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Poor performance out of a kick ass system
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Hi Jonathon,
Glad to hear you are having success with your system. Can you tell me if you have used RED footage at different resolutions in your system?
My system is not working well with 5K RED Epic footage. But from what I have found, I might need 2 RED Rockets to get that footage to play realtime.
Just curious what types of media you have been using on your system.
thanks,
Peter -
Rohit
Are you saying ver 9 let’s you use a Cuda card as GUI and get cuda acceleration from it at same time in Mac pro? And then have an additional cuda card in other 16x slot? So a gtx 590 in slot 1 and gtx 580 in slot 2?
I’m just about to buy a cubix box . -
The first real project I did on my windows system was actually a 12min Epic short shot 5k…. and ended up as a 4k DCP. I used HD proxies. I don’t have a red rocket so there’s no way I’d even come close to 4k. Actually, since I only had a GTX 285 1gb I did the final output on my Mac system which has a more powerful GPU!
I worked in HD resolution 1920×1080 DPX. It was formatted 1.85 in the end. Also, I worked in rec709 not P3…. low budget and needed to have one master that looked the same for web, BD and DCP.
At some point… after 9 is out I’ll change out the 285 for a 6xx series. But, for HD res stuff it is great.
– JL
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“None of that Winblows hassle, great people doing modified cards for it and if you really need power, you get a proper Cubix 8X and put 3 GTX 580s in.”
Hi Sascha,
Glad to hear things are running well. Keep in mind that DaVinci recommends using the 16-channel versions of GPU-Xpander for Resolve 8+. Also, feel free to contact Mic Grover in the Cubix Support Department, micg@cubix.com, with any additional technical questions. Some of the PCIe lane comments I’m reading in this thread are a bit off the mark or incomplete in their analysis, and Cubix Support / Engineering can answer any PCIe technical question you might have.Eric Fiegehen
Cubix -
Hello Eric,
Can you offer anything to the conversation regarding PCIe lanes?
You say that some of us are off the mark… could you offer any insight to what we have said here? If someone knows that others are missing the mark, it would be nice if they help set them straight. That is why we are all here after all.
thanks,
Peter -
Hi Peter,
I’ll probably need to clarify or amend this info later today or tomorrow after review by my SE or an Engineer, but there’s two parts to the answer.
Robert H basically has it correct in one of his earlier comments. Right now, the PCIe switch vendors are only shipping up to 48-lane Gen 3 chipsets in volume. This is why Cubix has not yet released a Gen3 expansion chassis – why bother when you can only get 1 additional Gen3 16-channel card attached (use one in the host, get 2 in return)?
The other part of the answer lies with the cards installed in those Gen3 slots. A Gen2 I/O controller will not operate at any faster rate than industry defined PCIe Gen2 speeds, even if a 16-channel Gen2 card is installed into a Gen3 16-channel slot. Also, you cannot expect a Gen2 16-channel I/O card to communicate at 80Gbps in a Gen3 8-channel slot, even though a Gen3 8-channel (electrical) slot has the capacity to communicate at 80Gbps, the equivalent of Gen2 16-channel performance.
That’s why if you plug a 16-channel Gen2 GUI or GPU card into an 8-channel Gen3 slot, even though that Gen3 slot has the ability to communicate at 80Gbps, maximum throughput will be 40Gbps since the I/O controller only has access to 8-lanes physical and electrical. Same condition comes up when you run out of Gen3 PCIe lanes – system architecture will limit you to a set number of lanes as specified by ASUS or whoever is manufacturing the motherboard.
My recommendation – again, without benefit of Cubix Engineering’s technical input as of writing this message – is to opt for a motherboard capable of supporting 4x (electrical) 16-channel Gen2 graphics cards, or 2x 16-channel Gen2 physical + Xpander. A great feature of PCIe is that Gen2 technology has progressed to the point that a single Gen2 slot can share its 80Gbps bandwidth with 3 more 16-channel slots, plus a couple of additional 8-channel slots. This is what we’re doing with the new Xpander Elite system shipping this week. 96 PCIe lanes let’s us daisy-chain 6 PCIe slots (4x dual-width 16-channel + 2x 8-channel), using up only 1 slot in the host computer. And yes, we designed it for running 4x GTX 580/680 cards plus a couple of RED Rockets, among other things.
Eric
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One thing to remember is that any CPU you plug into a P9X79 series motherboard is going to have a maximum of 40 PCIe lanes. Various version of the P9X79 motherboard distribute those 40 lanes to the various physical slots differently, but on a single processor system that’s the limit.
On a dual CPU system, one can get 80 lanes or in some cases 84 lanes.
I think SuperMicro cheats to get 84 by taking some ‘lanes’ from another motherboard function.
John
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Hey guys
Just want to add that i also fell for the p9x79 ws trap. I bought it as a bit of a gamble, before BM included the pro version in their config. And yes, now that i finally got the decklink extreme card, performance is way slower. So thanks for the insight, i’ll go and purchase the pro i think 🙂
Peter, how’s your system working out for you and what’s the current setup?
Mikael
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Hi Mikael,
Sorry to hear you fell for the WS trap like I did. It does seem that the WS board is not the best choice for the Resolve setup.
My setup with the ‘Pro’ board is working pretty well. Most footage will play with realtime playback. Except when I work with RED 5K footage. My system can not handle those files, no matter what debayer setting I have it at. I was told that I need 2 RED rocket cards to get realtime playback with the 5K material. That’s not going to happen soon, so I am stuck with slower than realtime playback (plus the P9X79 board is maxed out on PCIe lanes anyways.. so I’m not sure if a 2nd Rocket card would help anyways).
Also whenever I have dissolves in my timeline I don’t get realtime playback. I turned on the render cache, but I’m still having trouble. I think my RAID might be slowing down since it’s getting a bit full. Might need to clear off files and re-format it.
Also I will say that Resolve 9 has been a TOTAL DISASTER for me. I have been having so many problems. Lots of crashes, windows not doing what they are supposed to, functions not matching with what the manual says, and other bugs. Not ready for prime time in my opinion. I wish I could have stayed at version 8. It was so rock solid and working great…. EXCEPT for the bug in which audio playback doesn’t work when you are using the UltraStudio SDI. And Blackmagic said they will not fix that bug, so I was forced to switch over to Beta software (and the 9.0 release seems worse than the Beta). Painful… very painful.
Well I hope that was helpful. Let me know if I can offer any more assistance.
-Peter
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Wow thanks mate. I’m gonna pick up my pro today and a gtx680 4gb. Let’s see what that does for me. Not looking forward to changing mobo though, hope all goes well 🙂
I guess if you have trouble with 5k, you can transcode to something smaller? Loosing raw info, i know, but getting realtime playback..-Mikael
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