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570 is special in that it runs in Mac Pro with no extra power needed.
A guy who got first one has posted at Creative Cow. To sum it up, he states that the card makes Adobe apps fly. He got the 570 2.5GB.
So I'm that guy. I wanted to get in my thoughts yesterday, but held off because I had got my hands on Adobe's CS6 trial; it had a soft release yesterday.
On the other forums I had to put a focus on it's performance in regards to DaVinci Resolve. So here I can summarize more thoughtfully. I needed to get professional work done asap. A fashion shoot I did with a RED Epic at 5k with high frame rate, some with HDR, and the varying resolutions and framerates below it. Search around enough and many people advocate very very expensive machine setups for this footage. Very few of those people actually need that power. Established post-production houses that want to display realtime effects and grading to a director/producer/clients are exceptions that immediately come to mind. I'm trying to avoid getting off topic and ensure we see an important point here. This card gets the job done for me. After I relayed my experience, my colleagues at quality post production houses will likely be buying quite a few of these 570s from MVC. They have a lot of Mac Pros, some with PCIe breakout boxes, but many that would benefit from an internal EFI 570. The time saved popping them in and boosting productivity at that price and simplicity makes the decision simple.
Since Thursday I've put the card through the ringer thoroughly in Adobe CS5.5, and since early afternoon yesterday CS6.
The tl;dr is: this card performs wonderfully without hassle in a (modestly upgraded and maintained) 2008 3,1 Mac Pro. I'll try and post a video up with pros and cons using sample footage and different cards/setups, maybe this week after a few items come in. I have a Premiere Pro timeline of mixed: dslr HD (1k) followed by RED 3k, 4k, and 5k footage. The nightmare most people skip is working with all of these files raw, most of my peers can't believe I deal with it, and the industry is finally taking the workflow seriously. I take the footage and mix complex dynamically linked After Effects compositions into my timeline, along with PPro's effects, and recently some stuff from Photoshop. Not everything benefits from CUDA or OpenGL/CL, but quite a bit of the important things do with the list growing. From that PPro timeline: I then export a master resolution which all of the different resolutions must conform to, and I have still retained my RAW formats. In CS6, yesterday, I did the same thing and threw SpeedGrade into the mix quickly with some heavy color grading, just to see...
My point is, no matter how good your machine, what I am mentioning above equates to very resource intensive renders and exports. This card makes a very real, very palpable difference. For the price, this card is the absolute "sweet spot" MVC says it is. I'm posting here because it makes a ton of sense for so many users, as one does not need to spend a boatload of money on a completely new machine. I will be doing some further modest upgrades and my system won't be what it is today, but the large number of Mac Pros being used in various fields should know that this card exists and is worth considering.
Many thanks to David at MVC who hooked me up last minute during a very chaotic time. Seriously, these guys are very helpful. He gave me a 5 minute rundown and a follow up email with information. I knew what he was telling me, but it saved me the 20-30 minutes I would have spent re-reading some forum posts/googling to reassure myself.
Extra side note: I've run the card in Win7 under bootcamp and put it through its paces there. I'm sure most assume/know it would run fine, but for those like myself that want to know for sure: I can verify that the card works great and I put it through its paces in the CS6 trial. CUDA being used, Resolve works fine, etc. even with the Windows partition being non-optimal.
As I've said in some other posts. It really is amazing how far things have come in the past few years and the impact we have on products via outlets like these. To come close to being able to do what I do just 3 or 4 years ago would have been ludicrously expensive. Fun and exciting time to be working with tech.
Cheers guys,
-Clay
