Nvidia quadro 4000 for Macpro?

S

SPZ

Veteran
I have a 2008 3.1 Macpro and plan to upgrade my video card. The quadro has dropped in price- 715$ in an amazon search- and seems to be the best one (specs wise) to go. However have been reading lots of contradicting reports on this card. Can anyone share their opinion about this card and in their FCP workflow? I'm not a Premiere user, but use some After Effects to complement FCP. Thanks!
 
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Unfortunately it will not help with After Effects.
I don't know how the Quadro works with FCP, but I can tell you that Premiere becomes super fast.
Best,
Diego
 
If you're going to upgrade to the next version of FCP I would wait and see which cards are optimized for it.

Rob.
 
i have Quadro 4000. Makes a difference in Smoke, PremierePro and Resolve. Resolve 8 will support OpenCL, so you can use AMD cards with it. All that it does in FCP is add more VRAM for plug-ins that are VRAM hungry. The one that comes to mind is Colorista II. If you are running 2 monitors off your graphics card and want to run Colorista II, you need at least 1 gb of VRAM as Colorista II requires 512mg of VRAM-- per display. The Quadro 4000 has 2gb VRAM. But it basically buys you nothing in FCP and in fact if you are only Final Cut or even AE based, might as well stay with AMD cards.
 
Thank you all for your replies. Ned, how would you say it improves on colorista ii performance compared to stock macpro card? I use colorista a lot, as well as Magic bullet looks. Does it improve Motion? I have already ordered the card so whatever happens I'll have to stick with it, but do you see Apple supporting this card in FCPX? Apple seems to be sticking with ATI For the graphics department... I love FCP and specially Prores, I don't see miself switching to Premiere for "native codec" editing...
 
FCP X utilizes Grand Central Dispatch, which means any OpenCL compatible card will work.
Here's a list from Silverado of current OpenCL compatible cards.

-------------

"NVIDIA Qualified GPU Cards
■ GeForce 320M
■ GeForce GT 330M
■ GeForce 9400M
■ GeForce 9600M GT
■ GeForce 8600M GT
■ GeForce GT 120
■ GeForce GT 130
■ GeForce GTX 285
■ GeForce 8800 GT
■ GeForce 8800 GS
■ Quadro FX 4800
■ Quadro FX 5600

AMD Qualified GPU Cards
■ GeForce 9600M GT
■ Radeon HD 4670
■ Radeon HD 4850
■ Radeon HD 4870
■ Radeon HD 5670
■ Radeon HD 5750
■ Radeon HD 5770
■ Radeon HD 5870

Presently, NVIDIA Quadro 4000 is not listed as a supported card for OpenCL under Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. This may likely change with a future up-date or the release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion."
 
Interesting. FCP X includes support for the Quadro FX4800 (older) but not for the newer 4000?
 
No it's not about FCP X supporting or not supporting anything. It is about cards that are OpenCL complaint, which means Grand Central Dispatch can utilize them. It's totally up to NVIDIA to make a card OpenCL or not. FCP X takes advantage of Grand Central Dispatch, the hardware manufacture has to make their hardware support OpenCL.

Thus, it would be more technically accurate to say, "What, the Quadro FX4000 doesn't support FCP X?"

When Lion is released, I have a feeling more cards will have firmware upgrades to give them OpenCL support. But that's just a guess.
 
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I see, thanks for clearing that out. Just visited nvidia's discussion forums and seeing the tone of most discussions on the cuda and quadro forums, I can't help but feel a bit concerned with my purchase... Anyway, will get the card in the next few days, lets see how it goes...
 
I'm using the 5870 and am very happy with it. We'll have to wait until FCP X is released to see what cards actually perform best in the real world. Until then, I'd stay away form the 4000.
 
Card arrived today and picked it up at my local reseller. Installing it now. Lets see what happens...Fingers crossed: Macpro 3.1, 2.8 8 core, nvidia geforce 8800gt
 
UPDATE

Installed card, works perfectly. Small improvement vs 8800gt in FCP. Main difference is in colorista II, now plays almost realtime with color corrections in prores 4:2:2 HQ. However, Magic Bullet Looks seems like its performing the same. Neat video also performing a little bit faster, but not much. Removed 8800GT in fear of incompatibilities.
 
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