Quadro Fx 4800 For Mac Quadro Fx 4800 For Mac

 



PNY Quadro FX 4800 for Mac VCQFX4800MACX16-PB 1.5GB 384-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Workstation Video Card. Chipset Manufacturer: NVIDIA Stream Processors: 192 DirectX: DirectX 10 OpenGL: OpenGL 2.1 under Mac OS X OpenGL 3.0 and DirectX 10 under Windows (Boot Camp) Model #: VCQFX4800MACX16-PB Return Policy: View Return Policy $399.00 –. Quadro FX 4800 For Mac delivers ultra-fast performance and realistic effects, enabling industry-leading applications to visualize and solve the world's most demanding digital content creation, 3D design, and scientific challenges.

For anyone who does 3D graphics, the high-end NVIDIA Quadro cards are the shiniest of red bicycles. At the top-end, they’ve got more memory than most gaming cards, but they've got a price to match their premium features. At $1799 retail, the Quadro FX 4800 Mac Edition is over $1300 more than the 1GB Geforce GTX 285 and is the only Quadro option available to Mac users. Considering the lack of reviews by 3D professionals who know how to test the card, that’s an expensive leap of faith that a potential customer would have to make. As someone who bought a Quadro FX 5600 for one of my older Mac Pros and Maya, that leap turned out to be quite an expensive letdown. So we thought we’d take another look at the faster Quadro FX 4800 to see if much has changed.

One thing has changed since then: NVIDIA has taken over official support of the Quadro cards and the drivers. Previously, the Quadro was supported by Apple, and while it was obvious NVIDIA had a hand in driver development, it was anyone’s guess as to who was responsible for the lackluster speed. Since the Quadro cards are all about drivers, giving NVIDIA some time to get the Quadro up to speed on the Linux and Windows sides seemed only fair.

I want to thank the people at NVIDIA for sending me the card, but also for their patience; we pushed this review back a few months since it was clear that OS X 10.6’s arrival would have dated the review immediately. Then we had to wait some more because OS X 10.6.0 had OpenGL problems with Maya and the Radeon 4870’s OpenCL was half-broken. We couldn’t have benchmarked the card properly until those were fixed with 10.6.2. So here we are.

Test hardware

  • NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 Mac Edition
  • CUDA Cores: 192
  • Memory Size Total: 1.5GB
  • Memory Interface: 384-bit
  • Memory Bandwidth: 76.8GB/sec

Test System

  • Dual quad Nehalem Mac Pro 2.66 GHz
  • 24GB RAM
  • Dual 1920x1200 screens
  • OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD startup disk

Quadro Fx 4800 For Mac Quadro Fx 4800 For Mac 7

4800

Test software

  • OS X 10.6.2 and latest built-in Quadro FX 4800 driver
  • Boot Camp 3 drivers with Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit
  • NVIDIA Quadro driver 1.9.1 64-bit

All tests were performed running the 64-bit OS X kernel and drivers, except for CUDA tests, since CUDA is currently 32-bit only.

How the Quadro compares to a gaming card

For those new to the benefits offered by a Quadro card, there are a number of things that differ from the Geforce 200 series part that the Quadro is based on. While it’s true that the Quadro has fewer CUDA cores and a lower clock speed than the eVGA Geforce GTX 285, it has a long list of benefits:

  • True quad-buffered 3D output
  • 128-bit color precision
  • 3D volumetric texture support
  • 12 pixels per clock rendering engine
  • 16 textures per pixel in fragment programs
  • Window ID clipping functionality
  • Unlimited fragment instruction
  • Unlimited vertex instruction
  • Hardware accelerated line stippling
  • Hardware accelerated antialiased points and lines
  • Hardware accelerated two-sided lighting
  • Hardware accelerated clipping planes

Some of these features can add a bit of performance to programs that use them, but the major benefit to this card is its quad-buffered 3D output port. If you use a scientific application like Osirix or 3D animation package like Maya with a 3D-capable display or specialized 3D glasses, the Quadro is the only way to view that 3D output on the Mac. Unfortunately, I don’t have a setup capable of displaying 3D output so I couldn’t test it for myself.

