HP Z820, Quadro K4000+GTX 670, poor realtime performance

[Matt Gottshalk]

The fact that Resolve is not showing the Quadro K4000 might be an issue.

What kind of hard drive arrays are you using for your source material?

McGee Digital Media Inc.
24P HD Production and Post
https://www.mcgeedigitalmedia.com

[Timo Teravainen]

We’re using Western Digital RE 4TB drives, no RAID, but it should not be an issue with DNxHD bandwidth.. My Ivy Bridge 4-core machine at home performs just fine with Prores/DNxHD and 7200rpm drives.

[Glenn Sakatch]

Both cards are in the machine, or is one in an expansion chasis?

I have k4000 and gtx’s, but they are in an expansion slot. All 3 show up in resolve.

Does the K4000 show up in your device manager. (You have 2 different sets of drivers installed correct?)

Glenn

[Timo Teravainen]

No expansion chassis, just the HP Z820 which has enough slots available.

I haven’t found instructions on what kind of driver setup is best for Quadro+GTX cards, but from some forum I run into advice that one driver – GTX – should work with both cards. So I’m running a 340.52 GTX driver. But I’ll have to change it anyway as we’re updating to GTX 970 card and that driver is too old for it.

So what’s the procedure of installing two different driver versions on the same system? Is there something to take into consideration

[Glenn Sakatch]

Hmmm, i just checked my system. I might have been confusing an earlier time when i had an FX4800 and the K4000.

I installed one card, installed the driver, installed the other card, and it wouldn’t show up untill I installed a second different driver.

It looks like my system, with a K4000 and two GTX770s, are all using one driver.

I have some other conflicts with my Avid DS software, so i’m on an earlier version…i’m running 310.90 (3d vision controller and 340.52 (graphics driver) In my computer management it lists driver version of 9.18.13.4052 for both.
(I hate the Nvidia number system…hard to know what you are running.)

But again, they should both show up in your computer management. Have you tried removing the GTX to see if the K4000 shows up? If the card changed slots after its initial installation, it might need to be removed and reinstalled into the new slot, without the other card in the system.

Glenn

[Timo Teravainen]

I’ll have to check when I get to the office next week if they’re showing in the computern management. I know that they are both showing on the NVidia Control Panel. And the K4000 is working, as it’s the one where the displays are connected. Resolve just doesn’t seem to “see” it. On the other hand, Avid does see it. And it certainly seems like Resolve is not using the K4000 efficiently. When I’m using the internal scopes in Davinci, the performance drops from realtime.

I’m on the same graphic driver version 340.52 for the same reasons (Avid). But now theres a need to update the driver for a new card we just got, since that driver doesn’t support the 900 series cards.

I wish Blackmagic would be more clear with the driver recommendations…

[Joseph Owens]

Is there a difference in bus data transfer rates between the PCIe slots?

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Glenn Sakatch]

There certainly is. I’m assuming Timo that you’ve installed them based on the Resolve suggested board order in their config guide?

Glenn

[Timo Teravainen]

I have the PCIE cards configured somewhat differently than the guide suggests, as there’s an ethernet card that seems to work only in a certain card slot. But the GPU:s are installed both into 16x card slots.

[Jakob Woodruff]

Hi Timo,

When we ran multiple cards in our workstations, Davinci typically would only recognize the cards not connected to any monitor’s, therefore being recognized as “processing” GPU’s only. Also I mght mention the lite version will only recognize one, again typically the one not connected to any monitors.

I’ve run the 670 4GB card with Davinci and never had any problems using DNxHD 220x and ProRes footage. Worked beautifully. I did run into problems with PCI-E lanes not being mapped properly on certain boards in the way’s it might appear obvious at first.

I suggest grabbing a copy of GPU-Z, fire it up and select your processing card then stick it some place where you can see it. Then fire up Resolve and try to stress the card a little. See what the PCI-E link shows as they vary dynamically based on load. It will tell how many lanes are assigned (4x, 8x etc) and the revision (1.0, 2.0 etc). That will let you know definitively if that is your bottle neck.

If that doesn’t work, we can try something else. I had trouble several times arranging our 10BGe Chelsio & Decklink cards in just the right place to keep it from throttling down the main GPU. Also had to plenty of configuring.

Some have mentioned about using Geforce drivers on Quadro cards. IMO that’s a BAD idea! Reason I say that is as i recall, there is some forms of acceleration that rely on the Quadro drivers, especially OpenGL performance. Also the Quadro drivers are designed for precision & quality. The Geforce drivers are designed for gaming and will basically sacrifice quality for speed typically. In the past, we would use Quadro drivers on Geforce cards and frankly the resulting image quality was much better.

~Jakob