Straddling the line: Nvidia GTX285

[Don Smith]

Kerry.. Here’s Chris demo’ing his AutoCam plug-in for C4D. You may like this because you can move your camera without keyframes:

https://vimeopro.com/cineversity/nab2012/video/41430265

NewsVideo.com

[Kerry Chartier]

Thanks, Don.

Chris has a fabulous reel. I was a Senior Producer with JWT in Detroit, now known as “Team Detroit”, and worked on the Ford broadcast business until just a few years ago. I’m sure your son and I know a lot of the same production people. If his rep hasn’t made a trip to Detroit recently, he should have his stuff shopped to my old agency. A few of the key people are –

Toby Barlow, Executive CD
Brad Henson, CD, Ford Truck
Bob Rashid, Kelly Trudell, both Senior producers.
Ken Dumm, Producer

Hopefully he scores some work. Also, thanks for the CSTools link. If Chris is as good with this stuff as he is spot film work, it should be great!

[Don Smith]

Kerry.. I now have the power splitter and have installed the GTX card in my work Mac Pro and left the AIT5770 card as my ‘boot’ graphics card. The GTX has nothing attached to it other than the power splitter cable.

I now have C4D running and under ‘OpenGL Capabilities’ it lists only the ATI Radeon HD 5770 OpenGL Engine. No mention of the GTX card. At the bottom of that window it says ‘Your graphics card has all necessary extensions for Enghanced OpenGL’.

One, I’m surprised that the ATI does OpenGL (along with OpenCL), and two, I’m surprised that the GTX does not seem to be recognized by C4D.

I’m not complaining about the performance of C4D, I just thought it was using the CPU only and that the GTX card would help.

NewsVideo.com

[Don Smith]

Kerry.. Got the GTX installed on my work Mac Pro. The ATI card remains the ‘boot’ graphics card.

However, C4D reports that the ATI card has OpenGL and at the bottom it reports that I have all necessary extensions to enable OpenGL.

No mention of the GTX card.

NewsVideo.com

[Kerry Chartier]

Hi Don.

Strange that your system isn’t showing the Nvidia card in C4D. I wonder if it’s a preferences or version issue. I also have monitors attached to all my cards, which might also make a difference. You may want to go to Nvidia’s site and download the latest drivers, and attach a temp monitor to help troubleshoot.

Even though both cards are OCL and OGL capable, the Nvidia is the better of the two for C4D, just as the ATI card is for Motion and FCP. It’s worth trying to get it going properly.

Here’s a look at what C4D shows on my system-

[Don Smith]

Kerry.. I got the power splitter and have put the GTX card into my work Mac Pro along side the ATI, which remains as the ‘boot’ graphics card.

C4D only lists the ATI card as the OpenGL accelerator and also says at the bottom that all necessary extensions are loaded.

Do I need to go out and find drivers for the GTX card? I was assuming (the Army tried to teach me not to do that) that the drivers were built-in to OS X because the card is marketed for the Mac pro by Apple.

NewsVideo.com

[Don Smith]

Even after downloading the NVidea driver for the GTX285 for Lion, restarting, loading the latest CUDA driver, C4D still shows only the ATI card. The GTX card is listed in the expanded About This Mac so its functioning.

It’s really a intellectual puzzle at this point but I would like to find out why so I can migrate my solution to the other two Mac Pro machines in my shop.

If you would like to take this discussion off-list, write to me don at the domain of newsvideo. Dot com

NewsVideo.com

[Jacob Fenn]

Don, just curious if you resolved your issue with the 5770 and 285 running simultaneously. I’m also going to be running the 285 for its CUDA capabilities, but using the 5770 to drive the GUI in Resolve and for better system performance in other areas so just wanted to check in. Did your issue end up being system related or was it specific to C4D not recognizing the card?

[Kerry Chartier]

Hey Jacob.

You have to add a splitter to one of the PCIE power connectors on your motherboard with a cable like this –

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812200935

You can now feed both cards.

If you position the ATI card in slot 1, Final cup and Motion will use it, and C4D will use the faster of the 2 cards (Nvidia) for it’s OpenGL functions, regardless of where the cards are slotted. You must have a display connected to each card for your system to use them properly.