[David Pirinelli]

Hey guys,

More 470s are on the way.

We lost a member of my family at end of 2011 and things have been in a general uproar.

Been filling orders as fast as I can since I got back from New York.

I have 10 more 470s getting here tomorrow so should be caught up in next couple of days.

I will also be listing some down clocked 480s. I am working out just how much I need to down clock them to keep them in power envelope of Mac Pro.

And again I would emphasize that if you are using an enclosure and have power plugs with 8 pins, GET THE GTX480. It is a much faster card when at full speed. The down clocked ones for Mac Pro will likely still be faster the 470, but best is still the full speed ones. The tests we did at Jake’s place showed a pretty substantial difference.

Also, want to point out that all of my cards work in Windows as well, so if you decide to switch, you can keep using them.

[David Pirinelli]

There is no Magic Bullet here.

The Tesla C2075 is a Quadro 6000 with fewer Display outputs.

And as Jake Blackstone & I discovered, a Quadro 6000 lives in the shadow of a GTX480 as far as Resolve is concerned.

If anyone in Hollywood wishes to see for themselves, I have a Quadro 6000 and a Tesla C2050 ready to loan out for benchmarking. Neither card can keep up with GTX480 in a Mac.

But all of my cards run in Windows too, if anyone wishes to put an end to this discussion by testing them in both.

I can also provide a GTX470 (OSX & Windows) and a GTX570 (Windows only)

Only stipulation is the one I had with Jake, all results are public.

[David Pirinelli]

I’m afraid that the MacVidCards issue isn’t a browser thing, it is a “unfinished website” issue. The guy doing it for me ran out of steam as we tried to get the e-commerce part working. I need to find a more experienced web guy.

Meanwhile, most of the cards are available through Ebay, and as I am located in Hollywood, I offer pick up within 2 blocks of the Kodak Theatre. (10% discount for cash)

All of my cards are OSX & Windows compatible, so anyone wishing to try “The Dark Side” will continue to be able to use them.

I can say that BMD has several of my cards in their possession and have never contacted me voicing any issues. I have been thanked for offering high powered CUDA options for their customers.

I am not a colorist. I am an Art Director. I got into video cards when FCP told me I couldn’t cut my reel because of a crappy GPU I had. I understand the tight schedules of the film biz, having been in it more than 20 years, so I try to ship within a day or two, whenever possible.

In my experience, my GTX470 is best possible card for easy install in a Mac Pro. Plugs right in, you just delete or modify one file in Lion and the card is ready to go.

For people running an enclosure with sufficient power and ventilation, the hot ticket is the GTX480. It is quite a bit more powerful than 470 but requires more power than is readily available in a Mac Pro.

Either one of these cards will run rings around a Quadro 4000. In fact, the GTX470 is slightly faster than 5000 & 6000 and the GTX480 is quite a good deal faster than all of them.

The 4800 is a slightly detuned GTX285 with more RAM. (It is similar in specs to a GTX275) That last time I read the Resole install guide, it acknowledged that a 5770 & Q4000 could run the software but stated that “GTX285 & GT120 continued to be fastest possible combo” or something to that effect. They have to be very careful of their wording, and I’m sure it pains them to have to say that the best way to run their software is with a 2 year old used card. And I am quite certain that my GTX4700 & GTX480 are faster than the GTX285

[David Pirinelli]

I recently took a variety of cards to Jake Blackstone and we tested NR speed.

The King was GTX480. The GTX470 was 2nd best IIRC.

The GTX285 and Quadro 4000 were quite a bit back in the field.

For a variety of reasons that I fully understand, nobody from BMD can tell you that my cards are best for their software. (Most especially for NR)

But I am equally certain that they will not come and tell you that they AREN’T the fastest ones with their software.

The only “officially recommended” card currently available is the Quadro 4000 starting at $800 . Or, for less than half of that you can get a GTX470 from MacVidCards that will run rings around it.

If the recent rumors of a return to Nvidia GPUs are true, things might get better for CUDA soon.

[David Pirinelli]

FWIW, all of the unique cards that MacVidCards has created will work just fine in Windows if anyone wishes to move the cards there.

My GT120s, GTX285 2 Gig and GTX470/480 cards will work same as before with the exception that only 2 display outputs will be functional. So, S-Video ports will not work and neither will the HDMI port.

