NVIDIA Launches Quadro 4000 GPU for Mac Pro

[Eric5h5]

What I don't get is how can hardware be optimized for graphics? Are graphical functions different on the hardware level to non-graphical functions?

3D graphics GPUs are massively parallel, with dozens/hundreds of cores running very limited instruction sets, which are highly suitable for vector calculations but not so much general computing. That said, CPUs and GPUs seem to be converging, so years from now I wouldn't be surprised if they merge. Then we can go back to software rendering. (Which sounds bad initially when you're used to GPUs, but in reality not only would speed not be an issue, but it would allow you to ditch OpenGL/Direct3D with their attendant limitations, driver problems, etc. and just do whatever you want. That's right: Mac versions of games will finally perform the same as Windows, and be a lot easier to port.)

--Eric

 

[skeep5]

real nice!

 

[Gauthic]

if only Apple had OpenGL 4 to go with it...

oh, wait. We don't even have 3 yet.

Re-quoted for truth and awareness.....

Its seems that Mac been behind the 3d curve since the 90's

 

[RebootD]

At last. This is the card I've been waiting for. This'll run Davinci Resolve for the Mac and After Effects CS5 very nicely instead of the dated and overpriced 4800.

Oh NOW they release it! Then again I don't do enough (yet) to justify the cost but I'm glad to know there is finally another option for those who need a new workstation card.

 

[Kid A]

3D graphics GPUs are massively parallel, with dozens/hundreds of cores running very limited instruction sets, which are highly suitable for vector calculations but not so much general computing. That said, CPUs and GPUs seem to be converging, so years from now I wouldn't be surprised if they merge. Then we can go back to software rendering. (Which sounds bad initially when you're used to GPUs, but in reality not only would speed not be an issue, but it would allow you to ditch OpenGL/Direct3D with their attendant limitations, driver problems, etc. and just do whatever you want. That's right: Mac versions of games will finally perform the same as Windows, and be a lot easier to port.)

--Eric

My very limited understanding of modern GPUs just went up by at least 100%. Thanks for that concise explanation.

 

[chrono1081]

Honestly, it won't run it fine. Workstation cards suck for gaming.

+1 but it will sure make my Maya renders look purty....

 

[michaelvoigt]

Folks, please learn to differentiate between workstation-class cards and regular video cards.

This is not for gaming. It's for quality over performance.



About $800.

What spec on this video card states that will have better quality then a consumer card? A NVIDIA consumer gaming card for $500.

The consumer card even has twice as many cuda cores...
The consumer card has better specs...

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product-geforce-gtx-580-us.html

This sounds like a card for a business user that just wants to spend a lot of money and not focus on the specs.

 

[michaelvoigt]

3D graphics GPUs are massively parallel, with dozens/hundreds of cores running very limited instruction sets, which are highly suitable for vector calculations but not so much general computing. That said, CPUs and GPUs seem to be converging, so years from now I wouldn't be surprised if they merge. Then we can go back to software rendering. (Which sounds bad initially when you're used to GPUs, but in reality not only would speed not be an issue, but it would allow you to ditch OpenGL/Direct3D with their attendant limitations, driver problems, etc. and just do whatever you want. That's right: Mac versions of games will finally perform the same as Windows, and be a lot easier to port.)

--Eric

...and this $1200 card has only half as many cuda cores a $500 card :

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product-geforce-gtx-580-us.html

256 versus 512, the GTX-580 has it beat....

 

[RebootD]

...and this $1200 card has only half as many cuda cores a $500 card :

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product-geforce-gtx-580-us.html

256 versus 512, the GTX-580 has it beat....

You should stop while you're ahead. There's more to Quadro than CUDA cores they have specific drivers and are geared towards specific professional applications. Here read up before you post nonsense: http://www.nvidia.com/page/partner_certified_drivers.html

 

[cube]

What spec on this video card states that will have better quality then a consumer card? A NVIDIA consumer gaming card for $500.

The consumer card even has twice as many cuda cores...
The consumer card has better specs...

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product-geforce-gtx-580-us.html

This sounds like a card for a business user that just wants to spend a lot of money and not focus on the specs.

A graphics card is not just harware. Specs don't make a card fit for professional work.

 

[SR2]

The biggest difference between a gaming card and a workstation card is the drivers. Alot of time and money goes into developing these drivers, but they still make a killing.

 

[michaelvoigt]

You should stop while you're ahead. There's more to Quadro than CUDA cores they have specific drivers and are geared towards specific professional applications. Here read up before you post nonsense: http://www.nvidia.com/page/partner_certified_drivers.html

The page you just sent has links to drivers for only windows, I don't see any mac stuff? How would any of those help on a mac pro running a Mac OS?

A cuda core is a cuda core, they wouldn't name them the same if they weren't. This card has 256 of them and a cheaper card(GTX 580) has 512 of them.

These pro drivers could be written to work with the GTX 580, and with that card the drivers would have double the cores to work with ...

I'm not going to argue that this card might have more resistance to heat and such other things, and I'm not going to argue that these pro drivers will not work with a GTX 580.

I think this is NVIDIA selling pro cards for more money based upon software drivers...

 

[mr_austin]

At last. This is the card I've been waiting for. This'll run Davinci Resolve for the Mac and After Effects CS5 very nicely instead of the dated and overpriced 4800.

