GTX285 vs Quadro 4000

And anything would be based on "in theory" plus based on past, on PC reviews, and because OS X drivers are so different.

Barefeats hopes to, if/when Apple starts shipping, I hear.

In the meantime, a way to use GTX 570 would be something to write home about, yes? And there, you can judge how GTX 580/570 compares in a lot of reviews (PC again) to 285s. And there are no drivers for GTX 500s (or for ATI 6000 series) as well.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product-quadro-4000-us.html
http://store.apple.com/us/product/H3314LL/A

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/11/nvidia-brings-fermi-quadro-4000-kickin g-mostly-screaming-to-mac.ars

The 4800 had 192 cores but looked close to 285's 240.
http://www.barefeats.com/nehal12.html

http://www.nvidia.com/object/productgeforce_gtx_285us.html

This is the GTX 570 (mere $359, $499 for 580 with slightly better specs))
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product-geforce-gtx-570-us.html
http://www.evga.com/products/moreInfo.asp?pn=012-P3-1570-AR
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product-geforce-gtx-580-us.html

$1100 to play and find out 😟
Sorry couldn't help, really hard to guess,

I tend to discount most of what I've seen on the blogger/review sites, they tend to either be game-centric, or not have a really great understanding of how a big machine (like the Mac Pro) gets used for pro video apps.

Hatter, has there been any confirmation yet on a consumer-level GTX570 card for the Mac, or is that speculation (or via flashed/hacked drivers)?

As Hatter said though, answers would have to be 'in theory' at this time, since the Quadro 4000 for Mac hasn't yet shipped (or at least arrived yet, I've got mine on order). Guessing/speculating can be extremely difficult, too, since it's a case of comparing Apples to Oranges (sorry, couldn't resist). The GTX285 is a 'consumer-grade' card which is hardware and driver-optimized for performance where it matters in gaming, and the Quadro series is 'pro-grade' and is hardware/driver-optimized for performance in pro apps (in this case, 3D rendering, data modeling, etc).

According to representatives I've spoken with at nVidia, the Quadro 4000 should easily deliver at least twice the performance of the Quadro FX 4800 (and as much as 5-8x faster in certain operations). The Quadro FX 4800 card was considered to be 2-3 times faster than the GTX-285 (depending on the application you're using). I've never owned a Quadro card myself so I haven't done extensive testing with one, but from the demos and time spent playing around with other peoples' machines that had Quadro FX 4800's installed, I don't think it's a false claim.

I can tell you that you won't see a huge improvement when it comes to Final Cut Studio... for now. There's an upgrade due in the spring that will hopefully be able to take better advantage of newer technology (not just in GPU's, but with your whole machine), hopefully then you'll see a massive improvement.

Adobe's Premiere Pro and After Effects CS5 have support for nVidia's CUDA technology, which lets them perform certain functions up to 10 times faster than without hardware acceleration. And the part I like most, a lot of stuff that would previously have required rendering in order to preview can easily be done in real-time. That's with just the GTX-285, having the Quadro 4000 will increase both the complexity and the number of layers that I can have in my projects and still get real-time performance.

The boost you see in C4D performance may depend on a number of factors, including what version you're using, what kind of work you're doing, and what plugins you're using. Octane Render is a ray-tracing plugin that looks incredibly promising, tapping into CUDA to boost the speed of ray-traced renders. I don't use C4D but some folks I consult with do (and have interest in ray tracing), for them the Quadro 4000 (or even better, putting two Quadro 4000's in a single Mac Pro) could be a real game-changer. But even if you don't have CUDA-optimized ray tracing plugins, the performance increase should be in the neighborhood of 4-6x (twice the speed of the older Quadro card, which itself is 2-3x faster than the GTX-285).

Hopefully the card will start shipping soon, and we'll start to see the results first-hand. 🙂

Apple has confirmed through a few sources, including Steve Jobs himself, that a Final Cut Studio update is coming in the first half of 2011. People are guessing at early spring because of the NAB trade show that falls in April, but nothing beyond first half of the year has been confirmed.

Whether or not it's better to delay your purchase is your call, based on your specific needs. For my purposes, the GTX-285 was a great speed boost and I expect the Quadro will be even greater in FCS. More importantly, I use a number of other applications that will benefit greatly from having that monster, I can't wait for it to start shipping.

I'd go Quadro as I have heard the 285 drivers were not very good and the quadro will pretty much always have support for high end video. The 285 is end of life already.

Quadro 4000

Total Frame Buffer 2 GB GDDR5
Memory Interface 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 89.6 GB/s

GTX285

Standard Memory Config 1024 MB GDDR3
Memory Interface Width 512-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 159 GB/s

I think people are attaching a little too much significance to the word "Quadro"

Do the math folks...the GTX285 has almost TWICE the memory bandwidth.

