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CUDA card or Kona 3 – Pick 1 for use
Wow, I just learned from Adobe tech support,something that has the potential to really disappoint a lot of editors switching to PrP 5.5. I was told that PrP supports only 1 graphics card at a time. So you have a choice. If you want to take full advantage of your CUDA card speeding certain things up, then you cant use the Kona 3 card to output the video to an engineering / client monitor. And conversely, if you need to see your video from the Kona 3 card displayed on a external monitor, you cant take advantage of the MPE / CUDA benefits from your Nvidia card. Yikes.
Tom Daigon
Avid DS / FCP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
17 Replies
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Tom, that sounds like completely false info unless it’s specific to the KOna 3 drivers for PrPro. The third party io cards work independently of CUDA.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
Actually…you’ve got it partly right.
First, the Kona 3 isn’t a graphics card…it’s video I/O. I run two Quadros (four displays) and a Kona LHi with CS5.5.
The CUDA effects support runs on the NVIDIA card…which feeds a display via DVI, DisplayPort…whatever.
The Kona cards interact with the computer through the PCIe buss…which plugs into the CPU.
I don’t think it’s that CUDA stops working…it’s that CUDA is fastest when the process doesn’t have to take the assembled frame and suck it back from the display card to the CPU and the n spit it out to the I/O card.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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No the case with Kona according to Adobe tech support. In the prefs menu is the “Player” option. You choose either Adobe or AJA. When using Kona 3 you must use one of their preset sequence choices or it will not display thru their system. If you build a regular sequence to use the CUDA card, it will NOT display thru the Kona. This is all new to me so Im just reporting things as I bump into them.
Tom Daigon
Avid DS / FCP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
That would be great news to my ears. But the question is, does the CUDA still do its MPE functions when I am using a AJA preset sequence, since that is required for displaying the Kona video on an external monitor?
Tom Daigon
Avid DS / FCP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
Tim should probably answer this as he’s familiar with AJA. But with Matrox, the CUDA effects are more certainly fully operational in Matrox sequences. I wouldn’t expect AJA drivers to work any differently.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
I certainly hope that is the case with AJA. If not I have confidence in their ability to institute it. 😉
Tom Daigon
Avid DS / FCP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
Karl Lee Soule had this to say…
Tom, I believe this recently changed with the release of the new Kona drivers last week. It was true that the GPU benefits did not use to work when in an AJA preset timeline, because the AJA drivers didn’t take advantage of it. But AJA rewrote the drivers.
Tom Daigon
Avid DS / FCP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
My Kona 3, running in 5.0 (I won’t upgrade until I’ve seen it work properly in 5.5) isn’t affected much by CUDA (if at all) in the timeline, but I mainly use it for outputting already-edited broadcast spots, and I generally have 7 or 8 graphics tracks (phone numbers, etc.) going (requiring rendering anyway, so CUDA is pointless in that respect). However, it does make a difference when outputting the timeline to an h.264 file.
Overall, I prefer to edit outside of the AJA-verse, because it just feels more sluggish (it was much smoother in CS3, and barely ever worked in CS4). If 5.5 fixes this, I’ll revisit that opinion.
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I’ve always perceived AJA as a FCP-centric company with support for PrPro almost an afterthought, especially on the Mac. I’m sure this will change somewhat with the wave of new users coming over from FCP but if I owned a Kona card I’d be trying to kick up their involvement by addressing my concerns to their management.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
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