance out of a card, I would go for the GTX570, possibly a GTX580 that has been flashed by the MacVidCards guy. If you're running a Hackintosh, the GTX570 and GTX580 cards are where it's at right now, no mods required.

[William Schultz]

My flashed GTX570 2.5GB should be arriving from Macvidcards today. Will try to get it into my system as soon as I can and write up a few notes for everyone that is curious about the performance of it under the latest OS. Thanks for all of the useful information as usual Jeff.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

My flashed GTX570 2.5GB should be arriving from Macvidcards today. Will try to get it into my system as soon as I can and write up a few notes for everyone that is curious about the performance of it under the latest OS. Thanks for all of the useful information as usual Jeff.

No problem. :) And your flashed 570 should work great!

FWIW, it seems that those on OSX 10.6.8 should stick with the GTX4xx series and if you want to run the GTX5xx series, you need to move to OSX 10.7.3 or later.

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

Some of the cards are being locked to 2.5GT/s interface mode, but not all.

How do I check if my card runs as it should?

[Ryan Browne]

Jeff Kilgroe has written extensively and accurately on this topic

Could you provide a link?

[Ben McCarthy]

If anyone has a GTX 570 with or without the EFI rom soldered you can try and delete the:

AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext" from your Extensions folder

This causes the card to power down when not under load

[Kenny Mosher]

I've got a PNY GTX580 3GB card in an '09 Mac Pro right now. Running OSX 10.7.4 and latest nVidia drivers... Here's the pros/cons of that configuration:

Pros:

It's cheaper than a Quadro 4000 and is a badass card if you also boot into Windows or Linux on the same system. CUDA performance is great -- a little better than the Quadro 4000, even when running on the Mac and given the other shortcomings I'm about to list. Under Windows, it screams, it smokes the Quadro 6000 in everything but OpenGL performance when in Windows. And that comes down to different driver optimizations.


Cons:

Drivers do not currently support proper power management or monitoring, fan control, etc.. for the card. It really does need a hack to work 100% properly. Drivers only see and allow for using 2GB of that 3GB onboard RAM. OpenGL performance is abysmal -- Cinebench scores are 30% less than the Quadro 4000 and so is overall OpenGL performance in apps like Maya, Lightwave, etc..

So... GTX580 makes a great secondary GPU in a PCIe expander for CUDA processing. Cheaper than a Tesla card and almost as good. Great primary card if you will be spending most of your time in Windows or Linux, but it's a dog in OSX unless we start hacking some config files and whatnot to make it work properly.



All things considered, I think the best card to buy for a current Mac Pro (or 2009 model, possibly '08 model if you still think it's worth spending money on) is the Quadro 4000 Mac Edition. It's officially supported, although the superior drivers come from nVidia, not Apple, so OSX updates tend to break compatibility with the latest "good" drivers until nVidia releases their updates a week or so later. IMO, not a big deal, on a production system no one should ever jump on a new OS update when first released.

The Quadro 4000 is a solid card, only takes one slot width and one 6-pin power connector. Two of them fit great inside a Mac Pro for additional CUDA acceleration in Resolve. If you need more 3D / OpenGL horsepower than what the Qudro 4000 gives you, then you probably should be looking at a Windows or Linux box for your software anyway. For 2D performance it does great. Personally, I think some of the ATI cards handle better under OSX for 2D performance and overall smoothness in running the GUI. The ATI 5870 isn't a bad card either and has decent OpenCL performance for FCPX. It's not on the supported list for CS6, but I believe you can change the text in the config file to make it work, just as you can with nVidia cards for CUDA. MPE does support OpenCL now, but it's not as complete or robust as the abilities with CUDA.

Hey Jeff
I just got the EVGA GTX 580 3GB as well as a used GT 120 for my 2008 3,1 Mac Pro. I have the 580 in slot 1, the Red Rocket in 2, ESata Card in 3, and the GT 120 in 4. I have an ATI Power Supply feeding power to the 580. For some reason I cannot see the 580 in the system profiler. I am running 10.7.4 and have the latest NVidia drivers installed. When I disconnect the power from the 580, all PCI cards show up, but when the 580 has power going to it, the 580 and RR don't appear in the profiler. Do you have any recommendations?

