Dual quadro fx 4600 [Archive]

Joe Carney

03-08-2008, 09:35 AM

If I set up a workstation with 2 quadro fx 4600 cards on a mobo that supported dual PCIe 16x cards, would Scratch benefit from that.

I'm looking at either a supermicro or tyan workstation board, or one of the new 780i boards that support sli.

David Birdy

03-08-2008, 10:29 AM

Hey Zeke,

I'm also looking at building a fast machine to process R3D files...
780i with multiple PCi slots is the way I may go.. + SATA drives
Why did you choose the Fx 4500 cards?

Dave

Joe Carney

03-09-2008, 10:47 AM

Hey Zeke,

I'm also looking at building a fast machine to process R3D files...
780i with multiple PCi slots is the way I may go.. + SATA drives
Why did you choose the Fx 4500 cards?

Dave

I got a fx4600 off of ebay for a great price. May get another one. Looks like the 780 SLI is stable. But, the 4600 covers a slot next to it. I want to use one of the slots for an Areco hardware based raid card, according to EVGA, you can put non graphics cards in the PCIe2.0 16x slots. But if the 4600 card is too wide, then either use just one or go with a workstation board to achieve same goal. Still working it out.

Lucas Wilson

03-09-2008, 10:55 AM

If I set up a workstation with 2 quadro fx 4600 cards on a mobo that supported dual PCIe 16x cards, would Scratch benefit from that.

I'm looking at either a supermicro or tyan workstation board, or one of the new 780i boards that support sli.

Hey Zeke - SCRATCH does not benefit from multiple gfx cards on a mobo.

Lucas

Joe Carney

03-09-2008, 11:04 AM

Hey Zeke - SCRATCH does not benefit from multiple gfx cards on a mobo.

Lucas

Thanks. Had to ask.

David Birdy

03-09-2008, 12:03 PM

Lucas,

Can you recommend a Graphic card?

Thanks
Dave

Zeke,

Check out the new HP XW8600....it looks great....

Dave

Fredrik Harreschou

03-13-2008, 07:27 AM

Lucas,

Can you recommend a Graphic card?

Thanks
Dave

I'll jump in on this: Quadro FX 4600/5600 SDI is what you would want to buy today. The drivers are a little buggy yet but they (will) have better functionality over the 4500/5500 cards, especially for output to tape and stereoscopic work.

If you are serious about getting a SCRATCH seat, I would recommend you not to go out and by the machine yourself. Assimilate might be able to hook you up with a certified machine at special prices, at least I would talk to them first.

Cheers,
Fredrik

Lucas Wilson

03-13-2008, 07:32 AM

I'll jump in on this: Quadro FX 4600/5600 SDI is what you would want to buy today. The drivers are a little buggy yet but they (will) have better functionality over the 4500/5500 cards, especially for output to tape and stereoscopic work.

If you are serious about getting a SCRATCH seat, I would recommend you not to go out and by the machine yourself. Assimilate might be able to hook you up with a certified machine at special prices, at least I would talk to them first.

Cheers,
Fredrik

Dave,

What he said... : )

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA

RivaiC

03-13-2008, 12:44 PM

So the conclusion is Scratch will not run on other machine that doesn't have Quadro FX card, if i got it right

Fredrik Harreschou

03-13-2008, 12:55 PM

http://assimilateinc.com/graphicscards.html

RivaiC

03-13-2008, 01:17 PM

Ok thanks

Seth Larney

03-15-2008, 09:20 PM

Hmm,

I just noticed that the 5600 is listed on the Assimilate website as 'in process'.

Lucas, now that the SDI versions are out, I was thinking of getting a 5600 1.5gb sdi for our planned Scratch suite, do you know if they are supported yet ? I really want to go with the 80 series gpu and it's miles above the old chipset.

Cheers,
S.

Lucas Wilson

03-16-2008, 01:37 AM

Hmm,

I just noticed that the 5600 is listed on the Assimilate website as 'in process'.

Lucas, now that the SDI versions are out, I was thinking of getting a 5600 1.5gb sdi for our planned Scratch suite, do you know if they are supported yet ? I really want to go with the 80 series gpu and it's miles above the old chipset.

Cheers,
S.

It is officially supported. We need to update our website... tx!

Lucas

Seth Larney

03-16-2008, 06:31 AM

Music to my ears :)

Mat@imageWork

04-01-2008, 05:56 AM

Hi Lucas,

I recently received a quote for an indecent workstation: 4x4 cores on new AMD, FX 5600 SDI, 8x146 sas 15K, 12 gig ram, controller raid card, bluefish 2K card.

Is Scratch 64 bit : 12 gig of ram should be wecome.
Are multicores usefull when process the final print (is GPU is for realtime and cores for final output?)
Does Scratch would support I/O directly with batch conform, etc...

thanks again, mathieu

Lucas Wilson

04-01-2008, 09:38 AM

Hi Lucas,

I recently received a quote for an indecent workstation: 4x4 cores on new AMD, FX 5600 SDI, 8x146 sas 15K, 12 gig ram, controller raid card, bluefish 2K card.

Is Scratch 64 bit : 12 gig of ram should be wecome.
Are multicores usefull when process the final print (is GPU is for realtime and cores for final output?)
Does Scratch would support I/O directly with batch conform, etc...

thanks again, mathieu

Hi Mathieu,

To answer your questions...

SCRATCH is not currently 64-bit.

Multicores are only useful when processing Plugins, or dealing with REDCODE. All color processing is done on the GPU, and the cores are mainly traffic cops moving bits around.

SCRATCH does not do direct video ingest. For that, we typically partner with Bluefish, as the Lust card will batch digitize an EDL to DPX files and insert proper metadata into the header. In addition, Symmetry (the software that comes with the Lust) will also populate a SCRATCH Construct with clips via the background XML engine in SCRATCH.

Cheers,

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, inc.
LA, CA, USA

Mark L. Pederson

04-01-2008, 11:03 AM

Music to my ears :)

and tested by us - all good - however, you should know that all that extra TEXTURE processing doesn't do anything for Scratch performance. 4600 SDI kicks the same ass in Scratch as the 5600 SDI - however, if you use the workstation for other apps (3D, etc.) then cool - and I am not even sure you can still find the 4600 SDI cards around - anyway, 5600 worked great for us in all of our tests with BOXX.

Seth Larney

04-01-2008, 05:37 PM

and tested by us - all good - however, you should know that all that extra TEXTURE processing doesn't do anything for Scratch performance. 4600 SDI kicks the same ass in Scratch as the 5600 SDI - however, if you use the workstation for other apps (3D, etc.) then cool - and I am not even sure you can still find the 4600 SDI cards around - anyway, 5600 worked great for us in all of our tests with BOXX.

Much appreciated, thanks Mark.
S.

Mat@imageWork

04-07-2008, 05:09 AM

good to know. Thanks o lot lucas. Hope scratch will go on 64 bit and multi GPU.

And Lucas, we have a discreet smoke here. We thinking about adding a FCP and a scratch to make our offline and grading. Have you worked on a similar workflow?
Smoke can handle directly XML from FCP. It take the XML and the footage too (but can't handle R3D footage). A cool workflow is to replace the footage of the offline with the footage of the graded material from Scratch in DPX. So when importing in Smoke, the XML "track" the graded material in image sequence. And then we can add effect on it. There is a lot of issue here (QT vs Images sequences, head and tail management, media management) but the big picture is there.

Thanks