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Mac Pro – nVIDIA Quadro 4000
I just got the latest Mac Pro (12 core) and am wondering – is anyone out there successfully using the nVIDIA Quadro 4000 with AE CS6 and Lion? I’m considering buying one, but it seems there are a lot of people out there with major problems with the 4000. It’s hard to tell if they are the majority or just flukes. Adobe claims to support it, but it sounds like people are finding out the opposite to be true. I want to buy an nVIDIA card to maximize the capabilities of CS6, but is there really one out there that works?
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3 Replies
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I’ve got a Quadro 4000 in a Mac Pro in the office. It works fine and has been vastly more reliable for me than the GTX285 it replaced, but the Quadro 4000 is not the best card for AE CS6.
Check out Juan Salvo and Danny Princz’s AE/GPU benchmarks [link].
Please note these benchmarks are specific to CS6’s new ray-tracing renderer. Third-party effects like Sapphire and Optical Flares can also process on the GPU, but normal 2D and Classic 3D rendering in After Effects is all on the CPU.Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Been running it for awhile now. Just make sure you are up to date with CUDA drivers.
We would love to try the better/faster options but they are not supported by Black Magic for Resolve and requires a hack from my understanding.
Where I work that wont fly with corp standards. -
Thanks very much for your help, guys. Walter, that chart really helped me in my search to get the most bang for my buck. I ended up going with the GTX 480 which I bought from macvidcards on ebay. This guy does some declocking and whatnot to make sure the cards work properly with the Mac Pro. This card came with two DVI ports, so I had to get converters to connect my 27″ apple cinema display and 1080P TV. I’m on Lion, so I was instructed to only download the CUDA driver, which I did and is fully up to date. Everything is working great so far – except AE playback in CS5 and CS6! When ram previewing a scene, I get screen tearing. It’s not terrible, but is distracting. If I play the same rendered out clip in Quicktime, I don’t have this problem, so it must be AE not liking the card because I didn’t have these issues with the stock ATI card that came with the Mac Pro. And it occurs on both monitors – so I don’t think it could be the DVI converters. I’ve read around this and other forums and it seems many people are having screen tearing issues, but mostly with just CS6. If anyone reading this has any ideas I’m very open to hearing them.
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