NVIDIA announces Kepler based Quadro K5000 GPU for Mac Pro!!!! This is huge for CUDA users!

quadro-k5000-mac-front

Arstechnica has the news on this HUGE announcement. The K5000 is the replacement for the QUADRO 5000 and runs at $2249. You check it out at NVIDIA as well.

Built around NVIDIA’s latest “Kepler” architecture, the double-wide card boasts 1536 processing cores shuffling pixels at up to 173GB/s along a 256-bit path to 4GB of GDDR5 memory. The card supports Shader Model 5.0, Open GL 3.2 on Mac OS X, and Open GL 4.3 and DirectX 11 when running Windows under BootCamp. And, it can support up to four monitors: two running at 2560×1600 over dual-link DVI ports, and two running up to 4096×2160 over DisplayPort 1.2. All that power also fits within an Energy Star-rated 122W power envelope.

This has serious CUDA performance and should be awesome for Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve 9.

Even more exciting for us not quite able to afford such a behometh card is that it signals some changes from Apple and Drivers. As you can actually run many Kepler cards now without much effort, since they included the drivers to deal with the NVIDIA powered MacBookPro and NVIDIA has started just writing a single driver for all cards in a series instead of different drivers. The thing is as of now you can only see 2GB of RAM on a card without doing some fiddling, which is an arbitrary addition made by Apple. The 4GB of RAM in this card looks like this will soon change for the better. And hopefully we get some Kepler GeForce cards running at full power on the mac soon. Like a GeForce GTX 680 (which matches the 1536 CUDA cores of the QUADRO) with slightly higher memory bandwidth.

Any way you look at this it is good news for high end mac graphics as it looks like NVIDIA is back and here to stay.

NVIDIA admits issues with CUDA 5.0.17 and 5.0.24 driver with Premiere Pro

From Todd Kopriva at Adobe. And over at NVIDIA. Causes crashes when going from Safari to Premiere Pro.

  • There is a known issue in this release where forcing or allowing the system to go to sleep while running CUDA applications on 2012 MacBook Pro models with automatic graphics switching will cause a system crash (kernel panic). You can prevent the computer from automatically going to sleep by setting the Computer Sleep option slider to Never in the Energy Saver pane of the System Preferences.
  • There is a known issue in this release where CUDA applications will not automatically engage the discrete GPU on 2012 MacBook Pro models with automatic graphics switching. To run CUDA applications, it is necessary to uncheck the Automatic Graphics Switching checkbox in the Energy Saver pane of the System Preferences.

Hmm, doesn’t sound like the same issue that I have been having, but hopefully it is similar, and accounts for the Premiere Pro instability.

Installed a PC NVIDIA KEPLER GTX670 Video Card in my MacPro for CUDA editing power

While I have an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 275 Mac Edition, it is very much old tech with only 240 CUDA cores for working with Premiere Pro. And it is about the fastest there is (other than a QUADRO 4000, but even that is old tech compared to current PC video card technology).

One solution is MacVidCards and their Ebay Site. These guys flash GTX 5xx series videos card with Apple Firmware so that you get full functionality on a Mac, including boot screens and EFI (so if you hold down option you can select hard drives, or go into the terminal before you hit the desktop). This is a great and easy solution for most people, though it leaves out Kepler video cards, the GTX 6xx series cards that are the latest and greatest with the most CUDA cores for real time playback in Premiere Pro.

As of Mountain Lion putting in a GTX 6xx series or Kepler has gotten a lot easier. This is because Mac OS X and the latest NVIDIA drivers now include drivers for the MacBook Pro 15″ Retina Display which is has Geforce GT 650m, so there is now some Kepler support in OS X. This means that PC Kepler cards will run in Mountain Lion, with a couple of caveats. One is you don’t get the boot screens, because the video drivers don’t kick in until just before the desktop shows up. The second is that due to a setting in OS X you can only have up to 2GB of RAM in a video card, if you have more you won’t get OpenCL acceleration. It is on this point that the excellent Netkas site comes in. Netkas has figured out multiple methods to make 6xx series NVIDIA cards with over 2GB of RAM work on a Mac.

Yes there are bigger cards with more CUDA cores, like the GTX 680, but it requires 8 pin power, and the Mac only supplies 6 pin power, so you will have to run an external power supply to get it to work, and the GTX 690 is basically 2 video cards in one, so the mac will have trouble using the dual cards, and you won’t get the benefit (except in boot camp into Windows). Basically the 670 uses 2 6 pin power adapters, so your mac can power it. I picked up an EVGA Geforce GTX670 FTW+ 4096MB GDDR5 Graphics card and installed it.

There are the instructions for a GTX 670 and the instructions for the rest of the 6xxx series cards on how to get OpenCL working on a card with more than 2GB of RAM.

Now I had problems getting the GTX 670 instructions to work.

I started to a TechTool Pro Safety partition I have on a second drive and did the replacement and repaired permissions and OpenCL was not fixed. After much fiddling I couldn’t figure it out, and having read elsewhere on the Netkas forums to also do the Hex edit, I also did the 32 and the ML Hex edit fixes, repaired permissions (A VERY IMPORTANT STEP AS YOUR COMPUTER MAY NOT BOOT IF YOU DON’T DO IT). I used the excellent HexEdit to edit the file.

I tried getting help on the forums, but was basically told how stupid I was and that I had done it wrong (which was not the case). Finally I decided to re-install the latest NVIDIA drivers and see if that did anything, and after restarting, I ran LuxMark (to test OpenCL speeds) and low and behold it now worked.

