[Vladimir Kucherov]

Hey, 4-6 weeks? Maybe we’ll have our Mac Davinci’s by then.

Then again at this point I’m not holding my breath!

[Vladimir Kucherov]

Holy moly you’re a lucky man Ola. Maybe I’m doing something wrong then? Granted I haven’t used my 8800 in a while so maybe I just forgot, but the 285 is definitely stepping up the noise.

You’re running yours in an early 2008 model mac right?

[Vladimir Kucherov]

No new cards are coming out from NVidia officially anytime soon. That however, can always change. However, since the Mac Pros already have 2 prosumer level ATI cards in the lineup, the only new hardware I see coming from NVidia is a new top of the line quadro (with its price tag)

If I remember what Peter wrote, the 285 can actually deliver a few more nodes due to more CUDA cores over the 4800, but the 4800 has a much lower power requirement along with having more RAM which helps with other things.

I would say right now if you can find the 285 anywhere, get it. It sounds like it offers a better dollar value if you’re strapped for cash.

[Vladimir Kucherov]

Also, after swapping a 4870 for a 285 I didn’t notice any performance drops in Color. The only downside is you can only work in floating point, but I pretty much use that all the time anyway.

Oh, and the thing is loud. 5 minutes into grading and it sounds like I’m on a runway.

[Vladimir Kucherov]

I’m very excited about being able to drop in new edits without having to redo everything. That along with the tracker is one of my biggest sells on DaVinci.

However, out of habit and many many bad all nighters, I don’t trust any workflow I haven’t run myself. I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than sorely disapointed!

[Vladimir Kucherov]

It all depends on how good Resolve’s roundtrip from final cut is.

I’ve done a few jobs, PSAs and other 1minute or under things that were shot on an XDCam or the Canon SLR, that I’ve been able to open up the FCP, send to Color, grade in 1 hour, and render back out in 5 minutes. Client like that doesn’t have a lot of money, so charging them only 1 hour of color time with no conform costs makes that kind of easy job possible.

I can see things like that being more of a pain with the DaVinci

[Vladimir Kucherov]

I think I’ve seen some rough benchmarks done on CreativeCow’s Color forum. I might search for those.

The problem of course is there are a lot of variables in addition to GPU to consider.

I remember getting about 4fps boost going from an 8800 to Radeon HD 4870, and then maintaining framerate when I jumped on the GTX285.

[Vladimir Kucherov]

Are you also saying that the reason DaVinci can do realtime is in large reason due to using 2 GPUs? Surely the GT120 doesn’t add that much to a 285 or a 4800.

Or does DaVinci simply run on dark matter and rainbows?

[Vladimir Kucherov]

Do you mean unplug from the motherboard, or unplug all monitors connected to it?

Both cards were plugged in, but only the GTX285 had any monitors attached to it. I’m guessing running monitors on both cards would cause problems.

I’m also guessing that to go between a DaVinci and Color on that setup would require swapping monitors, because I have a feeling the GT120 would be underpowered to run Color. I have not tested this though.

[Vladimir Kucherov]

It’s not the 4800 but….

I recently got my GT120 and GTX285 and popped both in my 2008 Mac Pro. Leopard kernel panicked on me (no idea why), but Snow Leopard booted like a champ.

I had a monitor plugged into the 285, ran Color, no problems. Rendering and exporting seemed to go fine. (of course, only 8bit and floating point on NVidia cards in Color).

So, that at least confirms that if you have a 120/285 DaVinci setup you can still go back and use Color.