Thanks!!
Kenny

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Profiler doesn't recognize the 580, or most other non-supported video cards because of something Apple has done with the GDI interface in relation to loading video drivers. If a card registers itself as a primary video display device, but doesn't have a proper EFI table entry, then it gets ignored. Only way to fix this is to flash the card with a modified EFI image to inject proper support.

The other issue you're going to run into is the card locking itself into low-power mode. The PCIe link speed drops to 2.5GT/s (v1.x equivalent) and the card remains throttled down regardless of what you throw at it. The nVidia drivers support proper speed and power management for *some* card models if no EFI support is present, but you have to delete the Apple power management kext to see if your card will work. ...As Ben McCarthy stated above:
If anyone has a GTX 570 with or without the EFI rom soldered you can try and delete the:

AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext" from your Extensions folder

This causes the card to power down when not under load

All things considered, the card works just OK, kinda like I stated in that post of mine you quoted.

You probably won't be able to see it in Profiler no matter what. Maybe you could send it to the MacVidCards guy and get a flashed EFI firmware. Make sure you have the latest drivers and extra CUDA package installed. You can see if Resolve will "see" it. I'm assuming you're running Resolve as it's the only app out there that would justify a configuration like this on the Mac. Also be aware that your Mac Pro 3,1 is going to be seriously bottlenecked by the 800MHz RAM. Don't expect to get real-time performance at 1080p unless you work in 8bit, probably not at all at 2K or higher. Your top two slots (3 and 4) are PCIe X4 v1.1. Not a big deal with your configuration, but it makes it difficult to install faster cards in those two slots. The Rocket works best in slot-2, if you move it up, it's bandwidth is cut in half. Which is probably OK in the '08 Mac Pro as the system isn't going to keep up with the Rocket anyway when it comes to direct transcodes.

[Kenny Mosher]

Thanks Jeff!!!!

[Nicos Ambatzis]

am facing the same dilemma with my MacPro (early 2008) with only one x16 slot. At the moment I am using Redcine x Pro and Color for grading having a Quadro 4500 double width card occupying the first two slots for monitoring a Redrocket in a x 4 slot running half speed (requires minimum x 8 one) and a Kona card into the next x 4 slot for video output, working with internal storage only (small projects). Now I am going to use an external storage, for instance two G-Speed es Pro units with 24 Tb and an ATTO controller card (thanks Jeff for the advice), which means I have to buy a Cyclone or a Cubix expander with 4 PCIe x 16 slots. The host adapter card requires a x 16 slot leading me to use the only one I have and move the Quadro 4500 into Cubix, plus the Redrocket and the ATTO leaving the Kona into Mac in a x 8 slot. But I am not very sure that this configuration will work up to a standard. The dilemma starts in case I would like to use Resolve. Of course the best thing will be to replace the Mac Pro, but I am waiting until Apple makes the move next year if it does??? In this situation what is the best way to go??? Replace the Q 4500 with two Quadro 4000 and the Kona with a 4K Decklink (one slot) or what????. Any help will be very much appreciated. Thanks.

[Jonathan S Strauss]

Honestly I think the Quadro 4000 has seen it's days with the GTX 570 HD Superclocked and GTX 570 2.5GB for mac at less than 50% the price. I have changed out almost every quadro card on our rental bays as they are just much slower and have had 0 problems with the pc or mac version of gtx 570 series. Must download Nvidia 10.7.4 drivers and do a minor edit to reenable open cl but once that is done it's good to go. Quadro needs same driver update to work properly as well. In resolve the performance with the 2.5GB card is substantially better than quadro 4000 (we actually got the same performance as 2x quadro 4000 in the mac) and in AE nearly twice as fast with ray trace engine (Do have to add file to PP/AE supported cards).

Check out the difference on ray trace application:

http://barefeats.com/aecs6.html

Just my opinion but I constantly make sure to have the absolute fastest machines available when we rent and have just been getting much better performance. I also have 3 GTX 580 3GB in cubix and they just smoke! (speaking of smoke)Smoke 2013 can use multiple GPU's as well and has been doing great (Cubix had two quadro 6000 in cubix at NAB with smoke running on there demo unit).

