nVidia PC envy…

[Craig Seeman]

Barefeats did this test a few weeks back. Obviously it wasn’t video specific but it included the nVidia GTX580 and AMD 7970. They used a MacPro 2010 and Bootcamp to test the cards it get a Mac vs Windows comparison. 7970 and 580 seriously outperformed the Mac GPUs currently available. There’s definitely a bit of Windows envy as he admits.

https://barefeats.com/wst10g14.html

[Andrew Richards]

I saw a review of that new GTX 680 that made me worry about its immediate future as an Apple OEM card. Dig the last graph, the one that tests OpenCL performance. The 680 sucks at OpenGL compared to the new AMD 7000 series. Apple is an OpenCL partisan, so it seems unlikely to me they would ship a Mac Pro with a card that sucks at their favored technology.

That doesn’t stop NVIDIA from putting forth the effort to make a couple Kepler cards Mac-friendly, but if the status quo of Apple having to OEM cards for them to work on a Mac carries forward, it does not bode well for modern CUDA on the Mac.

Best,
Andy

[Lance Bachelder]

Yes and the GTX 680 has a 1,000 MORE CUDA cores than the GTX 580!

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California

[Lance Bachelder]

Understood – just would be nice to have some options when it comes time to BTO a new MacPro… there are no nVidia options for BTO, though there are nVidia cards in the Apple online store.

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California

[Andrew Richards]

[Lance Bachelder] “just would be nice to have some options when it comes time to BTO a new MacPro”

It would be nice, but I doubt Apple would have a BTO option for a card that would make its own software run poorly. I could see them selling a third party card in their store, but getting it built-in might be a non-starter for them if the OpenCL performance is indeed that poor on the Keplers.

Best,
Andy

[Lance Bachelder]

Well FCPX and Motion need OpenCL which the nVidia does support. But Maya, Avid, Adobe, DaVinci, Magic Bullet etc. all do better with nVidia. So if Apple is going to tailor their Mac Pro’s for FCPX/Motion users only, that would be sad…

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California

[Walter Soyka]

I’m with you. I’d love to see better NVIDIA support on the Mac. (10.7.3’s universal NVIDIA driver [link] is interesting and encouraging, but with no official support, still too scary for production, in my opinion).

[Lance Bachelder] “The big advantage Adobe has right now over everyone is the nVidia CUDA real-time stuff including the ability to cut 4k Red raw files.”

There’s a lot of GPU-accelerated goodness in Premiere Pro, but RED debayering happens on the CPU. You might consider a RED Rocket.

The GPU is used for scaling, so if you’re cutting 4K in a 1080 sequence, there’s still some GPU gain to be had, even when debayering at 1/2.

[Lance Bachelder] “There’s 256 CUDA cores on an $1,100 Quadro 4000 for Mac card. The new GTX 680 introduced today retails for $499 and has a whopping 1,536 CUDA cores!”

It has six times the number of CUDA cores, but I’d also note that it has the same amount of RAM (2 GB) — so while performance will almost certainly be higher across the board, there may be some cases where memory will cause a bottleneck.

[Lance Bachelder] “Unless we can get these cards for Macs, it starts to make more sense to use a PC if I decide to use CS6 for my next show…”

Come on in, the water’s fine! At this point, I think that PCs are worth considering for anyone, unless you’re dedicated to FCPX.

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

[Lance Bachelder]

Understood. I’m assuming that without a Red Rocket I’d be cutting Red raw 4k stuff with PPro set to 1/2 or 1/4 in a 4k sequence to get any type of real-time performance. The Red Rocket is nearly 10 times the price of the GTX 680 though 🙁

I use both Win and OSX machines everyday so not a prob to “come on in” lol. Just gonna wait ’til NAB and see what Adobe has done with PPro for now then decide what kind of beast I’ll be ordering or building in the near future. Hopefully Apple will show us a new Mac Pro by then. Of course there’s the caveat of getting the money n the bank for my next film before any of this happens…

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California

[Lance Bachelder]

I’ll ad that I’ve never shot or cut a Red show so still learning here. Guess that since I’m comfy cutting on any NLE, hardware comes into play. If I’m gonna get a substantial performance boost on one system over another I’ll usually gravitate toward the faster system regardless of brand or OS.

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California

[Andrew Richards]

[Lance Bachelder] “Well FCPX and Motion need OpenCL which the nVidia does support.”

…barely. They use it the same way PPro uses CUDA- to improve performance and enable more real-time processing of effects and codecs. I agree it is a poke in the eye, but it is in keeping with Apple’s MO to build for their own offerings. It could happen; maybe offering a BTO card that suits third party apps while hamstringing Apple’s own is just the kind of deviation from Apple’s norm we’ll see more of under Tim Cook. It would be refreshing, for sure. It’s one thing to not put them in iMacs, but to pretend that Mac Pros are only used for Apple’s software? Silly.

Plus it could be that OpenCL isn’t a weakness, just that particular OpenCL benchmark is a weakness.

Best,
Andy