GTX 570 to Quadro (Need advice)

Discussion in 'Videocards - Intel ARC & ARC Driver section' started by Gonzakpo, May 11, 2011.

  1. Gonzakpo

    Gonzakpo Guest

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    GTX 570 to Quadro (Need advice)-

    Hello. I'm building a workstation to use the Avid Media Composer software. For now I followed almost exactly what the Videoguys DIY8 guide says (http://www.videoguys.com/Blog/E/Videoguys+DIY8+Sneak+Peek+Work+in+Progess+Coming+this+Fall/0x094b1737e0a06c495e5178a167fbdbd7.aspx)although I may use the i7 960 because it's half the price of the i7 970.

    The thing is, the Quadro videocard are too expensive for me. Maybe I could afford the Quadro 2000 but I'm not sure if it's worth it (not the greatest of the Quadros).

    So I was wondering, what do you think of buying a GTX 570 (the one I can buy in my country is the EVGA SuperClocked) and using the Quadro drivers?. Will it perform better than a Quadro 2000 or maybe a Quadro 4000?

    I know this questions are difficult to answer, but I'm sure somebody has already tested this.

    Also, appart from the modded quadro drivers, did somebody try to mod the bios?

    Thank you very much in advance. I hope this is the right section to post this. I'm new around here.
     
    Last edited: May 13, 2011
  2. IKnowJack

    IKnowJack Guest

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    depends what you want to use it for...if you are mainly doing CAD work then Quadro is the way to go...its much faster than the GTX series in CAD acceleration..

    if you want it mainly for games, then the GTX will be faster than the Quadro...Quadros have a slightly different core architecture that can accelerate CAD specific requirements, and better (ECC) ram

    using the Quadro drivers on a GTX card does not provide any benifits for CAD work

    this pdf explains the benifits of quadro over geforce.. http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_geforce.html

    for Avid, i would probably go the quadro, the ECC ram will insure the frames stay error free
     
    Last edited: May 11, 2011
  3. Gonzakpo

    Gonzakpo Guest

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    The thing is, the Quadro 2000 doesn't have ECC ram!!! Unbelievable right?

    Those Nvidia basterds....
     
  4. Wokis

    Wokis Active Member

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    If the money isn't there and Avid is your only concern, get whatever Geforce you like.

    This has been discussed a couple of times in avid's forums. Avid officially want you to use Quadro on the PC and that's what they're supporting, but then there's tons of users that simply didn't buy a quadro and can use Media Composer just fine anyway. Then the discussions have gone back and forward about what Quadro can accelerate better than a Geforce and many people believe that the difference is close to none and that Quadro is recommended due to more stable drivers.

    Where the truth lies I don't know. But I can witness to that my MC 5 is running fine on a GTX 460, without quadro drivers.
     
    Last edited: May 11, 2011

  5. Gonzakpo

    Gonzakpo Guest

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    Thank you. This is what I needed to heard.

    What Avid tells you about your "non supported" videocard. Did you have ANY problem?

    Is some special Avid function disabled because of not using a Quadro? Or everything works fine?.

    Thank you!
     
  6. Gonzakpo

    Gonzakpo Guest

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    Did somebody tried this already?

    1- Install a non certified card using que Quadro drivers. Use some gamer card that has spec close to a Quadro (eg: GTX 460 is similar to Quadro 4000).

    2- Make Avid believe you have a certified card by modifying the QualifiedGpuBoards.txt file. (C:\Prpgram Files\Avid\Avid Media Composer\SupportingFiles\Config\QualifiedGpuBoards.txt).

    3- Try if distributed processing works!

    I've been wondering this for some time but I don't have the hardware to test it. To know if Avid is using the GPU or not as a co-processor we could use GPU-Z to monitor the GPU load.

    What do you think? Will this work?
     
  7. Wokis

    Wokis Active Member

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    I might get on that tomorrow (GMT+1 so sleepy time now).

    Again, how much it actually has an impact on performance is another thing, but it would sure feel awesome if it worked ;)

    No I have not experienced any kind of issues with my GF on avid, nor have I found any disabled software features because of it if I compare it to the fancy Avid certified Quadro-computers at work (well they all have mojo sdi, nitris DX's or adrenalines connected too so of course they have some extra features compared to all-software), but maybe I haven't been looking around enough.

    I'll do some kind of follow up on this, I swear ;)
     
  8. Gonzakpo

    Gonzakpo Guest

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    Great!! I'll wait for your findings hehe :thumbup:

    I hope Nvidia and Avid cops are not around here hahaha :cop:
     
  9. Wokis

    Wokis Active Member

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    So am trying it atm. Installed Quadro with modified inf found here at guru3d. I don't know if they were needed at all but still.

    I put in the line
    NVIDIA Corporation--Geforce GTX 460/PCI/SSE2 : NVIDIA : 460 : 270.73
    in QualifiedGpuBoards.txt

    Started Avid and BAM! "Certified GPU detected" flashed by when it started. Kind of looked promising ;)

    Set render quality to high on some 720p DNxHD 60 MXF material. Put on Luma key and 3D warp on two clips, two effects I know should benefit from GPU acceleration.

