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

[shaftbond]

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/periphera...ted-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