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The Quadro FX 4800 for Mac + Premiere Pro CS5 = fast

A couple of months ago I was offered the opportunity to test out the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac. This beast of a video card is one of the more powerful cards available for the Macintosh but it’s also quite expensive (currently just over $1,400 at Amazon). I jumped at the opportunity as it’s this NVIDIA technology that powers the Mercury Playback engine in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. That and the fact that I probably wouldn’t have been able to justify the cost of the card on my own. In short, the Mercury engine and the NVIDIA Cuda technology combine for some very fast editing of very processor intensive formats. Since then, this particular graphics card has become the backbone of another hot Mac product, the DaVinci Resolve for Mac.

Let me first say that I’ve been at a bit of a loss as to how to exactly test / benchmark / review the 4800. I certainly consider myself geeky enough to closely follow and understand a lot of the computer technology we have to use in post-production but I’m not geeky enough (nor do I have any desire to be geeky enough) to spend hours running benchmark tests on graphics cards, hard drives and things like that. That’s what Barefeats is for and they’ve done their own Quadro FX 4800 for Mac tests. Ars Technica too. While I most certainly care about all the changing technology I often get to the point where I don’t want to know the deep technical details as to how something many work, I just want to that it does indeed work and how that will help my post-prodcution workflow. So how to discuss the 4800?

Bruce is a PC, I’m a Mac.

Fellow PVC writer Bruce Johnson has been writing about the PC version of this card and his workflow with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. I thought that I would mirror one of his posts with the Mac version since there’s probably quite a few people getting 4800’s of their own as they begin setting up DaVinci Resolve for Mac.

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac.

This card is big! It’s about 10.5 inches long and about an inch and a half wide so it takes up all of the space in the doublewide slot 1 of the Mac Pro. It doesn’t really look like you’d be able to get a card in slot 2 once the thing was installed but you can. One thing to be sure of (and one thing that was asked of me) is that you are running a supported Mac Pro. If you check the System Profiler you can check exactly which model you are running.

About This Mac > More Info will launch the System Profiler so you can check for your specific version of MacPro

Not all Mac Pro’s are supported for the 4800. Older Mac Pros before 2008 aren’t supported. Full details are on the NVIDIA 4800 for Mac driver page. My model is 4,1 which is supported. If you’re planning on setting up a Resolve system make sure you have a supported model before buying. If you’re planning to run DaVinci Resolve and have a supported system for that software then your machine is supported for a 4800. There’s a good list of Macs and the Model Identifier numbers on Everymac that helps understand all of these little numbers a bit better.

The card has to get external power so you’ll need the power cable to get up and running. There’s two small power outlets on the motherboard and the 4800 will plug into one of those.

The 4800 power cable plugged into the power outlet on the Mac Pro motherboard

The Mac Pro really is elegant in its internal design so removing components (RAM, hard drives, PCI cards) is a breeze. Back to that early statement about how geeky I am; I’m more than happy to snap open and work with the user serviceable internals of the Mac Pro but looking at a few of the pictures of the PC that Bruce works with makes me very happy that Macs aren’t designed that way. If they were any more difficult to service I might let someone else do it.

Removing the access door is as simple as popping the latch on the back of the Mac Pro. There’s two thumb screws that have to be unscrewed to remove the bracket that secures the PCI cards once they are inserted. They key to removing a PCI card it to slide the latching bar out of the way so the cards can be removed. You can see the silver metal bar running across the motherboard:

To slide it out of the way push the button on the plastic shroud that covers the rear PCI slot holders:

This allows you to slide the whole shroud back which releases the latching bar. It took me a while to figure this one out when I went to install my first card in a Mac Pro. Then it’s a matter of pulling the card straight up out of its slot. If inserting a new card line up the bottom of the card and push it straight into the slot until it seats.

The 4800 is big so it’s obvious it fits into slot 1, the doublewide slot. I found it easiest to attach the power cable to the motherboard first, then attach the other end of the power cable to the card itself and then insert it into the slot. If you’re setting up for DaVinci Resolve then you’ll insert your second video card into slot 2. It’s tight but it fits.

The Quadro FX 4800 for Mac and GeForce 120 side by side.

The 4800 card installed.

Both the 4800 and GT 120 installed.

For a proper Resolve configuration there’s two other cards to insert as well so it’s going to be a full computer once all the cards are in place. There’s two drivers that need to be installed for the 4800, both the card’s Mac driver and the CUDA driver. Check the NVIDIA site and make sure you’re on the right os version.

Once everything is installed, connect the monitor and you’re ready to go.

The connections on the Mac Pro with both video cards installed.

What you’ll see in the image above is the back of the Mac Pro and the graphics card connection with both the 4800 and GT 120 installed. I’ve connected my display to the 4800 as I’m working with Premiere Pro CS5 as of this writing with no Resolve for Mac installed. If you’re setting up a recommended Resolve for Mac configuration you’ll be connecting your monitor to the GT 120 card as that drives the GUI for the software and the 4800 does all the processing for everything else. You’ll also have PCI cards in the other two slots. Notice I said recommended as there are people who are running Resolve for Mac with only the 4800 card. You’ll get less realtime performance but also won’t have to swap monitor cables depending on what application you might be working in.