[Rob Anderson]

Here's what I've been running in my '09 Mac Pro tower (original write up by me too):
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1076970

**Just wanted to note and per Jeff's own suggestions above, we switched over to PC's for our main work horses. While these solutions are 'nice' on the Macs, the realities of the bang for the buck ratios on PC's make all of this somewhat nonsensical.

[Jonathan S Strauss]

I still get much better performance out of resolve on a mac even in the newest resolve 9 beta compared to a PC with much better internals. It will be awhile before PC version really catches up, if anyone has found a different outcome I'd love to hear. Also wanted to point out that while Jeff is still recommending the Quadro 4000 (makes sense as it works pretty much out of the box) resolve now recommends the GTX 570 even on mac starting in Resolve 9 (works fine in resolve 8) if you look at there configuration guide. I have talked to a few people that work there and they agree it works much better. Also remember Resolve 9 lets you use your processing card also as you GUI card so need for the GT 120 anymore.

[md rutherford]

This is a great thread. Thanks for the wise info Jeff.

I just bought a EVGA GTX580 off the shelf for my office machine (MacPro4,1) to replace my GTX 285.

I didn't have the 6 to 8 pin adapter, so sure enough, it didn't work w/o that. But from what i have read even w/ the adaptor the power draw seems a little worrisome to me.

So it looks like my options are:

1. to run the high-risk option and get the adapter, or
2. do what others are doing w/ the 580 and get an addtional PSU.

But my question is this:
Is there a reason why people aren't just upgrading the internal PSU in the mac pro?

[Jarek Zabczynski]

But my question is this:
Is there a reason why people aren't fust upgrading the internal PSU in the mac pro?

Because you can't. Apple doesn't use off the shelf power supplies.

[md rutherford]

^ Thanks for confirming that. The thought of an external additional PSU makes me cringe, so that won't be happening. I guess I will just toss this in my i7 hackinmac in my home office, and get a gtx 570 for my main work machine. That just leaves me with a perfectly good gtx 285, but oh well, life goes on.

Before I throw in the towel, are there any thoughts on the risk of using the 6-8 pin adapter (for the gtx580) in a mac pro?

In my system i am currently running:

macpro 4,1:
slot1 - gtx 285
slot2 - sas raid controller
slot3 - usb3/sata controller
slot4 - bm decklink

[Jeff Kilgroe]

You can use a 6 to 8 pin adapter in a Mac Pro just fine if you are only powering from one of the two PCIe power connectors. If using both connectors and one is feeding an 8 pin connector, you stand the chance of over-drawing, if the card is under heavy load. But lots of people report success (I've also done it) and have not had any issues. I would worry a bit about long-term effects. Adapting both connectors to 8-pin is definitely not a good idea. That segment of the PSU, as well as the circuitry on the logic board, is just not made to support the potential draw of dual 8-pin connectors. Hence the reason for people talking about external PSUs.

I have not worked with the GTX570 or GTX580 under OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion, so can't comment on how well they are working. And that's the big gamble with running non-standard cards in OSX. The level of usability seems to change with every release of the OS and subsequent release of nVidia drivers.

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

GTX580 works fine with on my 8-core 2010 MacPro with OSX 10.8, no additional drivers needed...

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

GTX580 is even recognised in System Information, and is listed with the full 3072 MB of ram.

[Will Keir]

ThaT's the current power house GPU? gtx580? Can u get full rez playback in Ppro yet?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

PPro should be able to do full rez playback of 5K 2:1 if you're at 7:1 or lower compression ratio and no RED Rocket card -- *IF* -- you're on a 12-core Mac Pro with 32GB RAM or more. You can probably pull it off on a fast 8-core Westmere system as well. The video card isn't really what helps here. CUDA acceleration kicks in with other aspects of image manipulation, namely additional transformation and scaling operations, GPU-accelerated FX, translucency in dissolves, things like that.

I'm seeing several reports of people saying the GTX4xx and 5xx series cards play fine in OSX 10.8. Still no one has confirmed for me if they are fully supported with power management functions and other features. It's great to see the full amount of RAM is being reported!

[md rutherford]

Tossed the 580 in my hackintosh at home, booted perfectly on first try, shows up in system profiler properly, and damn is it ever fast. Curious to see if i get the same performance once i try it in my office mac pro.

[md rutherford]

I have been using a ray-tracing benchmark for AE cs6 provided by Teddy Gage on CreativeCow. It has proved to be quite handy for testing these different card configurations.

