GTX 680 or Quadro 4000 for Premier and AE CS 6

[LWRCJohn]

the 680 has well over 1500 cuda cores, while the Quadro has 256 per.  Im not very hip to the new video in computers but do understand that the purposes of these cards are very different.

Would it be better to buy a Quadro or a gtx 680? going in to a  SR-X mobo w/48 gb ram and  4( by 4) HDD arrays on independant sas raid cards.

Im building a new system cuz my SR-2 isnt cutting it, keeps crashing after adding the second raid card to it.

thanks in advance.

[Harm_Millaard]

You did not tell (as usual) and Shakespeare did not know about MPE versus MGE.

[Harm_Millaard]

Quadro 4000, cost € 717, 256 CUDA cores, memory bandwidth 89 GB/s.

GTX 460, cost € 164, 336 CUDA cores, memory bandwidth 115 GB/s.

GTX 680, cost € 474, 1536 CUDA cores, memory bandwidth 192 GB/s.

Which do you think delivers the best BFTB?

Quadros are overpriced and underperforming and two generations old now.

[excited_Genie16B8]

They've had endless stability problems with the graphics drivers and everything has been solved by switching to Quadro4000.

Honestly, I'd seriously reevaluate their skills as system builders if that's the case. Most people use GTX cards, and most people have no issues at all.

[timtro]

I was just in Chat with nVidia on a related subject and they said 580 is old, 680 replaced it (not on Adobe's list but there's a fix for that). They insist that the Quadro 6000 is best (for 12 cores) and Quadro 4000 is next best choice for video editing (as opposed to gaming or simple video playback), all things considered. I have an old GTX 285/2GB that worked fine until I started using MTS files with CS6.

[Guest]

what about the k5000?  shouldn't that be better than quadro 6000?

[Alex_-_DV411]

They insist that the Quadro 6000 is best (for 12 cores)

I laughed out loud when I saw this. But of course they do! Actually the new K5000 is a much better card for, say, AE purposes (not Pr), and it's for under $2K.  Quadro 4000 will work just as well as GTX-680 for light duty editing in Premiere Pro, yet it's hard to recommend it over GTX-670 or 680 given that it's slower, more expensive, and fairly outdated.  For Premiere Pro purposes, a GTX-670 is hard to beat - Harm said just as much in his post above.

[timtro]

K5000 appears to be for Mac. I didn't see it in the Adobe Cuda "approved" list. Of course, the 670 isn't int he list either.

[Alex_-_DV411]

K5000 appears to be for Mac. I didn't see it in the Adobe Cuda "approved" list. Of course, the 670 isn't int he list either.

Windows, too.  HP and Dell already offer them on their workstation lines.  It'll eventually make it to the Adobe approved list. It shares the silicon (Kepler architecture) with GTX-600 series; adds supposedly stronger OpenGL support, 10-bit color, etc.

With all that, it's not clear that K5000 will be faster than a GTX-680, and probably slower than a 690, in AE ray tracing.  The 680 is currently the performance leader (in AE ray tracing) - they haven't tested 690 or K5000 yet.  If the benchmarks are any indication, K5000 will be slower than a 680.  That's actually quite surprising given supposedly stronger OpenGL support in Quadro lines.  As it stands, (and already recommended above by other posters), I'd look at GTX-690 for maximum performance if your system can handle it (cooling- and power-wise), unless you need 10-bit color support, or (plan to) use something like 3DS Max.  Then - K5000.

[timtro]

I agree with the "an old GTX 285/2GB that worked fine until I started using MTS files with CS6."   That was exactly my situation, resolved by replacing with the Quadro 4000. Nvidia's tech explained to me that there are other functions that were incorporated into the Quadro 4000 specifically to accomodate Adobe CS6.

[ggameon]

I have had a few cardt gtx and quadro.

Quadro cards are rip offs lol. I sold my 2 quadro 4000 and use gtx cards. It might be that if you use 3ds max for complicated stuff that quadros will be more stable....i wouldnt know. For adobe and i suspect every other software gtx cards are cheaper and better. Maybe quadro 6000 if you are loaded and don't care about the price....

i dont knoiw the difference between 6000 and 5000 series gtx cards there semems to be some differences and the more cuda cores doesnt mean faster......

[ECBowen]

3DS Max is Direct X based now. Quadro's will not have any performance advantage with Max anymore.

Eric

ADK

[Todd_Kopriva]

The GTX 680 and several other GPUs have been added to the list of cards that After Effects will use for GPU acceleration of the ray-traced 3D renderer in the After Effects CC (12.1) update.

See this page for details:

http://adobe.ly/AE_CC_12dot1_details

[urosfri]

So is there any conlusion? I have Q4000 now and I want to update to 4K editing. As I am looking to specifications of Q4000 max resolution is 2.560. And of course I want to speed up the system for 4K editing. Is GTX680 solution or maybe multiple GTX680 into SLI is the best solution for rendering?

[Bill Gehrke]

The GTX 680 is now (1-2 years later from this antique thread) not worth considering look at the GTX 970 or GTX 980.  Forget the Quadro unless you have on of the very expensive 10-bit monitors.