You are basically hoping that a 4 Cylinder Ferrari will be faster than an 8 cylinder Corvette because "Ferrari" sounds better than "Chevrolet".

On a Mac, there is ONE set of drivers. All Nvidia cards in similar family use same one. So unless the Quadro is delivered with Magic Fairy Dust, it will be constrained by the laws of electronics as we know them.

If you think the Quadro has magical drivers that will allow it to toss aside the reality of constrained bandwidth, read up on Nvidia's site what other cards those drivers are for. (Hint...GTX285 is on the list)

There are some Scientific uses of double precision floating point that Fermi may handle better, but for raw 3D throughput, you are seriously kidding yourself if you think the Quadro 4000 is going to offer some Great Leap Forward. Or even be able to catch a glimpse of the GTX285's tail lights.

On the other hand, those Fermi drivers are also making a GTX480 roar in my Nehalem. There is every reason to expect a consumer lever Fermi card in next 8 months using these same drivers.

GTX580

Standard Memory Config 1536 MB GDDR5
Memory Interface Width 384-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 192.4

Here are specs for GTX480:

Standard Memory Config 1536 MB GDDR5
Memory Interface Width 384-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 177.4

And the GTX470:

Standard Memory Config 1280 MB GDDR5
Memory Interface Width 320-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 133.9

For an idea how important that Memory Bandwidth number really is:

http://www.barefeats.com/nehal11.html

You'll note the $500 GTX285 mopped the floor with the Quadro 4800 which costs 3 times as much. Your extra $1K got you some nifty stickers but the guy rendering with the GTX285 will be finishing his renders faster and going home sooner.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/12/a-second-look-at-the-nvidia-quadro-fx- 4800-mac-edition.ars/3

When the consumer Fermi GPU arrives, get excited. Until then, the GTX285 will remain King of CUDA for Mac.

It's about the drivers and advanced support moving forward with Adobe and 3rd party apps. Does anyone know if EVGA is planning on continuing Mac cards? They phased out the 285 pretty quickly. It does suck that the pro cards vendors support (Fire and Quadro) fall short in horsepower. The API's are not always forth coming with 3rd party support for consumer cards. Just something to think about for future purchases. And why would EVGA build drivers for a card when you say they are unnecessary?

"And why would EVGA build drivers for a card when you say they are unnecessary? "

Not sure what you mean.

EVGA doesn't build or write drivers.

Nvidia makes the G200 or GF100 chips, designs a "reference board" and writes drivers for it.

They then sell the G200 or GF100 chips to various "board partners" like EVGA who can choose to build their GTX285 like the reference board, or make their own version. Typically they need to OK any changes with Nvidia.

The reason the Quadro 4800 is SLOWER than a GTX285 is that a Quadro uses the same G200 chip as the GTX285, but with a smaller "window" into the RAM and lower clock speeds. The QUadro 4800 is more like a GTX260 with double the RAM.

To sell the high margin cards, certain driver features are "locked out" in WIndows for anything but QUadro and FireGl cards. Since these locks aren't present in OSX, the only big gain has been Stereo 3D and now this double precision floating point thing, which is only usefull for certain apps.

Basically Nvidia and ATI are in a death battle to create fast cards. Their top chip IS in their top consumer card. The "pro" cards are watered down versions of these "killer" GPUs but have been watered down for stability and so that low yield chips go to higher quantity items like consumer chips.

The Quadro 4800 has a section of G200 "disabled" in comparison to GTX285. Out of 100 G200 chips, say that 40 are good enough to have all pipelines working. Those become the high end GPU gaming cards. The cards that work OK with an ROP unit turned off become GTX260/GTX275 and Quadro 4800.

BTW, the reason EVGA stopped making GTX285 is very simple, Nvidia stopped making the G200 chip it is based on to make way for Fermi. Had they stockpiled 1,000,000 G200s they could have continued making them, but they would have had to pay the G200 market price of April 2010 and then hold them while they lost value waiting to sell. Nobody in tech likes holding inventory long. I just sold 3 old G4s for $100. New they were worth $7,000+.

Tech is a hot potato.

Sadly, for Mac we get the cards right as they get phased out. The 4870 was same story. We got it a month or two before 4890 came out.

They have drivers on their site for the GTX285 Mac Edition. I'd link them but you have to go through the menu's, linking didn't work. Follow the item description in the drivers area. The drivers were bad and caused kernel panics for many Mac users. Some users with other 9600 etc. GeForce cards were using those drivers when the Steam - 10.6.3 driver problem happened. They supposedly helped with stuttering frames caused by Apple's shoddy drivers so I know they make them.

