NVidia Quadro K5000 coming for Mac Pros

[Steve Connor]

https://www.engadget.com/2012/09/07/nvidia-quadro-k5000-for-mac-hands-on/

Real time RayTrace in AE with 2 of these bad boys!

Steve Connor
‘It’s just my opinion, with an occasional fact thrown in for good measure”

[Mark Dobson]

Thanks Steve,

Looks pretty enticing.

Could it be installed in my 2008 quadCore?

And how about forward compatibility with the yet to be specified, but fleetingly promised, new Mac Pro?

I imagine this could be a hot seller with many people looking at solutions of bumping up the performance of their existing Mac Pro setups

[Erik Lindahl]

I saw this also – very interesting indeed.

A note though is the fact that the cards takes TWO PCIe slots where a Quadro 4000 today only uses one. Still the added performance of the K5000 should outshine the use of two 4000’s hopefully. For a “general use online machine” you want CUDA and OpenCL accleration with-out soly relying on a dedicated processing card.

I’ll be at IBC from tomorrow so I’ll poke nVidia / Adobe / BlackMagic regarding this for sure. We also have two 2008 MacPro’s still running strong and this card would be a decent upgrade. However, looking at the fact the card costs well over 2000 dollar investing in a completely new system might be more “sane”.

[Kevin Patrick]

Isn’t the first slot a double wide slot? At least I believe it is in my Early 2008 Mac Pro.

What I didn’t see (probably missed it) was whether or not it needs one or two (all) of the internal power cables.

[Kevin Patrick]

I noticed that PP CS6 now supports the GTX680.

https://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2012/09/premiere-pro-cs6-6-0-2-update-hidpi-for-retina-display-bug-fixes-and-new-supported-gpus.html

[Erik Lindahl]

You can have two of these cards in the same system so the power-requirements are similar or lower than the Quardro 4000. However, since they hare 2 slots wide, having two of these cards makes for example it impossible (or at least hard) to build a editing system like that. It only leaves 1 slot for data i/o and video i/o where you’d need two.

Using 1 Quadro 4000 and 1 K5000 is an option but then one of the two might suffer. Resolve as I understand it prefers a powerful non-gui-card for acceleration where Premier Pro and Final Cut Pro X requires the gui-card for acceleration.

[Jeremy Garchow]

I think I’ll be riding this Mac thing out.

🙂

[Erik Lindahl]

Talked to nVidia in Amsterdam and they are syncing the release of the Quadro K5000 for Mac with a coming OSX-release. The aim at the moment was “late october” but nVidia is apparently in the hands of Apple here to a degree. They wanted to avoid the Quadro 4000 issues with no OpenCL support and such hence doing it this way.

Further more it sounds like all PCIe 2.0 machines will handle the cards. I presume that is the MacPro 2008 and newer. The exact performance was a bit sketchy but it “should be the fastest nVidia offering on the Mac”.

[Rick Lang]

Erik, did you also talk to them about the mobile/notebook cards such as the K5000M? There’s a series of notebook and mobile offerings and would be interesting to know what could fit in a new iMac.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Erik Lindahl]

I didn’t ask them about that sadly.

Traditionally Apple has always used desktop / consumer chips in their computers with possibly a “Workstation option” on their pro-desktops. I’d imagine the iMac will continue to match the MacBook Pro in performance.

A higher-end consumer card tends to beat the pro-cards with ease. It might be a different story on Windows however.

The only “awesome” Quadro-features are, in general more RAM and also the “video link technology”. The later means any video I/O card (BM, AJA for example) can direct link to the GPU for higher, lower latency performance. I don’t think the technology is widely used yet though. And you really pay a premium for these features.