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4k editing GPU, whats peoples choice?

M

marcjwebb

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 16, 2017
10
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hi all.

I was hoping people would be kind enough o share their opinion on better than what I currently have ( gtx770 4GB ) for editing and working with 4k footage .

Mine seems to be getting a bit long in the tooth now and doesn't seem to want to co-operate as much.

I am shooting large 4k (4gb per min) from my camera so needs to be updated as far as I can see.

so what do people currently use? and would you guys recommend?
 
What program are you using to edit? This will ultimately guide what people will suggest.
 
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premiere pro on a Mac Pro 4.1 (flashed to 5.1 ) 6 core W5690 3.46, 32gb ram and a 500gb SSD
 
I have a client that we added a Titan X to their 5,1 (3.06GHz 12 Core) and it is butter smooth editing 4K. They have all SSD storage.

The Titan X can also be used with the internal PCIe cables with no additional work needed from the PSU.
 
I thought that the Titan range and the 1080 needed the extra power ? Usually drawn from one of the SATA ports
 
We only used the internal connectors for the Titan X. Machine still runs to this day editing 4K video pretty much 24/7.
 
Wow ok that’s crazy. A local Mac Pro specialist near me mentioned that it needs the extra so pretty shocked
 
The machine was originally configured with dual Quadra 4000s which each pull 142w. They use a single 6pin connector. It ran this way for two years and then was upgraded to the Titan X (Maxwell).
 
Puget systems have an interesting school of thought regarding gpu choices for video editing on windows systems with Premiere,(can't be that much Different for Mac) they say the VRAM should be a minimum 2GB's more then the resolution of the footage. So for example if 4K have 6GB of VRAM minimum, 6k have 8 and so forth.

They have all kinds of articles testing hardware with editing software. Obviously it's on Windows systems. But still interesting reading to get an idea on software optimisation.

I'm not a video guy so really have no idea myself.
 
worth checking what the problem is, i assume your on CC PP ?
when you say slow, when and how?

is it time line or render or effects, have you looked in activity monitor to check cpu use/ram use/disc use to see if you can find the bottle neck.

also what codec are you working with, proxy's or just changing codec can help a lot.

also worth using say istats to check gpu use

i assume your project files are on the SSD?

ps are you using openCL or CUDA? (worth trying the other one to see if it helps)

if it's GH5 h265 video then :/ may be worth proxy unless adobe has fixed that by now

ps have you got the prefs all set correct & optimized for your setup?
 
marcjwebb said:
Wow ok that’s crazy. A local Mac Pro specialist near me mentioned that it needs the extra so pretty shocked
Click to expand...

For anything above GTX1080. Technically need extra power, because the two mini 6pins only rated up to 75W each.

However, in real world. Each mini 6pin can deliver about 120W before the shut down protection kicks in.

Therefore, practically, the cMP can power most non factory OC high end Nvidia card (including both reference TitanX).

I am now running a 1080Ti with just the mini 6pins, no problem at all. Especially if your usage is video editing. It's demand is quite bit lower than 3D work.

This is the power draw test from my 1080Ti, TitanX should be more or less the same.
1080Ti power draw.jpg

The video editing power draw should be similar to CompuBenchCL.

N.B. As you can see in the graph, the power draw strangely max at 97W, this is the display limit. The actual draw of the 1080Ti should be max at about 110W. But this should only happen in Furmark. Other "normal" high demand stuff Luke Unigine Heaven or Luxmark, can't even hit the 90W mark. However, I must emphasis that I do balance the load between the two mini 6pin. If you connect one mini 6pin to the 6pin, the other one to the 8pin, but not mixing them together. The 8pin will draw way above 100W and most like sufficient enough to shut down the Mac Pro under stress.
 
im not shore if SATA power is safe for a GPU it's a big load.

are GTX1060's ok in mac now? or is it just the 1080's?
 
orph said:
im not shore if SATA power is safe for a GPU it's a big load.

are GTX1060's ok in mac now? or is it just the 1080's?
Click to expand...

Technically, NO (single SATA to single 6pin). Because SATA only rated up to ~55W, but a single 6pin can draw 75W (assume no OC).

But since most 6+8pin graphic card don't really need to draw 75W from the 6pin (they can more rely on the 8pin), therefore, the real world max power draw on the 6pin may be only up to 60W. In this case, even though it may occasionally draw a little bit more than the rated limit. But the power draw should still within the practical limit because the port usually builded with some buffer.

