adding CUDA cards

[Todd Kopriva]

> Would there be a benefit if I add two Quadro 4000s?

Premiere Pro will only use one of the cards for CUDA processing. Premiere Pro doesn’t use SLI.

> Can I definately expect an increase in real time speed and faster renders?

You can see results from several hundred users’ machines here:
https://ppbm5.com/DB-PPBM5-2.php

This page describes what CUDA processing actually accelerates (as well as other important information about this feature).

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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[Rick Diamond]

Thank you Todd

[Rick Diamond]

Todd,

I just looked at the chart. Not sure how to decipher the information. Also, do you have any speed results or other data regarding the Mac Pro?

Thank you,

Rick

[Keith Moreau]

I don’t know if there are benchmarks on Macs like there are on PCs. I have a Mac Pro 2008 8 core with Quadro 4000. I think the benefits of the CUDA are evident mostly on having the CUDA enabled effects being able to be rendered in real time. The CUDA is also used on these effects for exporting, either via Premiere Pro, or Media Encoder. If I wasn’t able to use CUDA acceleration via these NVidia cards, Premiere Pro would be a lot less appealing to me.

That being said, I also feel I could benefit from a more modern Mac or PC with more cores and faster clock, I think Premiere Pro really tries to use all the power it can and if your system isn’t powerful enough you’ll experience various forms of sluggishness. I can’t wait until Apple releases a new line of Mac Pros, and I pray they don’t discontinue them.

[Rick Diamond]

Keith, I also have a 2008, 8 core Mac Pro. Looks like the Quadro 4000 would be a worthwhile purchase. I’m having trouble finding additional ram. Do you know where I can find it to accomodate the 2008 Mac Pro?

Also, have you upgraded to Lion? Any benefit? I’m still using Snow Leopard.

Rick

[Keith Moreau]

Hi Rick

I use dealram.com to find the best prices, usually I go to Other World Computing, macsales.com to purchase the RAM, they have good RAM and a good warranty which I have had to use once. They also have a trade in for old ram, which might be of some benefit. RIght now I have 24GB, this seems to be right for my situation. I also have a SSD startup drive and this makes things a lot faster as well. They are expensive but really improved the perceived speed of the system.

I upgraded to Lion a couple of weeks ago. I’m always wary of major upgrades, especially since Lion obsoleted a lot of things. However, the main reason I wanted to upgrade to Lion was that it was reported to fix the PPro ‘laggy timeline’ problem where dragging clips in the timeline would have a latency. There was a whole discussion here and on the Adobe Premiere Forums about that.

Anyway, yes, I upgraded, and at least in that way Premiere Pro 5.5.2 is better. I had some PPro instabilities and I’m still having them, such as occasional crashes in Premiere Pro. This might be due to either plugins in Premiere Pro, or some non-Lion compatible Quicktime plugins.

I removed at least one that was causing Quicktime to crash and re-launch every few seconds. I’m still investigating a OGG component that Premiere Pro seems to complain about loading (in the Mac system logs). At this point for the timeline issue it’s probably worth upgrading to Lion. I would backup your startup drive completely before upgrading, if at all possible.

What I’m finding is if the Premiere Pro Project starts getting bit large, Premiere Pro begins to get more sluggish and unstable (crashy.) I was just working on a project yesterday that was crashing. It was a 200MB project, mostly because within the project I had backed up many sequences to preserve states of the sequences before I made major changes. I also had multiple but related sequences within the same project file. I trimmed the project to remove the unneccesary sequences which reduced it down to about 35MB and it worked much better and didn’t crash after that. Most of the work I’ve done in PPro on the Mac to date has been 30 minutes or less. I’m wary of working on a long form project, over 1 hour, I feel I’m going to have to baby it, like I had to do with FCP 7, to keep it stable. I hope Adobe addresses this in the near future.

Good luck with it and report back with your progress.

-Keith

[Tom Daigon]

Keith – I hope Adobe addresses this in the near future.

Keith, lets make sure they address it. Please go to Adobe and make your bug / feature request here.

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
Mac Pro 3,1
8 core
10.6.8
Nvidia Quadro 4000
24 gigs ram
Maxx Digital / Areca 8tb. raid
Kona 3

[Rick Diamond]

Keith, thank you for the extensive and great reply. I’ll go to the site you recommended for the RAM. I’ll also upgrade to Lion. The latency when dragging clips on the timeline is really a problem. I hope my Matrox MXO2 will also work more smoothly as well.

Rick

[Andrew Leitch]

Hi Todd,

Is it possible to tell which card PPro is using for CUDA acceleration? I’m testing out Davinci Resolve and have a GT 120 which I’ve put in Slot 1, and moved my Quadro 4000 to Slot 2 as per the Resolve specs.

My concern is that I want to continue to use the Quadro 4000 with PPro (I’m thinking, for the price I paid, it’s higher preforming card), and not have it just sitting there, only getting used by DaVinci.

Also on a related note… is the GT 120 a better preforming card with AE? A quick render test did show the GT 120 render a comp 43secs as apposed to 62sec by the 4000.

Any insight is appreciated.

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A.J. Leitch
http://www.modrew.com