On the Quadro 5000/6000 I had to disable the center Displayport. Why? Have a look at Mac Q4800 vs Windows Q4800 or Mac Q4000 vs Windows Q4000. The Windows cards have more ports but the way Nvidia drivers are written means there is no easy way to address 3 ports. A costly decision for Nvidia, as it has meant that Apple versions of their cards need new PCBs in addition to new ROMs.

But using the cards for GPU is not affected at all.

To reiterate, all of our cards will continue functioning just fine in Bootcamp or even when moved physically into a Windows box.

[David Pirinelli]

I do not have the luxury of having tested 3 @ GTX480s at once.

There is someone who does know the answer, he has been running 3 of my 480s in a Cubix or Cyclone for a couple months but he has never posted about it, that I am aware of.

EDIT: I just discovered that Neil has been posting about the triple GTX480 setup I sold him over on Reduser in the “DaVinci 8.1 Announced” thread. I am glad to see it is still working for him. He also has a triple GTX285 2 Gig setup, though I can’t say whether he has ever tested them against each other.

I am no colorist, I am usually an Art Director looking for work. (all you post guys have put me out of work…couldn’t beat you, had to join you) So I can only ask you guys to report speed results. I will say this, nobody has ever returned a GTX470 or GTX480 because they didn’t like it.

Watching Jake do the tests yesterday, the GTX480 was clearly in a different league from the GTX285, at least for the Noise Reduction testing we did.

The BMD guys might also know the answer.

[David Pirinelli]

The Quadro cards are based on same exact Fermi core as the consumer cards. The 2 main differences are that Nvidia DISABLES much of the Double Precision Float capabilities in consumer cards and that Quadro cards typically have more RAM. In Windows, there are apps that require Double Precision, and these apps will be 2 or 3 times faster with a Quadro.

I am unaware of apps that use Double Precision Float in OSX. I would love to find some, as the Quadro 5000 and Quadro 6000 I have created would have a place to roar. So, when there are no places for a Quadro 4000 to use this one place it excels, you have the simple reality that this is for all intents and purposes, between a GTX450 and a GTX460, or thereabouts. These cards retail in the $100-200 range.

To get people to pay for Mac driver development, they only offer a SINGLE Mac card from the entire Fermi line, the Quadro 4000. The drivers are written and stable for each and every card in the series, there just aren’t any cards with EFI to boot and use the drivers. So you have an OS full of drivers for the range of wonderful cards, and very few ways to use them.

Sascha Haber compared my GTX470 to a Mac Quadro 4000 and found it to be quite a good deal faster. (for half as much money).

The Quadro 4000 is nice in that it is single slot and only needs one power connector. I think there was a GTX460 that was single slot, but I have never held one in my hands. All the Fermi cards I have gotten to work are Dual Power Plug…except the Quadro 5000 which is Dual Slot but only needs 1@ 6 pin power plug.

The Quadro 4000 is a good choice when you need low power consumption or have limited space.

The GTX470 is best possible card for use with Resolve in a standard Mac Pro without need for extra juice.

But if you have a Cubix or Cyclone with dual width slots and plenty of power available, then the GTX480 is the way to go. In such an expander, the use of QUadro 4000 would be a large waste of money, as you would basically be paying $800-$1,200 each for consumer grade cards worth about $150/each.

BTW, many people know that each and every thing I am stating here is true, they just can’t tell you. I understand why this is, but I can offer alternatives. It was an interesting technical puzzle and I solved it.

If you have an expander with Dual Width slots and plenty of power, get a GTX480. I can’t reiterate this enough. The card is basically TWICE as fast as a GTX285.

[David Pirinelli]

Thanks for any and all kind words.

As I stated before, I am NOT a colorist. I know absolutely ZERO about what you guys do. I have spent my last 16 years making pretty sets. Sometime in there I started fiddling around with Video Cards when my old Blue & White wouldn’t run FCP. It has grown into an obsession and already takes up WAY too much of my time. (Coincidentally, time I should be spending updating my reel)

Speaking of which, if any of you have Director friends in LA who have recently mentioned needing an Art DIrector, I wouldn’t mind getting paint on my hands again instead of thermal compound.

https://web.mac.com/dpart2/

I have considered learning Resolve to a point that I could test my various cards with it. But then I should also like to learn Premiere so that I could test the configs I have come up with to enable Mercury on 1,1 and 2,1 as well. I have had several people ask me to load SMOKE and see how my cards work with it. And I know that my head can not hold all of that, nor do I have time to learn all of that software.

