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PCI-Express Could Improve Performence 10 fold
The best thing about PCIe is that it’s two-way. So for example, Final Cut 6 or Motion 3 could send data to your Nvidia or ATI card for super-fast and powerful 3D processing, and then send it back to the computer – allowing output over a Kona or recording rendered media to the disk.
Currently, AGP and PCI-X can only work one-way at high speed. So anything it processes goes out to the computer monitor. That’s how Motion 1 & 2 works for example. You can get RT playback of incredible effects – but you can only watch it on your monitor. You can’t export it or output to tape without rendering it first. PCIe can do away with that.
Think OpenGL preview in After Effects, but w/o the word “preview”.
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10 Replies
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So what’s your point?
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Wow, that’s very educational. Thanks for that. I was wondering though, as apparently you can add additional graphics cards now, could you just add an extra card and and extra monitor and acheive the same basic result? I mean could you have say 2 monitors for editing and a third (through DVI) for previewing from FCP, Motion, AE, Boris Red, etc? Or, would this only work with FCP’s DVI preview (forget what they call it)?
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[David Jones] “So what’s your point?”
Pretty obvious since the new Powermacs w/ PCIe came out today.
What’s your point?
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You could technically have 8 monitors. As far as Cinema Desktop, I don’t know how it will work. I’m sure a FCP update will adress this eventually.
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I think one very important question should be: will Motion and other software that use GPUs to render real-time see an improvement in speeds if more than one video card is installed in the machine?
I can’t wait to see the throughput on PCI express SATA raid cards.
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I don’t think SATA will be as significant. Throughput is currently way faster than the drives themselves.
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Is that where the logjam is with SATA? You see them listed as capable of 150 MB/s or 3.0 Gigabites/sec, but are told real world even the 3 Gig only run sustained at 65 MB/s. The whole thing is a bit of a mystery to me.
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The interface is fast, but the actual disks themselves are very slow in comparison. Even a 15kRPM disk is nowhere near fast enough to max out a 150MB/s SATA channel. The high speed of SATA is to make it more future proof for newer technology.
Sean
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We have a SATA raid that does 200mb a second. Four drives and a SATA card with four connectors.
Dajen Productions
Santa Barbara, CA
G5 Dual 2 Gig – AJA IO & LA
Huge 1.2 Raid
FCP 5-OS X 10.4.1-QT 7 -
Yes, so divide that by 4 and you get 50. You have 150 MB/s of bandwidth per channel (each SATA connector is a channel). But you’re only using 1/3rd of that because the drives, individually, will not go faster than 50 MB/s.
Sean
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