DaVinci on a 2008 MacPro

[Vladimir Kucherov]

It works well enough but don’t really expect real time performance on much. DPX 1080p realtime will work with a good raid setup, and one-eighth rez r3ds will play in realtime.

Compressed formats (again, I’m assuming 1080p here), and quarter-rez r3d’s play at around 20-23.5 fps.

It can also trip up rendering 4k footage (like when you set your Red Debayer to full quality premium) – I basically have to throttle my machine to 2fps render so I don’t get errors.

[Erik Lindahl]

Thanks for such a quick reply.

We do work in uncompressed 8- and 10-bit, ProRes and RED. Both SD and HD but our output tends to be 1080p (10-bit uncompressed) or 2K (ProRes 4444) at most. Occasionally we get DPX into our suite, it’s quite rare, but it happens.

Would performance be affected if we went for a 2x Quadro 4000 vs say 1x Quardro 4000 and 1x Radeon 5770 (i.e. does DaVinci utilize both the render and gui GPU for processing)? Also I guess performance would still be vastly superior to what we’re seeing in Color at the moment.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Vladimir Kucherov]

Yes, performance still beats Color, even when down to 2fps (and it’s a lot higher for 1080p sources)

The GPU isn’t the bottleneck on the system per-se. GPU on davinci only handles color processing, so you’ll only have performance gains if you have very complicated grades. The bottleneck on the 2008 mac pros is from my understanding CPU power and bus speeds, working to unpack and re-pack files as it goes.

[Erik Lindahl]

It’s my understanding internal i/o is the issue with these system yes. CPU speeds are decent but over-all throughput become a bottleneck.

So is there any gain in Da Vinci with 2x Quadro 4000 cards? We’d probably go this route anyway to get acceleration in CS5 and Squeeze.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Sascha Haber]

Well, you need like 200 Cuda cores for processing. that’s either a 285, 4800old or 4000new.
If you don’t need the system for premiere or color or anything else, the 120 will do. the Ati will be much better and a second 4000 with the display connected will greatly improve everything else that can use OpenGL and/or Cuda , like Sapphires or Vue

A slice of color…

DaVinci 7.1 OSX 10.6.6
Dual Xeon 2,4 RAM 24 GB
RAID0 8TB eSata 6TB
GTX 285 / GT 120
Extreme 3D+ WAVE

[Robert Houllahan]

I had resolve running on a 2008 with 1 GTX285 and a 12Tb Rocket Raid, it was pretty slow. I think this is due to the PCIe V1.0 slots in the 2008 model which seriously limit overall machine bandwidth.

-Rob-

Robert Houllahan
Director / Colorist
Cinelab Inc.
http://www.cinelab.com

Mackbook Pro

[Illya Laney]

We ran 1 GTX on a 2008 with 1920×1080 ProRes 444(without a RAID) and still got 4 nodes running realtime. It would take a quarter second to catch up but it settled on the full frame rate. Also, there’s different 2008 models and only ones with 800 MHz DDR2 support the GT120.

twitter.com/illyalaney

[Erik Lindahl]

Interesting. Well even if we only get 4-nodel real-time it’s better than using color as long as the tool is solid which it seems. The investment isnt that high then either and we get into the new environment.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Robert Houllahan]

The 8-core 2008 machine I had was 667mhz Ram bus and PCIe V1.0 which put it out of Resolve usability.

-Rob-

Robert Houllahan
Director / Colorist
Cinelab Inc.
http://www.cinelab.com

Mackbook Pro

[Darin Wooldridge]

I am using an 08 mac.. Is it working? Yes it is.. 🙂

NOTE: The comments above are strictly mine, and may not necessarily
represent those of my employers.

Darin Wooldridge
Colorist / Technical Strategist
818-653-3918-cell
dwooldridge@mac.com
check me out at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Davinci-Resolve-Colorist/117363011609028?ref=….