This leads to an interesting question: How well will a DaVinci Resolve for Mac system lend itself to sharing a computer with other applications like Final Cut Pro, Media Composer or the Adobe CS5 suite? Considering Resolve for Mac has some strict system requirements this will be something that has to be tested out as Resolve gets out in the market. There’s also often strict requirements for drivers where one application might require one version and another application a totally different version. One thing you can be sure of is that at $995 there will be a lot of people buying Resolve for Mac who will be running the application with lots of other software installed and not necessarily be set up with the recommended Resolve configuration. Stay tuned to the Internet for those reports.

Next Up: The 4800 with Premiere Pro CS5.

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Hey Scott here’s a link that details several other Geforce based video cards that work with the mercury playback engine through a “hack” (editing a text file and enabling a option in the video card driver).  So you may not need a $1500 video card.  On the PC side at least, there are sub $150 cards that will work, and many of those cards will work on the Mac as well.

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/https.macrumors.com/t223244.html

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/21  at  10:48 PM

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And apparently Matrox provides Mercury acceleration with their MAX technology on the PC:

http://www.matrox.com/video/en/press/releases/mxo2_cs5/

Haven’t heard much discussion about this or speed reports but i do think it’s coming to the Mac too.

Posted by Scott Simmons  on  09/22  at  06:31 AM

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Great article, very thorough.

However, if you were going to get a high-end video card, I would wait if you can. The 4800 is last-generation technology. The 4000 and 5000 (the 5000 is the direct replacement for the 4800) are out for PC now, and should be available for Mac with the next rev of the Mac Pro.

But who knows when that will be…

Posted by Charles Angus  on  09/22  at  09:41 PM

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Good point Charles. Though i don’t think NVIDIA knows when the Mac versions will be shipping. Apparently Apple doesn’t really want them to say much of anything. According to NVIDIA the 4800 for both Mac and PC will remain shipping for a while at least. That’s good since it’s a big part of Resolve and Smoke on Mac. I wish Apple would get off their ass and get back into NVIDIAs corner so we could get more and better Mac options!

Posted by Scott Simmons  on  09/22  at  10:28 PM

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Someone prone to conspiracy theories might ask, “Apple seems to be tailoring their apps for ATi so why would they do extra work to support NVIDIA, the card of choice for Avid and Adobe?” 

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/23  at  07:13 PM

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Someone prone to conspiracy theories might ask, “Apple seems to be tailoring their apps for ATi so why would they do extra work to support NVIDIA, the card of choice for Avid and Adobe?”

Posted by FXHisBUG  on  09/25  at  03:40 AM

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another great post Scoot!...have anyone try this with the EVGA GTX 285 for Mac..been surfing the net for that card..since i’m doing mostly HD 24p work dont really need the 2k+ res..was wondering will this card good enough for Resolve…CS5 and MC5.0. and of course FCP. (still have FCS2.0) don’t think it worth it to get FCS3.0 yet…

cheers
dara

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  10/12  at  04:04 PM

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Dara, I’ve heard of a lot of people getting the 285 for use with Resolve. apparently you can find them on eBay and from some other retailers where they have had the card flashed to make it work. Not sure of how it works with Adobe’s Mercury Playback engine though.

Posted by Scott Simmons  on  10/12  at  05:00 PM

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Thanks for the reply Simmon…will my system work with resolve I check requirement PDF look like but im not sure…here my mac spec.

Hardware Overview:

  Model Name:  Mac Pro
  Model Identifier:  MacPro3,1
  Processor Name:  Quad-Core Intel Xeon
  Processor Speed:  2.8 GHz
  Number Of Processors:  2
  Total Number Of Cores:  8
  L2 Cache (per processor):  12 MB
 
I got it a long time ago..just turn it on.

thanks
Dara

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  10/13  at  03:51 PM

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Could someone please help me understand if somethings wrong with my settings or if my 4800 is defected?

I run OSX Lion 10.7.2 and have the quadro fx 4800 installed in a:
Mac Pro 4,1
2 x 2.93Ghz Quad-core Intel Xeon
12GB of Ram
with two additional Geforce GT 120 installed too.

the latest drivers for the 4800
GPU driver version: 7.12.9 270.05.10f03
CUDA driver version: 4.0.50

I run Premiere 5.5.2 and have tested the performance with the two different settings:
Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration
Mercury Playback Engine Software Only

I did this test because I didn’t feel my 4800 did the work I’ve read everywhere it should. Adding simple text titles to AVCHD footage made my playback drop frames.

Anyhow, I tested my machine with 1920x1080 AVCHD and added video layers until I started to see stutter during playback. First with “Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration”. With 14 video layers sized down so you could see them all beside one another playback started to drop frames. The yellow line was still yellow in the top of the timeline. Shouldn’t it turn red if the footage needs rendering?

I then switched to “Mercury Playback Engine Software Only” and the yellow line turned red. The strange thing is that when I played back the same 14 layers of video the dropped frames where gone!! Isn’t this beyond strange??? Shouldn’t everything run more smooth with the “Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration”?

Has it got anything to do with my Geforce GT 120 installed? Should I get rid of those? My two 24 inch apple displays are both connected to the 4800.

PLEASE help me or redirect me to some good forums!

Posted by david tarrodi  on  12/11  at  11:57 AM

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