Comments on: NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac

By: John Rambo

John Rambo — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:03:03 +0000

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.

By: Thom Bellion

Thom Bellion — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:11:00 +0000

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…

By: Thom Bellion

Thom Bellion — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:55:24 +0000

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.

By: xalgovan

xalgovan — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:11:05 +0000

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.

By: etype

etype — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:24:37 +0000

yehaaaaaaaaaa!

first post!