The benchmark AE project can be found here (http://www.teddygage.com/AEBENCHCS6/).

Here are my results so far on 3 of our machines:

mac pro (4,1) 2.26ghz, 32GB
OSX 10.7.4
GTX 285
28:30

i7 3.24ghz, 12GB, (DX58so Mobo)
OSX 10.74
GTX 580 1.5GB
5:15

i7 3.2ghz, 24GB, (P6T7 Mobo)
OSX 10.6.6
3X GTX 470's
3:45

Our Resolve machine (last in the list) burned right through the benchmark, and was the fastest by quite a margin. Not bad for a machine we built well over a year ago! It is right up there with the fastest results I have seen out of people trying it, including the dual 580, 590, and 690's. 3x 470's has proved time and time again to be a great performance-to-cost solution if you have a motherboard that can support it, or with a cubix in a mac pro.

My next test will be my mac pro w/ the 580 after i get the 6-8 pin adaptor tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing the results.

If anyone else uses that benchmark, would love to see you post your results here. I am curious to see how the 570's (and other cards) are stacking up.

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

I'm seeing several reports of people saying the GTX4xx and 5xx series cards play fine in OSX 10.8. Still no one has confirmed for me if they are fully supported with power management functions and other features. It's great to see the full amount of RAM is being reported!

Is it possible to check it somehow? I could try, if you told me how.

[Neil W. Smith]

... I have not worked with the GTX570 or GTX580 under OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion, so can't comment on how well they are working. And that's the big gamble with running non-standard cards in OSX. The level of usability seems to change with every release of the OS and subsequent release of nVidia drivers.

In one of our Resolve Mac towers running Mountain Lion, I have a GTX 680 (with external power supply) and 2 x GTX 690s in the attached PCIe Expansion chassis ... R9 sees all 5 x GPUs ... runs like shit off a shovel ... you can also cook your breakfast on it at the same time :-)

Neil

[Doug Beatty]

I have been using a ray-tracing benchmark for AE cs6 provided by Teddy Gage on CreativeCow. It has proved to be quite handy for testing these different card configurations.

The benchmark AE project can be found here (http://www.teddygage.com/AEBENCHCS6/).

Here are my results so far on 3 of our machines:

mac pro (4,1) 2.26ghz, 32GB
OSX 10.7.4
GTX 285
28:30

i7 3.24ghz, 12GB, (DX58so Mobo)
OSX 10.74
GTX 580 1.5GB
5:15

i7 3.2ghz, 24GB, (P6T7 Mobo)
OSX 10.6.6
3X GTX 470's
3:45

Our Resolve machine (last in the list) burned right through the benchmark, and was the fastest by quite a margin. Not bad for a machine we built well over a year ago! It is right up there with the fastest results I have seen out of people trying it, including the dual 580, 590, and 690's. 3x 470's has proved time and time again to be a great performance-to-cost solution if you have a motherboard that can support it, or with a cubix in a mac pro.

My next test will be my mac pro w/ the 580 after i get the 6-8 pin adaptor tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing the results.

If anyone else uses that benchmark, would love to see you post your results here. I am curious to see how the 570's (and other cards) are stacking up.

Resolve was choking on my 285 Snow Leopard machine, so I picked up a 570 2.5GB and am updating to Lion. Blue (my Hackintosh) is having issues with the update to 10.7 but those will hopefully be ironed out by next week. Once he's back up I'll report my benchmarks

OC'ed Xeon 3680 3.33ghz (EX58-UD4P), 24GB
OSX 10.7.3 or 4

I'm also running off an Intel 120GB ssd, so that should help things along.

[Johnny Friday]

Are all these mac machines Hackintosh machines? I have not seen any of these graphics cards offered for Mac....I have quadro 4000 and i thik the only card i know offered for mac....where are these new GTX cards? OR is there a hack to get them working?

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

We run a GTX580, originally made for pc's in our mac. The card is supported by OSX 10.8 out of the box.

[Johnny Friday]

We run a GTX580, originally made for pc's in our mac. The card is supported by OSX 10.8 out of the box.

Well then, things are changing i see. So 10.8 supports cards originally for PC?....so then, what is the card with SDI out that is reliable for Mac....670?