I make the cards work and I depend on your guys to benchmark & report on what works and what doesn’t. ENd users know far better than I could. I encouraged Barefeats to test Resolve and sent him some of these “unsupported” cards to test with. For whatever reason, nobody is able to “officially” endorse these cards.

So again, it falls to end users on boards like this.

If there is someone in LA / Hollywood area who would like to scientifically compare these cards in a 1,1 or any Mac, I would be MORE than happy to loan them out for such a test. The basis of the 1,1/2,1 Resolve setup is an EFI32 GT120 I have been able to make work. My efforts to add EFI32 to more complex cards like GTX285 and GXT470 have not worked out. So, the GPU card is “injected” while the GUI GT120 offers full 100% boot screen and EFI support.

And as far as that goes, once you have the GT120 and injector in, ANY of the various GPUs will run in a 1,1 or 2,1. So it could also be used with GTX470 or even GTX480 with power brought it. On it’s PCIE 1.0 bus, will these faster cards make a difference? I don’t know but again, would love to .

So if someone has a licensed copy of Resolve and would like to get to the bottom of this, hard drives from later Mac Pros will fit right into older ones, they just stick out and you have to leave cover off. But that would be the most scientific way, test on a “supported” 4,1 and run benchmark then move the drives to a 1,1 or 2,1 and run same tests. I can offer my 1,1 up as a test mule. It has Dual Dual 3.0s and 17 Gigs of RAM.

But ultimately, I think my point always has been that I find it funny that the Resove guide lists various iMac and Macbook setups but then the commonly held opinion is that 1,1 and 2,1 are completely NOT able to run it. But if we consider a Macbook with GT330 as “capable” why is a 2,1 with Dual Quad 3.0s and a GTX285 “unacceptable”? Will the 2,1 be slower than a 5,1 ? Of course, but saying it “Can’t be used” with Resolve seems to be rather arbitrarily telling a large bunch of people that they can’t use Resolve until they drop 3-5K on a new machine. Why not encourage them to start off on their existing Mac Pro and when they feel the need for more speed (and get some paid work) then they can buy whatever machine they want and move Resolve onto it?

[David Pirinelli]

Whoa there guys.

Jake, why is it when Sascha wrote glowing words about my GTX470 you didn’t call him out as a mole?

I have gone out of my way to create better Nvidia cards than you can get anywhere else.

I don’t even come on here and brag about it, there has been enough chatter to create more demand than I can easily deal with.

I am both the CEO and ALL of the employees of MacVidCards.

This guy doesn’t work for me, but is in fact a customer.

I thinnk that many people are interested to know whether 1,1 and 2,1 Mac pros can be made to run Resolve. I created a way to do it.

It has amazed me that everyone says RAM transfer to CPU speeds too slow, etc, yet people discuss running Resolve on MacBooks and iMacs all of the time. I have a MacBook Pro from 2009 and I guarantee that I see more beachballs on it then I do on my Quad 3.0 1,1. If people want to run it on a 1,1 or 2,1 why not? It is still a better choice then a MacBook with a 9600GT or 330GT (8800GT from years gone by). So these slower but newer Macs are on the “list”, why not something with more REAL HP behind it?

Aside from which, my cards sell themselves. Above this post on masthead I see at least 3 of my customers. BMD has bought 3 or 4 cards I know of and I have spoken in person with at least 1 employee.

I make cards that make it easier for people to use this software. I just introed a Quadro 5000 and I am looking for someone in Hollywood to try a Quadro 6000 for Mac. I don’t know Resolve well enough to post about it’s abilities with my cards so I always hope for people to do so themselves. I am an Art Director who has worked in the biz in Hollywood for 16 years. I went to edit my reel one day and discovered that I didn’t have a good enough GPU for FCP. That led me here.

The guy isn’t a mole. I don’t know him outside of his role as a guy that handed me $$$ so he could get a card.

Less paranoia would be good.

[David Pirinelli]

The Nvidia drivers that come in Snow Leopard DO NOT SUPPORT QUADRO.

This is part of the APple/Nvidia/Adobe feud.

You need to install these:

https://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-macosx-256.02.25f01-driver.html

If the installer won’t run, right click and install the packages.