For OS X’s GPU-reliant Aqua interface and Core Image, the Quadro doesn’t offer any benefit over the GTX 285, because the latter has more memory bandwidth (159GB/sec vs. the 4800’s 76.8GB/sec). The Quadro FX 4800 is capable of 10-bits-per-channel output, but the Mac edition only has dual-link DVI outputs, so there’s no way to harness this color power. The PC version has two 10-bit DisplayPort outputs so NVIDIA opted for compatibility over pro features on the Mac version. I’ve never been a fan of Apple’s obscure mini DisplayPort, but if it was used instead of DVI, this could have been the only card capable of 10-bits per channel output on OS X. The 4800 does support 10-bit grayscale output over DVI though, which is popular in medical imaging. If you’re hunting for tumors, you need all the help you can get.

Nvidia Quadro Fx 4800 For Mac

The Potential Draw: CUDA for Video Professionals

Given that the advantages listed above appeal to a very small segment of users, NVIDIA has been working on CUDA software for professionals to drive the Quadro sales. The CUDA-based Elemental Accelerator H.264 video encoder is one of these ventures, and at $499, it is definitely priced for professionals. It only works with Quadro cards and the Adobe CS4 Suite of video applications, so that adds a further premium to the software price. Nevertheless, H.264 compression for Blu-ray is very time consuming, so the benefits of the Quadro and CUDA could be significant for video professionals, many of whom use Macs.

Getting the Elemental package running is very straightforward: install the bundle for Adobe’s suite and you’re set. The next time you launch Premiere or Adobe Media Encoder, you’ll have a new output option:

If you’re thinking that you can just install the bundle and run it on another CUDA-capable NVIDIA card, think again. It just crashes Adobe Media Encoder.

From there, you can further customize your output options as with any other encoder:

The Elemental Accelerator also GPU-accelerates audio encoding:

Video options include the standard CBR/VBR output, 2-pass encoding and CABAC entropy encoding. The output options are limited but adequate: Encore-compatible Blu-ray H.264 stream output with separate audio file or multiplexed MP4 or MPEG2 containers. Be careful if you enable CABAC, since many devices like iPhones can't handle this decoding. The 2.1-profile muxed MP4s played fine on my iPhone 3G.

Mac Pro users finally have a professional-level graphics card, but is it worth the price?

Quadro Fx 4800 For Mac

Mac Pro users have faced a troubling paradox for some time. While the Mac Pro is capable of 64-bit multiple processor supercomputing, there have been few professional-level graphics cards available for this system. This is like driving a Formula One race car but being restricted to 50 mph. This very real limitation has prevented many Mac Pro users from tackling high-end visualization tasks. However, earlier this year, NVIDIA promised to solve this problem with the release of a variant of Quadro FX 4800 specifically built for the Mac Pro.
The Quadro FX 4800 is designed to meet the demands of graphics intensive applications like scientific visualization, video processing, and high-end 3D modeling. Based on NVIDIAwww.nvidia.com’s GT200GL GPU, the Quadro FX 4800 features 1.5 GB of GDDR3 on-board RAM, 384-bit memory interface, 76.8 GB/s memory bandwidth, 192 processing cores, all with a modest 150 Watts power consumption. This double-width PCIe graphics card has two Dual Link DVI connectors (one more than the Windows version) and a three pin mini-DIN connector for stereoscopic output. And the card’s housing makes it quieter than, for example, the Quadro FX 4600. On paper all of these specs add up to a powerhouse graphics card that should be able to tackle any graphics computing task. For Windows users this is the case, but Mac users may be in for a surprise.

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Benchmark tests indicate that under the Windows operating system the Quadro FX 4800 delivers marked performance boosts. Our own testing with the Windows version of the card in an HP Z600 workstation showed consistently improved performance when loading very large datasets into 3ds max, rendering in After Effects, or applying filters in Photoshop. In a Mac Pro the Quadro FX 4800 performed very well during testing with the Adobe CS4 suite as expected. But here is the nagging problem, we also tested an ATI Radeon 4870 (under $300) and found that while the Quadro FX 4800 did better than the Radeon 4870 the difference was often negligible.

Quadro Fx 4800 For Mac Quadro Fx 4800 For Mac Osx

Why would a $300 Radeon 4870 do almost as well as $1799 Quadro FX 4800? It could be argued that the Quadro FX 4800 exceeds at ultra high-end visualization like scientific visualization. That would mean that for standard high-end work like video processing there’s no need to dole out the cash for the Quadro FX 4800 when a less expensive Radeon 4870 will do the trick. Another possible answer is persistent problems with nVidia drivers on the Mac that prevent the computer and graphics card from working efficiently. All variables being equal nVidia cards working under the Windows operating system outperform cards working under the Mac operating system. Until this issue is sorted out Mac users cannot expect the same performance Windows users enjoy.