NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac

CATEGORIES: Hardware, Product Reviews | Erik Kuna | November 05, 2009

VISUAL COMPUTING FROM THE DESKTOP

NVIDIA Quadro FX The new professional-level Quadro FX 4800 with 1.5 GB of memory brings a much-needed performance upgrade to the Mac Pro lineup. But why do you need a $1,799 graphics card? If you’re not a full-time design/graphics professional with a large budget, you probably don’t. But if you are, the timesaving and quality precision you’ll get with this card pays for itself in no time.

Where this card shines is the NVIDIA’s revolutionary new CUDA technology and Elemental Technologies Elemental Accelerator, which lets your system use all 192 GPU processor cores instead of just the typical eight cores in a Mac Pro CPU. Not only will your system benefit from the increased performance, using the GPU will speed up your workflow by freeing up your CPU to do other tasks. So, what does this mean for the Adobe Creative Suite professional?

Imagine being able to view After Effects’ nested compositions or rendering effects such as Bilateral Blur, Turbulent Noise, and Depth of Field Blur three to five times faster, or even seeing those effects in near real time as you make adjustments? Not to mention rendering the Cartoon Effect 38x faster with the GPU rather than CPU rendering. And it doesn’t stop there! You’re looking at massive speed increases in Photoshop CS4 vs. non-GPU accelerated computers, and the image’s interpolation quality far exceeds that of non-GPU-accelerated systems. In addition, the Elemental Accelerator allows Adobe Premiere to render H.264 movies using the GPU at faster-than-real-time speeds, which is pretty much unheard of with CPU rendering. Plus you’ll be able to render resized movies in half the time.

If you need a professional choice when it comes to workstation-level graphics on the Mac Pro, then look no further than the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800.—Eric Kuna

Company: NVIDIA Corporation
Price: $1,799
Web: www.nvidia.com
Rating: 4.5

Hot: GPU acceleration; CUDA technology; Elemental Accelerator
Not: Limited GPU support outside Adobe Apps; cost

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yehaaaaaaaaaa!

first post!

Comment by etype | November 5, 2009 @ 10:24 pm

I’d love one for 3D work…. but a graphics card that is more than half the price of an entry level Mac Pro. That much money would buy a lot of memory, an SSD drive, and an upgrade to a pretty good graphics card like the HD 4870. Those also would improve your workflow.

Comment by xalgovan | November 6, 2009 @ 1:11 am

Honestly, for a fraction of the price, just get the GeForce GTX 285 for Mac. It has 240 CUDA cores VS the 192, 0.5 less VRAM – but with more processing power it will fill it faster. And yes – definitely get an SSD or two in RAID 0 as that is still the major bottleneck.
Adobe CS4 doesn’t care about workstation vs. gaming cards, it just sees the # of CUDA cores and the cards OpenGL Specs. CAD/CAE are the only software suites on PC with neutered drivers for the gaming cards, but I’ve yet to test this with NX for OS X (the only high-end CAE/CAM suite I’ve found for OS X outside of the Army’s BRL-CAD).
But for ANY CUDA based scientific programs, or custom CUDA programs, like rendering scripts, only look at the CUDA driver which only counts the # of cores in order to assign the workload.

Comment by Thom Bellion | January 11, 2010 @ 3:55 pm

Oh – but the wait will be worth it for the next refresh since the Pro’s will be getting the 6 Core Intel Gulftown. It’ll be nice to have 6 or 12 cores, and the performance back well above the i7 iMac. nVidia is also working on releasing the Fermi-based line soon which will be worth waiting on.

To get an idea of the specs:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_tesla_C2050_C2070_us.html

Avatar used CUDA renderers instead of CPU based render-farms. That was good enough for me – and that isn’t even the next-gen Fermi…

Comment by Thom Bellion | January 11, 2010 @ 4:11 pm

i would really like to see some 3D benchmarks for the Quadro. i currently have an ATI HD4870 in my 8-core mac pro, but i’d really like to know the difference a Quadro would make when using, say Maya 2010 for OS X. i’m so curious, but not necessarily $1500 curious if you get my drift.

Comment by John Rambo | January 20, 2010 @ 8:03 pm

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