This would be a great card for Resolve, or Smoke, or Nuke, or Premiere Pro. This card is all about CUDA and CUDA accelerated software. If you don't use CUDA accelerated software, it's probably not for you.

After Effects won't get a huge boost from it except for certain plugins, like Kronos.

 

[jbg232]

You should stop while you're ahead. There's more to Quadro than CUDA cores they have specific drivers and are geared towards specific professional applications. Here read up before you post nonsense: http://www.nvidia.com/page/partner_certified_drivers.html

So, how will this card affect performance for aperture 3 compared to the standard ATI 5870, etc cards?

 

[Kenrik]

You use this card if you're a 3D artist working on the next Toy Story or Avatar movie.

not if you're a pimple faced teenager wanting to play Crysis.

Nvidia Quadro cards have always run around $1000, no kids.. it's not your $129 GTS 450.. this is a serious card for serious work.

Pro level cards actually suck for gaming FYI.

 

[Kenrik]

The page you just sent has links to drivers for only windows, I don't see any mac stuff? How would any of those help on a mac pro running a Mac OS?

A cuda core is a cuda core, they wouldn't name them the same if they weren't. This card has 256 of them and a cheaper card(GTX 580) has 512 of them.

These pro drivers could be written to work with the GTX 580, and with that card the drivers would have double the cores to work with ...

I'm not going to argue that this card might have more resistance to heat and such other things, and I'm not going to argue that these pro drivers will not work with a GTX 580.

I think this is NVIDIA selling pro cards for more money based upon software drivers...

True... it is mostly drivers/firmware. I know with some of the older cards you could flash a consumer level card to a quadro.

 

[coochiekuta]

You use this card if you're a 3D artist working on the next Toy Story or Avatar movie.

not if you're a pimple faced teenager wanting to play Crysis.

Nvidia Quadro cards have always run around $1000, no kids.. it's not your $129 GTS 450.. this is a serious card for serious work.

Pro level cards actually suck for gaming FYI.

i think what folks are wondering is the profit margin on quadro line versus the profit they take making the geforce. most understand they are for different uses but can the development costs really do so different?

 

[Kenrik]

i think what folks are wondering is the profit margin on quadro line versus the profit they take making the geforce. most understand they are for different uses but can the development costs really do so different?

Yes because they will only sell a few thousand of these.

High Quantity = Lower Price, and inverse.

 

[commander.data]

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product-quadro-4000-mac-us.html

¹ OpenGL 3.1 on Mac OSX, OpenGL 4.1 on Windows using Bootcamp

nVidia's Spec page actually lists OpenGL 3.1 as supported in OS X. I wonder is this a typo or are we finally moving past OpenGL 2.1?

 

[Huhn]

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Basically same corechip as a geforce card. Different layout ( not really actually) dufferent firmware and drivers... Thats all. And it could be interesting to flash a windows quadro with a mac bios....

 

[Major Reeves]

But the pc version costs $779 and has much better drivers.

 

[BornAgainMac]

I was thinking of getting this card to display my iphoto library of 250 photos of my cat. I don't have any games or drawing apps. Just iWork and iLife. I figure I just need this card and 64 GBs of memory for my Mac Pro server edition.

 

[Giuly]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2 like Mac OS X; de-de) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8C134)

You should stop while you're ahead. There's more to Quadro than CUDA cores they have specific drivers and are geared towards specific professional applications. Here read up before you post nonsense: http://www.nvidia.com/page/partner_certified_drivers.html

The page you just sent has links to drivers for only windows, I don't see any mac stuff? How would any of those help on a mac pro running a Mac OS?

A cuda core is a cuda core, they wouldn't name them the same if they weren't. This card has 256 of them and a cheaper card(GTX 580) has 512 of them.

These pro drivers could be written to work with the GTX 580, and with that card the drivers would have double the cores to work with ...

I'm not going to argue that this card might have more resistance to heat and such other things, and I'm not going to argue that these pro drivers will not work with a GTX 580.

I think this is NVIDIA selling pro cards for more money based upon software drivers...

Add some $$$, get a Quadro 6000 and have 448 CUDA processors, 6GB of RAM and 1.3 billion triangles per second.
Anyhow as stated, GeForces take some educated guesses and present these as their results if they are precise enough, Quadri continue to calculate. Thus they are "slower" but the image is better, think Toy Story rather than Crysis.

 

[Mikey7c8]

You're looking at it wrong if you're looking at it from a pure hardware perspective. You're paying for the professional level firmware and the drivers - which goes through far more application specific testing and optimisation than the gaming drivers ever would, and as others have mentioned do produce far better quality imagery.

More to the point though if you're working on something that would actually make use of workstation class cards, $1200 is a drop in the ocean compared to your overall budget.

Something else to note is that you can expect far better support from manufacturers for workstation cards as well as compared to their gaming counterparts.

It is of course worthwhile noting (as others have) that for a non-professional it is often worthwhile flashing the non-workstation cards with workstation firmware if those products are important to you - ie students.

 

[iBug2]

Well, the Radeon 5870 is about $300 for PC folks, yet we still have to pay $450 plus tax. So by a similar margin, we Mac folks have to pay more for the Quadro card as well.

Depends. 5870 for PC ranges from 300$ to 460$. (1 GB versions). The most expensive ones are overclocked obviously, but not all of them.