Quadro 4000 a bust?

[Michael McCaffrey]

I just installed the Quadro 4000 for Mac in my 2009 Mac Pro (Quad core 2.66ghz, 8gb RAM, RAID, 10.7.4) and it plays back red 4kHD files at 1/2 res with a stutter... EXACTLY the same results I had before I even installed the card. So in effect, no difference at all.

I have the latest CUDA drivers installed and the latest drivers for the Quadro 4000 for 10.7.4. Am I missing something? I have Mercury Playback Engine enabled. It was found and (CUDA) enabled.. but zero performance. If I turn the playback to "software only" I get the same results, 1/2 playback stutter and 1/4 res it plays fine. Whether I enable the Mercury Playback Engine or not makes zero different in playback.

I talked to Nvidia and they said to talk to Apple and Apple said to talk to Adobe and Adobe suggested I re-install CS6, which I did, and.. nothing. Am I missing something? After all the rave reviews of the Quadro 4000 and RED playback I dont see any difference whatsoever. This cant be right.

System Specs:
OS 10.7.4
Premiere Pro CS 6.0.1 w/ Adobe Labs Plugin
CUDA 4.2.10 Driver
Quadro 4000 Driver version 270.00.00f06
Quad-core Xeon 2.66ghz
8GB RAM
3TB RAID 0

I also have a GT 120 card and 3 monitors but I took out the GT120 card and unplugged all but one monitor to eliminate conflicts and still no results from the CUDA.

[Tom.Wong]

cuda does not help with r3d decompression. you need a red rocket with that. all cuda helps with is on the fly rendering of effects. so you can playback footage with stacked effects on it, and the more cuda cores the more effects you can stack. only way to get closer to real time playback with r3d at the moment is having a rocket installed.

[Michael McCaffrey]

I don't need 4k playback. Seems like a lot of people are getting rt playback at 1/2 res with nvidia cards so that's what I was hoping for. $5k for a graphics card is way out of my price range.

[Paul Provost]

Just to test try in resolve lite
But a quad core with 8gig of ram...

[Jeff Kilgroe]

As pointed out by Tom, the wavelet decompression is what takes most of the compute power for R3D workflow and Adobe MPE + GPU acceleration doesn't kick in until after those frames have been decompressed and delivered to the applications frame buffer.

Asking for real-time R3D 4K at half-res is expecting a bit much. In that 2009 Mac Pro, the bottleneck is the CPU and RAM. You are running a single quad-core 2.66GHz CPU. You're not even running the RAM at full speed in that system due to only one CPU and supporting memory interface being installed. And 8GB is not much to work with.. That said, even with a Rocket in an 8-core 2009 Mac Pro with 24GB RAM and Quadro 4000, I still couldn't work at half res in CS5.5 (didn't try CS6 on that system before stripping it down for sale). At that point, the memory speed was the bottleneck at 1066Mhz. I could transcode fast though, but I kept my work in Premiere at 1/4 and even had to drop to 1/8 if the edit started consuming a ton of layers and FX. At that point, the Rocket was actually a hinderance as it always does a full resolution and full quality debayer.