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

H.264 exporting in Premiere Pro

I also wanted to see how much the 4800 card might speed up a simple H.264 export like I might send for client approvals. An iPhone preset is one of my favorites so I exported a 32 second clip. Both software and GPU acceleration took about 28 seconds. I was surprised at those results as I thought that the GPU acceleration was supposed to speed up encoding as well. The NVIDIA reviewer’s guide suggests using a Blu-ray preset as an encoding test. With that preset I tried a one minute clip and software encoded in 53 seconds while the GPU acceleration encoded in 39 seconds. I also tried tried that same one minute with an H.264 Vimeo HD preset. Software only: 1:03 - GPU accelerated: 36 seconds. That was was more like it as the GPU accelerated encode was much faster. I’m not real sure what the deal is with these exports. Sometimes the 4800 seemed to accelerate the export, sometimes it didn’t.

Rendering Colorista II in FCP, playback in Motion

One other comparison I wanted to try out was a Colorista II rendering option between the GeForce 120 and the 4800. For this test I loaded up Final Cut Pro. Colorista II takes advantage of your system’s GPU for rendering and you can choose to render using the CPU or the GPU. Here’s the control from FCP:

I took a 22 second 1920x1080 ProRes (LT) clip in Final Cut Pro, applied a basic look with Colorista II and hit render. Render Using CPU: 2 minutes 41 seconds. Render Using GPU (with the GeForce 120): 1:25.    Render Using GPU (with the Quadro FX4800 for Mac):  1:39. Not much difference in the two card’s rendering times under that test.

Next I tried a completely subjective test with Apple Motion. With the GeForce 120 installed I brought up the Directions.HD template. Working at Full resolution and Normal quality Motion played back the template just fine at full fps. But when I started adding clips, to the Drop Zone as well as new clips, playback started to suffer.

With the 4800 playback would begin to suffer as I added more ProRes clips to the template as well. It felt like I did get better performance while adding clips out of the 4800 than I did the 120 but it wasn’t a night and day difference. I have completed two Motion projects (both moderately complex 2D motion graphics projects) with the 4800 card installed and performance was great there, playback never an issue.

Wrap-up

To really take full advantage of a fast GPU, software has to be specifically written to utilize it. This is exactly what Adobe has done with the Mercury Playback engine, optimizing it to support the NVIDIA CUDA technology. The performance really is quite amazing, as was expected, but I have to admit that I was quite stunned by just how much realtime performance I got when the Premiere Pro CS5 Program monitor playback resolution was dropped to 1/2. You really could see a no-render situation for offline edit. I do wonder exactly what the quality difference on an external client monitor might be between the Full and 1/2 resolution setting but for basic creative offline editing it looked pretty good at 1/2. When viewing the Program monitor full screen I could begin to see the resolution difference but for offline it would have been more than acceptable. The Mercury Playback engine is a great example of what can be achieved when writing for the GPU. I’ve read an article or two about the 4800 and PPro CS5 that says you can add all the effects and layers you want and never see a hit in real time performance or resolution. That wasn’t entirely true in my tests as full resolution did begin to see performance hits as I added layers and effects to native Canon H.264. But as I’ve said, the 1/2 Resolution playback setting was stunning in playback performance and looked great on the Program monitor. There’s so many different possible combinations of computers and footage that I’m sure performance will vary from situation to situation. No card is powerful enough to accelerate everything, all the time ... at least not at this level and price point.

The GPU really is a way to extend the performance of our computers. Apple built their GPU technology, OpenCL, into Snow Leopard but as of right now I don’t think anything really takes much advantage of it, especially not Final Cut Pro. NVIDIA already has their next GPU technology announced as well: Fermi. The Fermi technology is showing up in a series of Quadro Fermi cards that should push the GPUs even further.

There should be a Fermi card coming to the Mac but as if right now, the Quadro FX 4800 for Mac is one of the fastest GPUs we can get but it should be noted that most applications don’t take advantage of all the 4800 can offer. It’s the high-end 3D applications like Maya or XSI that really use all of its power.  While one of several supported cards for the Adobe Mercury Playback engine it’s one of only two cards currently supported as the GPU (DaVinci Resolve pdf link) for DaVinci Resolve for Mac (the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 being the other). It’s also one of the supported graphics cards for Autodesk’s Smoke for Mac.

If you get to reading some of the online debate about graphics cards and really dig into the performance numbers you might see that these high end graphics cards are overkill for a lot of what we do in post-production. But the fact is if you want to take full advantage of a certain selection of post applications (Premiere Pro CS5, Resolve for Mac, Smoke for Mac) then the Quadro FX 4800 for Mac might have to be a central part of that system. It might not be the newest of the NVIDIA technology at this point but it is still available out in the distribution channels. Until the new NVIDIA Fermi Quadro for the Mac ships (and it looks like it might in October) and applications support it then the 4800 might be your card.

I’m sure there’s something about all this fast changing GPU technology that I might have missed or misunderstood. My testing might have been unscientific but it’s testing that supports what I have to do on a daily basis. Edit video footage, often with effects and multiple layers and export H.264 files. A search around the ‘net for specs, reviews and performance numbers brings back way more hits that I care to read and understand. I just want the software manufacturers to tell me which card is best for their application and hopefully the moons will align where an editor can have a fast card in their system with many of their goto applications being accelerated by it. The NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac is helping allow for some great applications on the Mac that we haven’t seen in post-production before. As technology moves along I hope they just keep on coming!

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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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