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

Yes, but be aware that it's not working 100% as a card originally made for Mac, and it's not officially supported. For instance we draw more power from the mainboard then the spec sheet on the Mac Pro allows, and there is no boot screen.

[Neil W. Smith]

Well then, things are changing i see. So 10.8 supports cards originally for PC?....so then, what is the card with SDI out that is reliable for Mac....670?

No SDI out with the Mac GPUs ... you need to install BMD DeckLink or AJA Kona 3 depending on your grading application .... of course, if you're only grading EPIC files and using RedCine X Pro then go with RedRocket card ... has HD SDI out as well.

Neil

[Johnny Friday]

I have a Matrox mxo2 now...and use it...but trying to think where i'll be soon...and BM or AJA might be the logical choice---but all depends what color grading software one goes with....AJA to me looks like the winner to work with....BM seems only for Davinci...so if i want to use Speedgrade or anything OTHER than Davinci, matrox and AJA are the ones to choose....But i don't believe either of those will work with Davinci as an I/O for SDI out....So then Davinici & BM are clearly out of the running for me....

....Anyone have thoughts on this? for best card or I/O device now for color work ? that allows use of various color software?

...in my case i often shoot/cut/grade in mixed format 720p, 1080p and 4k/5k files....

[Will Keir]

Johnny,

The 580 does work on the mac, I've confirmed this with actual users. It's about a 30% performance increase over the GTX 285.



We run a GTX580, originally made for pc's in our mac. The card is supported by OSX 10.8 out of the box.

[Johnny Friday]

Johnny,

The 580 does work on the mac, I've confirmed this with actual users. It's about a 30% performance increase over the GTX 285.

But is there any benefit then going from Quadro 4000 to the GTX 580? I can't imagine there is much of a gain...and with no sdi, and having to go with a complete different I/O for that...my Matrox MX02 works now, but looking at AJA. But i'm not seeing much from going Quadro to GTX580 then....

[Will Keir]

Not worth the step up right now, the 4000 is on par with the GTX 285, maybe 5-10% faster on specific applications. Either way, your best playback on Ppro will be 1/2 rez, maybe less if your rig isn't a beast.

it's always nice to not limit your software color correcting choices based on your hardware choice. i havent' had a chance to try either speedgrade or Resolve. You basically want a card to go SDi out to a grading monitor, correct?

[Johnny Friday]

Yep....i've cut a doc on CS 5 using Matrox MXO2 via SDI & HDMI out (but that's only 8bit).....so this has been a difficult and costly road to travel looking for best color (software/hardware) configuration...Would be easier i think if i was on a PC...but Mac makes it a bit difficult. AJA is looking good at moment. But then again, Davinci and BM are pretty standard in color world.

[Paul Provost]

Even the cheapest bmd sdi card will work with resolve in a Mac. You don't need the top of the line one.

[Will Keir]

Yep....i've cut a doc on CS 5 using Matrox MXO2 via SDI & HDMI out (but that's only 8bit).....so this has been a difficult and costly road to travel looking for best color (software/hardware) configuration...Would be easier i think if i was on a PC...but Mac makes it a bit difficult. AJA is looking good at moment. But then again, Davinci and BM are pretty standard in color world.

What are you editing on now, Ppro I assume? Of course your own tests will mean a lot more, but I hear only good things about Davinci Resolve, I'm hoping to try it sooner rather than later. God, am I happy not to be forced into using Apple Color. Not because it was a bad interface, which it could have been better, but because it has so many limitation to the workflow and round trip. Adjust my editing timeline heavily so I can color correct? Are you mad! :)

[Fabian Benninghoven]

The GTX 580 is very difficult to find. Is there another option from Nvidia for a 12 core Mac?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The GTX570 is actually the best choice for the Mac Pro over the 580. Been playing with them here now that Mountain Lion has better support for these non-Mac cards. The 580 can over-draw power on the Mac. But it's not so simple as that, a lot depends on the make/model and from which manufacturer and which reference design they followed. I like the PNY and EVGA ones best. Just be sure you don't go overboard and buy the hot-rod, OC models or anything like that. They suck even more power and in some situations won't even fit in the Mac Pro tower (or several PC systems for that matter) -- I'm looking at you GTX580 CLASSIFIED ULTRA, why u no fit in my HP?. Not sure if that helps though. Production on these models is slowing though, so that could be why they're getting harder for you to find.