Of course, if using 2x SATA port to power a single 6pin port. That should always within limit.
 
I was using a 3.33 gHz 6-core 5.1 with a GTX970 for video editing with Premiere CC. When I started doing 4K videos, I found it way too slow. I bought a bottom-end dual 2.22 gHz 5.1 and swapped in two used X5680 chips at 3.33 gHz. I also bought 48GB of used RAM. Then I swapped all the HDDs and PCI cards from the older Mac into the new machine. For about two hours of my own labor and about $800 cash, I now can easily edit 4K in native resolution smooth as butter in a machine that would have cost over $5,000 new.
 
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h9826790 said:
Of course, if using 2x SATA port to power a single 6pin port. That should always within limit.
Click to expand...

You can get a dual sata to 6 pin adapter. Mac Vid cards sell thishttp://www.macvidcards.com/store/p103/SATA_to__PCIe_Power_Cable.html

Create pro also talk about using sata power to drive the 1080ti/titans internally. Then there is this mac vid cards blog post.

http://www.macvidcards.com/blog/the-pesky-power-issue-with-pascal-1080ti-and-titan

I have never had to do it but there are people saying it works. But there is also people saying that sata to 6 pin will cause fires if you do a google search.

I think at the end of the day these cards are a user beware kind of thing.
 
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My machine is purpose built for 4K video editing/compositing and I've recently just finished a 4K DCI film edit. Specs are in my sig, but I've used the Titan X (Maxwell) for the whole project without issue and the GPU acceleration works well in Premiere Pro. It's also great for real-time scaling and is used in full with all 12-cores for a lot of different render/encode tasks (particularly transcodes to H.264).

I recommend it too for CUDA acceleration as I noticed it felt more responsive vs using it with OpenCL. I do play safe though and power via 2 SATA to 6pin and dual mini 6 pin to 8 pin.

Storage is probably the biggest thing to think about. This current edit's ProRes raw footage is around 14TB alone. I found a good solution to keep it all internal in the machine by using the Caldigit FASTA Pro ESATA/USB 3 card (the one that also has 2 internal 6G SATA ports on the backend of the card) and split a 4 Hard Drive RAID 0 for all raw media reads between the card and the internal SATA ports to surpass the internal SATA 2 RAID limit the cMP has. And then the separate M.2 SSDs for separate tasks... one each for boot/media cache/scratch render/and proxy read. Works really well since I'm balancing out the entire workload and giving each process its own separate bandwidth.
 
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PowerMike G5 said:
Storage is probably the biggest thing to think about. This current edit's ProRes raw footage is around 14TB alone. I found a good solution to keep it all internal in the machine by using the Caldigit FASTA Pro ESATA/USB 3 card (the one that also has 2 internal 6G SATA ports on the backend of the card) and split a 4 Hard Drive RAID 0 for all raw media reads between the card and the internal SATA ports to surpass the internal SATA 2 RAID limit the cMP has.
Click to expand...

So you have two WD Blacks on the internal, and two on the Caldigit? What sort of speed you get from this Raid0?
 
orph said:
worth checking what the problem is, i assume your on CC PP ?
when you say slow, when and how?

is it time line or render or effects, have you looked in activity monitor to check cpu use/ram use/disc use to see if you can find the bottle neck.

also what codec are you working with, proxy's or just changing codec can help a lot.

also worth using say istats to check gpu use

i assume your project files are on the SSD?

ps are you using openCL or CUDA? (worth trying the other one to see if it helps)

if it's GH5 h265 video then :/ may be worth proxy unless adobe has fixed that by now

ps have you got the prefs all set correct & optimized for your setup?
Click to expand...


yeah on premiere pro CC was on 2018 but found that there are a number of issues around the export and rendering so rolled it back to 2017
[doublepost=1511007887][/doublepost]random question, but does anyone know if premier pro is more CPU or GPU on exporting footage?
 
pierrox said:
So you have two WD Blacks on the internal, and two on the Caldigit? What sort of speed you get from this Raid0?
Click to expand...

Yes. I'm getting around 850MBs read/writes using 4 x 6TB WD Blacks. It's a good internal way to bypass the 550MBs limit of the internal SATA ports in RAID since the PCIE card itself still has external USB3/ESATA as well, so I can keep it all on one card.
 
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