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07-01-2010, 11:20 AM
No, Jay.Originally Posted by Jay A. Kelley
But a HP Z800 is the workstation of choice of all the Autodesk Linux systems such as Flame, Smoke or Lustre and is of course very well suited for Resolve on Linux.
Hans
PS: My computer skills are limited. If I would tinker around with computer parts I would probably ending up troubleshooting that box all day and not making one film. IMHO, quality hardware has it's place and is for users like me cheaper.
07-01-2010, 02:12 PM
Jay, first of all, I know nothing of which I am about to speak... But I'm wondering.... can you build a Hackintosh out of rad pc parts? If you can, perhaps you can have your monster machine with pc parts and run the Mac OS on it too?
07-01-2010, 03:12 PM
I'm a happy hackintosh user. But i don't recomend to anybody. Never!!, why? Because they will call me any time that they have a problem.
Here in europe we have a company that sell a monster hackintosh, www.pearc.de and i think they can give you a osx software upgrade support.
The only problem at this moment is not nvidia470 support, only 285. I'm thinking to overclock my 285 to catch the 470.
You can make dual proccesor system too, but is soo expensive
saludos
Jose
07-01-2010, 03:31 PM
Elsie,Apparently you can according to the www.PearC.de faq`s from the link above..
"13. Can I install another operating system such as Linux or Windows?
Yes, you can. However it is necessary to install another hard drive and install the other operating system on it. If you decide to install it on the main hard drive (Mac OS X start volume), it can cause several complications and is not supported by us."
Not sure in practicse how this would work though?..Resolve on your hackintosh with all the benefits you wish for from a PC Jay?!
Couls someone who knows what they`re talking set the record straight?
Last edited by Graham_C; 07-01-2010 at 03:45 PM.
07-01-2010, 03:37 PM
Yeah, building a hackintosh isn't a big deal... Except you are confined to using hardware that will be supported by the software. People complain about the cost of the Mac Pro, but go and price out a similar system with dual Xeon CPUs. Not cheap at all. Apple charges no more for their systems than Dell, for example. Sometimes less, but they're not real good at keeping prices up to date. Especially lately as the Mac Pro is in need of an update or better yet, a full reboot.. Like any other system vendor, they really get you on the price of HDDs and RAM. With a hackintosh, they can be stable, but you're always at the risk of not having a full Apple EFI. But they can be a workable system if you accept the imitations and risks involved -- a 4 or 6 core single-CPU hackintosh can be powerful when overclocked and have a lot of performance benefits in software that relies more on the speed of one or two CPUs rather than scaling to higher numbers of cores. Overclocking the 285 won't get you a 470. It will just get you a 285 that's a bit faster. I just wish nVidia would release some drivers for the 285 that don't completely suck ass. The latest driver release from about 10 days ago fixes the CUDA issue with OSX 10.6.4, but still lacks any real performance enhancements or major bug fixes.
@ Jay,
I assumed before that you wanted the dual Xeon for the number of cores and a few other possibilities it brings to the table. It's a great system if you're going to be doing a lot of rendering. But what Bruce and Steve have pointed out, a single 6-core CPU overclocked is going to give you faster performance within most of your applications and at a cheaper price. Even though the Adobe Mercury Engine is CPU-based and scales across multiple CPUs. The performance benefit from more cores really tapers off past 4 physical cores or about 6 virtual cores. GPU plays a role in the Mercury Engine as well. It handles most of the color transformations and a lot of the FX plugins and transition plugins. CS5 tells you which plugins are GPU accelerated too.
So before buying the dual Xeon over the single i7 workstation, ask yourself this... Do you do a lot of rendering where you would benefit from the additional CPUs in the system? Is that more important to you than the up-front performance of your software that you will be working in every day?
It's possible to overclock the Xeons as well, contrary to popular belief, but it's not easy and you will need access to specific BIOS hacks and other tools to get it right.
07-01-2010, 04:00 PM
Jeff could you clarify this if possible,i`m getting a bit mixed up on my learning curve,you said above..
"Even though the Adobe Mercury Engine is CPU-based and scales across multiple CPUs"
So the Mercury engine is specific cutting edge software that helps leverage multi core cpu`s for rendering?..so where then do the multi core GPU`s come into play within CS5? It`s the CPU/GPU tasking that i can`t get clear on
07-01-2010, 04:48 PM
Premiere Pro has the Mercury Engine for playback. It leverages multiple CPUs to distribute processing for multiple streams of video. For example, all R3D processing and debayer is done on the CPUs. It has to be done via RED's SDK, which currently has no GPU acceleration for debayering. However, the Mercury engine also makes use of CUDA (nVidia's GPU acceleration interface) and it uses it for color, transitions, layering and FX.
If you have a crappy GPU in your system, even if the system is a hot-rod 12-core PC, you may find that the CPUs plow right through decoding of the R3D streams, but completely chokes at transitions such as dissolves and wipes between them. If you want to see the CPU activity with the Mercury Playback Engine, load up a CPU monitor (Task Manager on Windows or Activity Monitor on Mac) and you can see graphs for the loads on each of your CPU cores. Watch what they do when something like the Mercury Engine runs.
The Mercury Engine is probably the best example of using multiprocessing combined with GPU acceleration in any current mainstream software. By Adobe using CUDA, that should theoretically be able to scale in ability too with more powerful GPUs and eventually more physical GPUs via SLI. The drawback to CUDA is it's nVidia's own proprietary interface. OpenCL should eventually be a better and completely open choice, but it's not quite up to standards yet.
I said above that the Mercury Engine doesn't scale well past a certain number of CPUs, which is still up for debate at this point. Because most systems with several CPU cores are typically being bottlenecked by the GPU doing much of the on-screen pixel-pushing within CS5's Mercury.
But the thing to keep in mind here is the CPUs and GPUs work in tandem within CS5. You can see the effect easily in Windows by assigning CS5 to only run on a couple CPUs.
07-01-2010, 05:04 PM
Many thanks for that clarification Jeff,much appreciated.
07-03-2010, 07:38 AM
why not? I'm thinking.. why wouldn't RED upgrade their SDK to benefit from CUDA? will this affect the sales of RED Rocket? CUDA is real amazing technology.. and the theory behind it is mind blowing clever and effective.. well, IMHO, I see all the future of processing is to be CUDA powered.. its a great alternative to the lame CPU technology from intel.. which does not require changing the whole platform to benefit from it..
07-03-2010, 08:08 AM
1) it requires a ground up rewrite of the debayering code.
2) It's been said that CUDA isn't particularly good at decoding wavelet-based images.
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