Best official card is still the Quadro 4000. It's a solid card, but overpriced in light of what can be used now. The K5000 is coming to Mac, but details are still a bit sketchy and it seems now that it very well could be delayed until the new Mac Pro arrives so there will be a proper slot to put it in.

[md rutherford]

Jeff is correct, as usual. I chose the 570 for my mac pro, and put my 580 in my hackintosh. I pretty much only use EVGA, and found the EVGA GTX 570 2.5gb for a good price easily. It has been running solid in my Mac Pro for a few weeks now. It's benchmarks aren't as great as the 580, (for the AEcs6 benchmark above, I got 6:45 vs 5:15) but i feel good knowing its not drawing too much power.

[Fabian Benninghoven]

Thx Jeff.. i've found a PNY GTX 570 1,25GB -> 224 Euro. I will try this card in the 12 core 2010 MacPro.

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

I'm happy user of this one (http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=03G-P3-1584-AR) in our 2010 MacPro...

[Fabian Benninghoven]

I tried to get an EVGA 580 with 3GB... but its sold out atm.

[Paul Provost]

You want over 2gb ram to handle red4k in resolve...

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The 570 is definitely recommended due to power considerations. The 580s work, but may have long-term effects or undesired performance issues due to the power situation. Of course, if you supply them with additional power to compensate, then that solves that issue.

Paul is correct, you definitely want 2GB+ RAM on the card. The 570's are available with 2.5GB RAM and shouldn't be too hard to find.

[Tom.Wong]

the k5000 is gonna be great. has the staying power and stability of a quadro series card, but packs the punch of a true high end gpu. 3x the amount of cuda cores over a gtx 580. prelim specs say it may only need one power cord also, so you can pop two in a existing mac tower without overdrawing the system. meaning really good power efficiency. gonna be expensive, but i think totally worthwhile for all next gen tower computing.

the issue with using gaming cards is the fact that there's never any official support for these cards in pro software. you can use them, but if there is any issue, the support team from the software company can't diagnose the problem. plus gaming cards go off the shelf much faster, and don't stick around like quadro cards do. I'm using a hacked 470 myself for resolve, since the q4000 isn't really cutting it anymore, but I really can't wait to get a new workhorse gpu!

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Only real down-side to the K5000 in the current towers is that you're cutting its potential bandwidth in half right from the start since we don't have PCIe v3 slots in the current towers to make use of it. Still not sure just when nVidia/PNY is going to unleash it anyway and if it will coincide with a new Mac Pro or not.

As for performance, you can't really go off the number of CUDA cores. The Kepler architecture is a major shift from Fermi and as we see with the GTX6xx vs GTX5xx cards, the performance gains don't really relate to the scaled core quantities. GTX680 is similar in performance to the GTX580 in most respects. Faster for some operations, but overall very similar. Actually slower for double-precision CUDA and OpenGL/CL computations.

All things considered, even with the lack of PCIe v3 in the current towers, the K5000 will probably be the ideal card once it's released. I'm not so sure I'm going to run out and buy one. As I sit here looking at my approximately 2.5 year old 2010 Mac Pro, currently with an EVGA GTX570 2.5GB installed, it runs just fine. I doubt I'd splurge on the K5000 at this point... This system has probably reached the end of the road as far as upgrades I'm willing to pay for...

[Will Keir]

the k5000 is gonna be great. has the staying power and stability of a quadro series card, but packs the punch of a true high end gpu. 3x the amount of cuda cores over a gtx 580. prelim specs say it may only need one power cord also, so you can pop two in a existing mac tower without overdrawing the system. meaning really good power efficiency. gonna be expensive, but i think totally worthwhile for all next gen tower computing.

Sounds awesome. The K5000 is a Nvidia card? Is there a release date yet?

[Fabian Benninghoven]

The 570 GTX from PNY has arrived. No picture... :/ Is there something special to do, to get this card working?

[Paul Provost]

You need to install cuda driver first then install card. Did you get the 2.5 gb model?

[Fabian Benninghoven]

Ok THX! No, only the 1,25 GB model. But i think it will be the 580 GTX when this card is more stable.

[md rutherford]

anyone using the 10.7.5 nvidia drivers yet?