    BAM again. GPU shows around 15% load when real-time rendering my 3D warp and around 20% when real-time rendering luma key. (Without this modification GPU shows around 5% acitvity at all time during playback.) Note that the GPU only starts to chew like this when rendering/video quality is set to high(full green). I'm not at work so can't check but my bet would be it's the same case with a quadro.

    So. I guess what you made me stumble upon here is pretty cool. :) Now I haven't exactly had time to long-time test this and it should be noted AFAIK a modern CPU has no problem whatsoever to do the same thing in real time. I can turn off this acceleration and still have the same speedy experience. But it's a cool thing :D

    edit: added words
     
    Last edited: May 13, 2011
  10. Gonzakpo

    Gonzakpo Guest

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    Yesss!!! We did it!!! We cheated Avid and Nvidia!!.

    It would be nice to compare rendering time between using this trick or without using it. We should spread the word so other people start to test this out.

    Regarding the Quadro drivers, I'm not sure if they are neccesary but I guess that they probably include some special functions that are not present on regular drivers. Maybe Avid needs these functions and thats why they require Quadros. I'm just guessing here...

    By the way, what graphic card are you using? I have to build a PC and I'm not yet sure if I should buy the GTX460 or the GTX470.
     
    Last edited: May 13, 2011

  11. Wokis

    Wokis Active Member

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    GPU:
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    GPU is GTX 460 like in sign and the "NVIDIA Corporation--Geforce GTX 460/PCI/SSE2 : NVIDIA : 460 : 270.73" line I added ;)

    I actually SLI two of them together but for my AVID installation (which is put on on another windows in dual boot for various reasons) only one GPU is in use.

    I think actual rendering times are left unaffected by GPU acceleration, at least in most cases but it's hard to google my way forward on this subject and am just basing this on my observations.

    What I got working now at home was real time rendering but when rendering for final output or when using render/expert render before playing an effect it will still resort to only using CPU, and I think that is intended for ensuring top quality renders.

    I have some people at work who could know more about this subject than me, though. I'll ask around on Monday and see if I can get some more meat about this subject.
     
  12. Gonzakpo

    Gonzakpo Guest

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    A side from what we are testing here, how does the 460 perform with Avid?. My system has to be capable of editing FullHD video using a Dual monitor config.
     
  13. Wokis

    Wokis Active Member

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    It can handle my dual monitors fine though I think a $40 graphics card can do that as well :)

    1080i59.94 full quality playback of DNxHD material (220 X MXF) is no problem either. Not sluggish in any way. I think this still has to do more with the rest of the system than the GPU. As long as the disks can handle it (thinking 1:1 MXF) and the CPU is an insanely good one, running Avid all software-mode for common purposes is still a blast.

    I made a multigroup test also. Four 1080p25 (DNxHD 185 X) videos att half quality render. Here I cannot choose full quality nor do I have a monitor the size of 7680x4320 and I'm guessing Avid feels that it isn't that common to want 4xFullHD playback while playing around in a multigroup, though it may be possible to do it with an Adrenaline or Mojo/Nitris DX. It went fine with no sluggish playback but is probably more due to my fast CPU, the GPU isn't really a bottleneck here, like in most if not all situations.

    Disclaimer here though. I usually DON'T edit much with this PC and have not, for other purposes than to answer this thread, worked with much 1080p material. I've just toyed around a little right now with full hd material, thrown effects and transitions on it and haven't expererienced any sluggish performance. Some effects (timewarp in particular) still do need to be pre-rendered before I can get proper playback, but with a Sandy Bridge i7 at 4.6 here, even these (single-thread..) renders goes by pretty fast.

    Getting better performance than that usually means going for a Mojo DX or similar, and even there you have to read up on what they can actually off-load the CPU in.


    --- Back to some distributed computing tests ---

    I've found one glitch with GTX 460 GPU acceleration so far. Full Screen playback (on a non ref-monitor, just using Avid's software full screen mode) in combination with a GPU-rendered effect will result in the Full Screen window NOT updating the video at all but instead displaying a still frame.

    Now I am not entirely sure that this MUST have been a bug with our ugly little hack, it might just be a distr. computing bug in general. More testing is req.

    It should be added that I REALLY need to upgrade my Avid too. I'm still running on the initial 5.0 release (the one with weird sound bugs) and heck there's a sexy 5.5 out there. I imagine that if you're building a machine for Avid right now that you're gonna get 5.5 on it? So maybe confirming that distributed computing on a Geforce works there as well is probably to prefer, even though this GPU acceleration they have seem like a pretty small deal when it comes to performance gains, to be honest.
     
  14. Gonzakpo

    Gonzakpo Guest

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    Yes, I will be using Avid 5.5.

    Now that you tell me, the Quadro 4000 card has recently been Qualified. Maybe your system needs the new version to fully work with the Fermi architecture.

    This is from Avid Requeriments web:
    If you are using Win 7, you should try to use the exactly same driver and a version equal or higher than 5.0.3.8

    If you don't feel like buying the Avid update, you could get it "somewhere". Just to test this out, then you uninstall it and resintall you legal Avid version. Or not...

    Sorry I'm not able to help you with this. I don't want to sound like if I were giving you orders on what to do next. I'm just throwing ideas. If you feel like testing them GREAT! If you don't, no problem!
     

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