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nVidia confirms Quadro 4000 (fermi) for the mac

A

aneks

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 29, 2006
132
0
for those with Highend requirements this is a good bit of news. Rumors of approx $999 retail is promosing. But basically full CUDA and all the other goodenss coming to osX later this year.

Very much inspired by things like Smoke on Mac and CAD customers demmanding it.

if you can be bothered watching the video, second half is all about Quadro and he talks all about mac and release dates:

http://media.fxguide.com/fxguidetv/fxguidetv-ep087.m4v

big download (199mb).
 
I heard on an editing forum that this new card will be cheaper than current Quadro cards and that it's due to be released in October.
malch
 
they mention that it will be 2x perfomance comapred to the previous 4800 and considerably cheaper, which is why they are initally offering the 4000 and not the other models. more asking questions and trawling has the price somewhere closr to 1100 us, so its still far from cheap, but that is a hell of a powerful card with some very serious performace especially for specific apps.

I am guessing that cs5 would also benefit a lot from this card as having seen the 5000 run on some windows boxes... it is amazing what a difference it makes to premiere and after effects.

People on this forum like to bitch and moan from a position of ignorance. Most of them will never need 2% of the peformance this kind of hardware puts out and want to quote figures based on some review for a game card running Star Craft 2. for high-end film and video professionals this kind of thing is a really big deal.
 
"I am guessing that cs5 would also benefit a lot from this card as having seen the 5000 run on some windows boxes... it is amazing what a difference it makes to premiere and after effects. "

Amazing...BEYOND amazing! Your guess is spot on, my friend...the performance differences are staggering!!!! Literally shaving, in some cases...up to 90+% in the time neccessary to complete so many tasks with video post!

"People on this forum like to bitch and moan from a position of ignorance. Most of them will never need 2% of the peformance this kind of hardware puts out and want to quote figures based on some review for a game card running Star Craft 2. for high-end film and video professionals this kind of thing is a really big deal."

I couldn't agree more...other than the percentage, but perhaps you forgot to put that "point" in front of the 2% to reflect .2%:) So many just don't GET what a business primary workstation should be capable of....and what it should NOT be capable of...more importantly. I'm just astounded by the specs on the new Pros...I have an '08 dual quad 3.0, so I'm fine for another round or two...but the power in these new machines is certainly incredible...with the addition of nVidia GPUs and CUDA capability, the time saved in post can/will be immeasurable!!!

Great News from nVidia!!!!

J
 
malch said:
I heard on an editing forum that this new card will be cheaper than current Quadro cards and that it's due to be released in October.
malch
Click to expand...

They aren't cheaper, this is due to confusion that, for example, the 4000 is the new Quadro 4000 series card. It replaces the 3800. The 5000 replaces the Quadro FX 4800 currently available for the Mac Pro, and has a higher retail price than the 4800 did.

Historically the Quadro cards in OS X have not have the type of driver optimisation and application specific performance enhancement you find on other operating systems, so I would urge people not to get too excited about a Mac version if you only want to use it for OS X.
 
jav6454 said:
Quadros running fermi are a sure fire hazard.
Click to expand...

You are right, Nvidia is hot!

nvidia.jpg
 
aneks said:
they mention that it will be 2x perfomance comapred to the previous 4800 and considerably cheaper, which is why they are initally offering the 4000 and not the other models. more asking questions and trawling has the price somewhere closr to 1100 us
Click to expand...

Nvidia says, "The Nvidia Quadro 4000 delivers up to 5x faster performance to drive a broad range of design, styling and video applications.
But five times faster than what?

You are right, the price is shown to be around $1,199.
It has 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, 256 CUDA cores, and can can process up to 890 million triangles per second.

Personally I'd prefer the Nvidia Quadro Plex 7000 with 12 GB of memory for only $14,900.
 
So if people on this thread would kindly advise:

- a long-time Mac-user, who's also
- an editor (Avid Media Composer and not FCP I'm afraid) who's been making do with a MacBook Pro (have not had any need to edit 1:1 uncompressed)
- who also shoots with a AVCHD-based Canon as a second camera sometimes (main camera is a Sony EX-1 who's files import quickly into Avid) and who wastes hours and hours rewrapping and then importing these annoying AVCHD files into Avid...

... should this new Quadro video card be on my wish-list?

Also... which Mac Pro should be on my wish-list? I get lost in some of the posts which say fewer cores might be better than more cores, if the processor speed is faster. I guess I understand this, especially if a person's apps can't benefit from more cores (and I don't think Avid supports multi-threading, yet anyway; I hear they're working on a 64-bit version), but maybe in my case importing AVCHD would go faster with more cores?

To further complicate things (for me), some of you say that more RAM is more important than anything else (but a recent poster on a Mac/Avid forum said that Avid can only use a maximum of 4GB RAM; again, this may change in the near future, and whatever Mac Pro I get I'll need to keep for four or five years).
thanks,
malch
 
aneks said:
for those with Highend requirements this is a good bit of news. Rumors of approx $999 retail is promosing. But basically full CUDA and all the other goodenss coming to osX later this year.

Very much inspired by things like Smoke on Mac and CAD customers demmanding it.

if you can be bothered watching the video, second half is all about Quadro and he talks all about mac and release dates:

http://media.fxguide.com/fxguidetv/fxguidetv-ep087.m4v

big download (199mb).
Click to expand...

If you are interested, starts around 30:24 on Mac Stuff.
 
Topper said:
It has 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, 256 CUDA cores, and can can process up to 890 million triangles per second.

Personally I'd prefer the Nvidia Quadro Plex 7000 with 12 GB of memory for only $14,900.
Click to expand...

Hm. Not impressed. Both the 480 and Tesla have more CUDA cores.
 
goMac said:
Hm. Not impressed. Both the 480 and Tesla have more CUDA cores.
Click to expand...

Yes, the GTX 480 has 480 CUDA cores.

BUT the Nvidia Quadro Plex 7000 has 896 CUDA cores. And it's cheap!

I am seriously interested in the Nvidia Quadro 4000. I probably won't get it but I'll look into it.
 
Topper said:
Yes, the GTX 480 has 480 CUDA cores.

BUT the Nvidia Quadro Plex 7000 has 896 CUDA cores. And it's cheap!

I am seriously interested in the Nvidia Quadro 4000. I probably won't get it but I'll look into it.
Click to expand...

Sounds like the 4000 is built to run in parallel configurations, so you could get a similar number of CUDA cores. (Assuming you weren't a moron and coded your CUDA stuff to run over multiple cards.)
 
I hope Apple brings back the Quadra branding to take advantage of these new cards, and they make it with the expandability to put four in parallel. A cuatro Quadro Quadra. :D
 
Sounds like a fairly tame card, with not many cores in order to fit into Mac Pro power profile. But a proper driver release might give us some scope for injecting 480s and higher core PC quadros.
 
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