Honestly I am not sure if I just needed to do the Hex Edit only, as the instructions I saw at Netkas said to try the file replacement for the 670, or if it really did require me doing both to get OpenCL acceleration activated, but doing both certainly worked for me with the addition of re-installing the NVDIA Drivers.

The next step is now to enable CUDA for your new video card in Premiere Pro and After Effects CS6. VidMuze has an excellent video on how to do this, and a download file that gives specific instructions. This was simple in comparison to the hex file thing, which was not hard, but certainly not this easy, but this does require some terminal use, so you should be comfortable using the terminal in your mac.

I now have 1344 CUDA cores for Premiere Pro and After Effects, and am looking forward to taking Premiere Pro CS6 and the Mercury Playback engine for a spin with more than 5 times the CUDA cores, twice the RAM and a much faster and newer processor. I will let you know how it performs.

Premiere Pro CS6 having some serious issues with NVIDIA GTX 285

I started on a job today shot on a 5D and didn’t have time to convert to ProRES, so I decided to cut it in Premiere Pro CS6 to save conversion time, plus since I have a compatible PluralEyes to sync off camera audio. It took a bit of time to do the sync, but after I watched my footage and then began cutting, but Premiere Pro could not have been more unstable. I crashed over and over, and was losing time and work. So much that I tried exporting to quicktime, but it was just going to take too long to render the timeline so I could edit.

I found this thread on the Adobe Forums, and found my exact problem.

I’m on a MacPro 4,1, Lion 10.7.4, CS6.0.1, 32GB RAM, GTX 285 with the latest nVidia and CUDA drivers.  I am seeing 2 primary issues:

 

Lots of Serious Error crashes.  This happens without any noticeable pattern – sometimes with the title tool, trim monitor, or simply just scrubbing the timeline.  It seems to happen more frequently with Dynamic Links in the timeline.  Also, I believe it is happening more often (or maybe exclusively)  with the MPE GPU option enabled.  I think in Software Only mode, it may not be present, although further testing required.

 

Also, I am having an issue where Pr will display black only in the source and program monitors, unless I click around the timeline and will get flashes of images.  This is remedied by changing over to Software Only for the MPE.  It seems to be worse if Safari is running.

I was having the same issues exactly, and have the same system setup, but with only 24 GB of RAM, and am running Mountain Lion 10.8.0. I kept having to trash my prefs which worked for about 5 minutes before I crashed again.

So I decided to remove the GTC285 and put in my QUADRO FX 4800. It is old and slow, but still pretty decent. I installed it about 2 hours ago, and Premiere Pro has been rock solid afterwards.

This shows it is either an NVIDIA driver or CUDA issue, or something in the Premiere Code with the GTX 285, as with the QUADRO FX 4800 it is running like a dream.

Adobe and NVIDIA need to fix this fast, because this is a major issue. If it was not for me having a spare video card I would have been SOL, as I have to finish this project and fast!

UPDATE: Had one crash after 3 and a half hours, but I have been saving now, back to the old paranoid saving all the time. Still unbelievable the difference with the different video card!

UPDATE AGAIN: And crashed again! OK, so not rock solid, but still much better than it was with the GTX 285.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 is unofficially supported in MacPro

evga5700-660x320

Tej’s Tech Blog has a post on installed an NVIDIA GTX 570 PC card into a MacPro and it seems to work except for EFI (so it goes straight to desktop or login screen, you don’t see the spinning ball at the start. Guess you can’t do safe mode or boot to another drive then from startup, though not positive on that).

You will have to do some Terminal tricks to get the Adobe suite to see it as compatible as the card is not listed for Mac, but it can be done.

This is great news. Wonder if NVIDIA is going towards one driver for all their cards, or if it means that Apple is planning to include NVIDIA if and when it ever updates the MacPro?

No matter what, more NVIDIA support for Macs is a good thing. And it is great that the new MacBook Pro and the MacBook Pro Retina are run by NVIDIA cards, as more CUDA support means more realtime with the Adobe Suite.

Netkas Forums got a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 working in a MacPro

Now this is some seriously exciting news at Hardmac, it seems the members at Netkas forums using the new mac NVIDIA drivers for the MacPro have managed to get an NVIDIA GeForve GTX 680 running in a MacPro.

gtx680

Now lets hope that Mountain Lion come with drivers and new cards are released, or are at least hackable to work, because I want a new video card in a big way!

Maximum PC on NVIDIA Tease

Maximum PC has an article on a recent NVIDIA tease on Facebook, saying It’s Coming!

Swedish overclocking site SweClockers.com (as translated and explained by VideoCardz.com) says that “independent sources” claim that “it” is the GeForce GTX 690, the long-rumored video card that theoretically sports two, count ’em, two of the GK104 Kepler GPUs found in the GTX 680, 4GB of GDDR5 memory, 3072 CUDA cores and a pair of 8-pin connectors. That, kiddies, would be one heck of a polygon-pumping beast.

Now this may be a gaming card, but 3072 CUDA cores would be a beast for Premiere Pro! Makes me want a PC for editing!

Next MacPro 16 Core and NVIDIA Graphics?

Macnn is reporting on the latest set of rumors on a new MacPro, and lets hope it is true, and Apple is staying committed to the pro market in at least it’s hardware.

They would be powered by the new Ivy Bridge 22 nanometer Xeon processors which can have 8 cores and 20MB cache, making for 16 core machines, with 32 virtual machines. And even more exciting to me is the possibility of returning to NVIDIA and their soon to released Kelper hardware. This would mean CUDA acceleration in Adobe Premiere, and hopefully the next generation Quadros being released for the mac. This could mean that Jobs fued with NVIDIA is over. Wouldn’t that rock!