[urosfri]

Thank you very much for this reply. Now I have this setup:Gigabyte B75-D3V motherboard, i7 3770, SSD Liteonit 512GB, and quadro q4000. But I cant really work nice at 4K editing. So my plan is to buy something like this: MSI-B85-G43 motherboard, i7 4770k, SSD SanDisk Ultra II 240GB, and GTX 970? Would this setup be any better?

Thank you very much for reply. And happy new year to all.

[cc_merchant]

No. See Tweakers Page - Disk Setup

You need several disks and lots of memory (32+ GB). Better go for a Samsung 850 Pro, instead of the SanDisk Ultra II.

[urosfri]

Several disks you meen for system (raid) or for storage. Because I have now ssd for system and other disks for storage and files. If I look at the write and read speed of Sandisk ultra and Samsung pro, there is no difference, except the price..:). And another thing is memory: is RAM more important than graphic card?

[cc_merchant]

Yes memory is more important than the video card, and 3D-nand MLC gives a better DWPD ratio, not to mention the limitations of the 4 channel Marvell controller on the SanDisk.

Don't raid the system disk. What other disks and connections?

[urosfri]

So, I have 512GB SSD Liteonit LCT-512M3S ATA. Is this ok? Or I need faster? And for storage I have internal WD15EADS 1.5TB, and some USB 3.0 external Samsung D3.

[urosfri]

What about Nvidia K5000 graphics? I am choosing betwet 2 cards now: GTX 780 or K5000?

[cc_merchant]

Definitely the 780. It beats the K6000 on price and the K5000 on price and by a wide margin on performance. The K5000 performs even less than the 760 for € 190.

[MarkWeiss]

I'm presently considering the GTX680 FTW 4GB model, for my existing Gigabyte P35 DQ6-based system.

I know the recent update to Premiere CS6 added the GTX680, but they don't specify the FTW version and I was wondering if that version also works? Almost triple the cores of the 580 listed in the earlier release. My other concern is it's a PCE-E 3.0 card, and my Gigabyte motherboard is just PCE-E.

I'm currently running an 8800GTS with 640MB, but none of the MPE features are available, even with the hacks. Keppler GPU required.

These are the GTX680 specs. I wonder how much improvement over the 8800GTS in Premiere? I typically edit four camera XDCam 1080p with 15 tracks of audio, mostly classical symphony concerts, so more performance is always desired, and if a GPU will shorten my 25+ hour blu-ray rendering times, that would be a huge help.

• Base Clock: 1084MHz
• Boost Clock: 1150 MHz
• Memory Clock: 6008MHz
• Cuda Cores: 1536
• PCI-e 3.0
• 4096MB GDDR5 256bit

[Bill Gehrke]

If your current motherboard only supports plain PCIe then all the GPU power will be going to waste as the associated CPU is your biggest problem,  That board even dates back to DDR2 memory.  If you can even find a GTX 680 that is new surprises me, When I looked at Newegg the only GTX680's they had were refurbished ones.  Sorry to bear such bad tidings,

[MarkWeiss]

Can't budget for a new card. Shopping for one under $250 in ebay.

I know it isn't a sixteen core, 12GHz monster, but short of rebuilding a new system for another four grand, I thought enabling MPE with a newer GPU would at least give it a bump in performance for minimal investment in $$ and time spent.

As long as there isn't a compatibility problem that would cause the 680 to not work, I don't care if I only get 90% of the performance the card is capable of in a PCI-E 3.0 bus. Just that it's stable and works faster than my 8800 GTS.

[RjL190365]

MarkWeiss wrote:

As long as there isn't a compatibility problem that would cause the 680 to not work, I don't care if I only get 90% of the performance the card is capable of in a PCI-E 3.0 bus. Just that it's stable and works faster than my 8800 GTS.

Actually, Mark, you'd be lucky if you get even 67% of the performance. In fact, with your current motherboard, CPU and RAM, you might not attain any overall real-world performance improvement whatsoever over a much cheaper GT 730 or GT 740 GPU in that system. And even at that, I'd recommend getting a new lower-end NVidia GPU to replace that 8800 GTS 640MB only if you're going to continue using that old system for years to come. After all, it would be a total waste of money to get a cheap GPU for that old PC only to upgrade to a much newer PC several months from now since the cheap GPU would then become a performance bottleneck.

And the reason why you cannot use MPE GPU acceleration with your system's current 8800 GTX 640 because the card simply does not have enough VRAM to even enable it, not because a newer GPU architecture is required. CS6's MPE GPU acceleration requires a minimum of 765MB of free, unused VRAM to even enable GPU acceleration at all. That limits MPE GPU acceleration to cards with 896MB or more VRAM. 768MB cards cannot enable GPU acceleration because the Windows API itself consumes nearly 20MB of that VRAM.

In other words, the GTX 680 4GB would be a complete waste of money if you're not going to upgrade to a much newer PC platform in the foreseeable future. In fact, $250 is still way too much money to invest in a GPU with such an outdated PC, especially since the rest of that PC combined is worth less than $100 total after depreciation.