MacDirectory Magazine

REVIEW NVIDIA’S QUADRO FX 4800 > PUTTING THE “FLOW” BACK IN WORKFLOW WORDS BY RIC GETTER There were some glorious years where video editors could sit back and enjoy the fruits of Moore’s Law. As regular as clockwork, our systems became more powerful, RAM and disk space became cheaper and more abundant and editing moved from six-figure tape-based suites to desktops and even laptops. NTSC video resolution was maxed out at 525 lines and life was good. Then this thing called “HD” came along. Higher and higher resolution sources started showing up in our capture bins as people started shooting with theater-quality formats like RED 2K and 4K. Even pro-sumer DSLRs are cranking out very respectable HD footage that can bog down a conventional post production effort. For the video suite, Moore’s Law was no longer good enough. What we needed was a quantum leap. This year, that arrived in the form of Adobe’s much-heralded Mercury Playback Engine, a technology that farmed-out complex rendering tasks to your graphics card. When the Mercury Engine went into development, Snow Leopard’s OpenCL framework was still a work in progress, but NVIDIA had a system called CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) that was a “fully-cooked” 64- bit architecture ready for business back in 2007. So that’s the path that Adobe chose. When CS5 arrived, NVIDIA had two CUDA cards ready for the Mac OS. The GeForce 285, a great card for cost-conscious gamers and the powerhouse Quadro FX 4800 created for video (and design engineering) professionals. And even beyond Adobe, the Quadro has the support of the top compositing, effects and color grading systems and qualifies for pro-level support from NVIDIA. The CUDA framework, like the Mac Pro, takes advantage of parallel processing using multiple CPU cores. In the case of our Mac Pro, we have 8 cores to toss at a task. To put things into perspective, the 4800 has 192. As for video memory, the card is loaded with 1.5GB, with a 384-bit highway connecting it to the processor array. There’s only one acronym that is befitting of the result: OMG! Space-friendly The FX 4800 is easy to install (as is just about everything on a Mac Pro). Even though it’s a double-width board (actually more of a box than board), placing it in Slot 1 will still leave the second PCI Express 2.0 slot (on the early 2008 Mac Pros) free for other high-speed cards. In spite of the intimidating look of the cooling fan, the 4800 is virtually silent once it powers up. The board will support two, Apple 30” Cinema Displays and has built-in stereo 3D output in the form of a standard 3-pin DIN connector. On the OS side, Apple has actually been supporting stereo 3D visualization since Jaguar (OS 10.2). Side by Side Fortunately, Adobe made it pretty easy for users (and reviewers) to see the effect of hardware acceleration in the Mercury Playback Engine; a simple setting can toggle a project file back to software only playback and rendering. There’s also a “hidden” (Cmd-F12) console/debug view that provides real-time statistical data on playback. Our test footage was in full 10- bit, AVCIntra P2 format. Playing back a single layer at full 1080p resolution, our dual 2.8 GHz Quad Core Mac Pro could only achieve about 70% of the target 23.98 FPS with software only rendering with all 8 of our CPU’s cores were maxed- out. We turned on the hardware acceleration and nailed the target frame rate with ease (at only about 20% CPU activity). Then, we added four more layers of video to the same scene. The software engine struggled along at about 20 percent of the target rate. The Quadro FX board handled all five layers without dropping a frame with our CPU usage was hovering between 70 percent and 80 percent. Even with all five layers, scrubbing along the footage was dead-on and jogging was absolutely fluid. The board has an equally impressive impact on rendering out footage, reducing Blu-ray export times by a factor of ten. This is a case where numbers alone really can’t tell the story. There are a variety of benchmarks available showing how the board plays with the Mercury Playback Engine (and OpenCL tasks in other applications). However, the real impact is on the creative flow of your work. If you’re on a deadline and burning with ideas, waiting for a transition or comp to render can be murder on the creative process. Though it’s possible to calculate the minutes, hours and even days the 4800’s processing power will save, there’s no way to put a price tag on the fluidity of a real time workflow. Like any pro-quality tool, the Quadro FX 4800 will help you work not just faster, but better. Product NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for the Mac Made by NVIDIA Price $1,799.95 list (generally under $1,400 retail) Pros Mercury Playback Engine-ready; mind- blowing performance overall; quiet and cool Cons Priced for the pro market System Requirements OS X 10.5.7 or later Rating ★★★★★ MacDirectory 119

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