While the initial release of the GTX 285 drivers got bad reviews, they've worked well for me (got my system in June of 2010). By the way, both the graphics drivers updates and the CUDA drivers for the card are available on the nVidia site (not on EVGA's), in the driver section (not hidden in any way). I don't know that it was EVGA "discontinuing them real quick" or not.. the card had been out for more than a year, and more importantly nVidia was no longer producing the GPU. Odds are the chip was no longer available and they simply sold through remaining inventory.

I've seen those numbers as well, DPArt, and I certainly don't have any predisposition to something because it has the word Quadro in it. And more importantly, I don't buy into the 'gamer kid' mentality that the consumer cards are just as good as (if not better than) the pro cards, and I learned a long time ago not to put much stock into what some of the web sites post (in most cases the machines are poorly configured to properly test a pro app, and often too RAM-starved to yield decent results regardless of what GPU is being used).

I've seen a couple comparisons that convinced me of the newer card's advantages. Before getting my machine this past June I'd seen side by sides of the GTX285 and the Quadro FX 4800, in pro apps the difference was huge. (The big card was well out of my budget, but it was nice to behold). And at siggraph this past summer the Quadro 4000 was easily crushing the older 4800's performance. I have no real interest in a consumer/gamer card - I want better performance with CS5, and faster 3D/rendering, and I'm confident I'll get that when my card arrives (hopefully tomorrow).

I had a Quadro 4800 which I got to work with Premiere Pro CS5 and the other CS5 apps. I liked it, but returned it in favor of a used GTX 285 which seemed to work well, but had artificial limitations imposed by Adobe's Mercury GPU engine to support only 3 tracks of GPU render assistance. I also heard about the new Quadro 4000 and though that the 4800 was soon going to be a $1500 paperweight soon.

I just got the Quadro 4000, and so far, with the newest Nvidia drivers (card and cuda) I'm happy with the performance on my 2008 Mac Pro and Premiere Pro CS5. It seems to be less 'glitchy' than the GTX 285. I was running into situations with the 285 where video would just not play, or there would be artifacts when resizing windows that wouldn't go away. Rebooting or clearing system caches with cocktail would usually resolve these, but it was kind of annoying. I haven't had this happen with the 4000. Yet.

Anybody else out there using the Quadro 4000 with a Mac and CS5? What are your experiences?

I bought one for using Premiere CS5 mostly and can say it has proven to be much faster. I only had an ati 4870 previously so can't compare to other cuda's but I haven't had any issues so far and it's nice to edit video with this card. Also just picked up Squeeze 7 encoder program and the cuda enabled Main Concept encoder is really fast.

When Snow Leopard came out we all heard about how OpenCl and Grand Central were going to make the world a new place by harnessing multiple GPUs to do computing work.

Very little of that has come to pass.

The only app I know of to use these things has been BlackMagic's DavInci Resolve. With 7.1 update it can now leverage MULTIPLE GPUs, just like we have been waiting for for years. They got stung when their package came out right after Apple quit using Nvidia as regular Mac Pro cards. Their App was designed to use cards no longer made. They have modified it to work with newer cards, but you can't help but notice the bitterness for the recently "deceased" GTX285 in their most recent buying guide for GPUs.

"While the ATI Radeon HD 5770 and NVIDIA Quadro 4000 cards are the latest combination of graphics cards for Resolve, the highest GPU performance for Resolve continues to be the combination of NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 (GUI) and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 (GPU). Unfortunately the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 is no longer available but owners of this card will continue to enjoy the highest GPU performance in Resolve. The NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 delivers higher performance than the NVIDIA Quadro 4000 and the Quadro 4000 is not designed to replace it. The Quadro 4000 is available at a much lower cost than the Quadro FX 4800."

I went out and grabbed a Q4000 just to see what the hoopla was about. Nice card, AWFULLY hot. Will benchmark it against GTX285 shortly. I will download the trial of Premiere and compare GTX285/Quadro 4000 /GTX480 on same clips if someone has recs on what clips to run through and how to set up.

But you may not have to wait that long, Barefeats has an article coming. Some good news for Quadro fans, but more good news for GTX2xx fans.

I'm curious to find out how the Quadro 4000 compares to the GTX 285 in your testing? I have the Quadro 4000 for Davinci Resolve 7.1 but unfortunately no GTX285 to compare it to. Please post your results. I've heard from others that in apps where 3D is necessary that the Quadro beats the GTX285.

Then have you not looked at these results?

Quadro 4000 vs others
http://www.barefeats.com/wst10g9.html