Luke Maslen
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Sean,
That’s right. It is essential to have one of the certified NVIDIA cards which has CUDA support. If you don’t have a CUDA card installed, Resolve will not run at all. CUDA is an NVIDIA technology which you won’t find in other brands of cards.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Kevin,
You’re quite right that using 2x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 cards in the Cubix expander going to use up all four slots as these cards are double-width.
It’s quite possible that running one GTX 285 in slot one of the Mac Pro, and another GTX 285 and a GeForce GT 120 in the Cubix expander, would work fine. It is one of the hundreds of permutations and combinations of cards and slots that we’ve not tested yet. The engineers think it might work fine but there is a possibility that the CUDA processing might become confused and try to use the GeForce GT 120 for the GPU which would cause terribly slow performance.
There’s a bunch of other configurations we’d like to test in the New Year such as four Quadro 4000’s in the Cubix expander rather than just three. I expect the “Where to install your hardware in a Mac Pro and PCIe expansion chassis” section of the configuration guide to grow as these configurations are tested over a month or so and found to be reliable.
In the meanwhile, Resolve customers are likely to try all sorts of combinations to see if they work so it will be exciting to keep an eye on this forum to find out what people have tried and found to work well.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Eric,
I was wondering about that too. I checked with the engineers who expect it should work fine but only had time to perform testing with 1, 2 and 3 NVIDIA Quadro 4000 cards in the PCI Express expansion chassis. They hope to test 4 cards soon but didn’t want to delay the release to test one extra card.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Dwaine,
Thank you for covering the period during which the different parts of the website were being updated. The DaVinci Resolve 7.1 software download now appears in both the DaVinci pages and the main Blackmagic Design website.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Robert,
Further to Peter’s reply, the multi-chassis Linux systems also have more CPUs which are particularly useful when working with compressed file formats.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Nat,
Some applications require a huge amount of RAM but don’t have the real time requirements of video so memory optimization is not so important. For other applications like Resolve, memory speed is much more important. Our recommendations may change with each new generation of Mac Pro as the memory architecture can change over time. For example, 8 GB of RAM is a recommended configuration in the Early 2008 Mac Pro series.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Sascha,
It sounds as though you have a great setup which will make Resolve run beautifully.
It is quite normal to see outstanding disk performance figures when a disk array is relatively empty. However the real test comes when the disk array is filled to about 80% capacity. You can certainly expect it to slow down significantly by then but, given how fast it is currently running, you’ve clearly got plenty of safety margin and it will continue to run fast even when your disk array is nearly full.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Alexander,
Unless I’m mistaken, I think the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT for Mac has been discontinued and is no longer available. We haven’t tested it so I don’t think we will now if it is no longer available but its good to know that it works for you in case anyone else is wanting to use one with Resolve. Thank you for letting us know.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Erik,
The Quadro 4000 is slower than the GTX 285. It is not the combination that causes it to be slower.
While installing a second Quadro 4000 might be useful for supporting 4 monitors with applications such as Final Cut Pro, it will just be used as the GUI card for Resolve and so won’t help provide extra GPU performance. In other words, you may as well use a cheaper card for the GUI card with Resolve if you are using the Quadro 4000 as the GPU card.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Ola,
Yes, Resolve 7.0.3 for Mac has been tested and certified for use with Mac OS X 10.6.5 and the latest NVIDIA CUDA drivers which are currently at version 3.2.17.
I think the earlier reports of problems were mostly before the NVIDIA CUDA update became available and certainly before Resolve 7.0.3 was released.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design