If I was stupid enough to buy a new Mac Pro……

[Justin Ferar]

Since we’re talkin’ Quadro’s and 5770/5780’s I wonder if it’s possible to run both my Quadro 4000 and the ATI 5770 at the same time and use one for Motion work and the other for Premier work?

I have no idea if these apps can select the card to use in preferences and also wonder if this would fry the power supply…

[Dustin Ward]

Oliver,
Maybe you would know a little more about this than I would, and I can’t find a forum on it anywhere. I ordered a quadro 4000, but my Mac Pro 12 core came with an ATI Radeon 5870. Can these cards be run together, or is that what you are saying you don’t recommend? Can the Mac Pro be altered to accept both the cards? Thanks for your help.

[Oliver Peters]

[Dustin Ward] ” Can the Mac Pro be altered to accept both the cards? “

What are you trying to do and why do you want both cards? The 5870 requires power from both aux connections on the motherboard. The 4000 would also require one of these. So you are short of sufficient power for both. I believe you could run the 5770 and the 4000 together. Or an older GT120 and the 4000.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Dustin Ward]

It’s just that my mac pro came with a 5870, so I wanted to be able to utilize it with my quadro 4000. Someone recommended this cable:
https://www.amazon.com/CB-6M-68F2-6-pin-PCI–Dual-Cable/dp/B005GWFZ8Y/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1314982428&sr=8-10

I’m more of a creative designer, so I don’t know much about the hardware except that I don’t want to get rid of a perfectly good card that I already have. Is this cable all that I would need?

[Walter Soyka]

[Dustin Ward] “It’s just that my mac pro came with a 5870, so I wanted to be able to utilize it with my quadro 4000. … I’m more of a creative designer, so I don’t know much about the hardware except that I don’t want to get rid of a perfectly good card that I already have. Is this cable all that I would need?”

If you don’t have a specific reason to want to run both cards together, I’d advise against it. Most (but not all) GPU-aware applications will only use the GPU that the main monitor is attached to for acceleration anyway, so you’d have another card in the system, another set of drivers loaded in memory, and you’d be taxing the Mac Pro power supply for no reason.

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

[Dustin Ward]

Thanks, you have been extremely helpful. This is sort of an open ended statement, but since you mentioned applications, I thought I would mention that I primarily use Premiere, After Effects and Davinci on my system.

[Oliver Peters]

[Walter Soyka] “If you don’t have a specific reason to want to run both cards together, I’d advise against it.”

Agreed. Multiple-GPU operation is application specific. Plus, in my testing of both of these cards, I’ve been happier with the 5870 than the 4000. The Nvidia card is somewhat faster/better with Adobe Premiere Pro (some effects only) and with DaVinci Resolve. Otherwise I prefer the ATI card. It’s also a little bit quieter and runs cooler. However, if you prefer the 4000, then simply install it in place of the 5870.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Walter Soyka]

[Dustin Ward] “Thanks, you have been extremely helpful. This is sort of an open ended statement, but since you mentioned applications, I thought I would mention that I primarily use Premiere, After Effects and Davinci on my system.”

Premiere wants the Q4000 as the primary GPU. If the monitors are not driven by the Q4000, you cannot use CUDA hardware acceleration for the Mercury Playback Engine.

Ae will use the Q4000 for the 3D ray-tracing renderer whether it is attached to the displays or not.

Resolve can use the Q4000 as a single card for both the UI and for computation. You can get better performance with a dedicated UI card driving the monitor in the first slot and the Q4000 in the second slot, left for computation only. The supported UI cards are the ATI Radeon 5770, the NVIDIA GeForce GT120, and another Quadro 4000. Lots of people are using GTX500-series cards instead of the Quadros in these configurations.

I can offer an anecdotal counterpoint to Oliver’s experience. I had loads of stability issues and kernel panics running the old NVIDIA GeForce GTX285 for Mac in my Mac Pro. I replaced it with a Quadro 4000, and I have found it to be stable. I guess your mileage may vary.

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

[Oliver Peters]

[Walter Soyka] “I replaced it with a Quadro 4000, and I have found it to be stable. I guess your mileage may vary.”

In my case, the 4000 was stable now, too (with recent OS and CUDA driver updates). However, in direct comparison of the ATI versus the Nvidia, Media Composer was the same, FCP X/FCP 7/Color better with 5870, Resolve better with the 4000, Premiere Pro the same (except certain accelerated effects).

The 5870 cannot be safely used with Resolve with anything below 10.8.2 (glitches in highlights). If you run two cards, I found that the fps increase was marginally better over a single 4000. FWIW – real-time playback has been better with Color and SpeedGrade over Resolve, although similar with the 4000 installed. Resolve has awful playback with the 5870 compared with the others. By and large, RT playback performance with SpeedGrade is significantly better than with Resolve, using a single GPU card (either).

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Walter Soyka]

Cool, thanks for the detailed information, Oliver.

[Oliver Peters] “Premiere Pro the same (except certain accelerated effects).”

Some of those accelerated effects may be pretty signficant (like the Fast Color Corrector, Ultra Keyer, and Warp Stabilizer).

There are some things that CUDA accelerates (beyond effects) that are worth noting: scaling, deinterlacing, blend modes, color space conversions, and handling frame rate differences, field order differences, pixel aspect ratio differences, frame size differences, and alpha channel representation differences.

Additionally, scaling with CUDA acceleration uses a different algorithm and yields higher-quality results than scaling without acceleration.

How important all this stuff is depends on the work you do; for some folks, this isn’t a blip on the radar, but for others, acceleration may offer significant performance advantages.

Here’s loads more information from Todd Kopriva.

https://blogs.adobe.com/premierepro/2011/02/cuda-mercury-playback-engine-and-adobe-premiere-pro.html

https://blogs.adobe.com/premierepro/2011/04/adobe-premiere-pro-cs5-5-improvements-in-cuda-processing-and-the-mercury-playback-engine.html

https://blogs.adobe.com/premierepro/2010/10/scaling-in-premiere-pro-cs5.html

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