Firepro W8100

[Invading]

Hi there,

I'm planing next build. It's for a professional Mediaserver working with QLab and Madmapper. On this machine I will also work with Premier Pro and After Effects.

MoBo: Sabertooth x79
CPU: E5 2680 V2 (Watercooled)
RAM: 64GB DDR3-1866 CL9
1st GPU: EVGA GTX 760 (for Desktop and maybe 1 dedicated Video output)
2nd GPU: Sapphire Firepro W8100 (for 4 dedicated Video outputs)
System SSD: Samsung SSD 850 Pro Series 128 GB
Working Video SSD: Asus Raidr Express PCIe SSD 240 GB
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 3TB

Can anybody tell me if the W8100 with Hawaii GL Chip is supported within Yosemite or is it possible to get it to work (on all outputs and making use of the 8GB VRAM). Off course other ideas on the Build are also very welcome.

Thanks a lot and hope to hear from you soon.

 

[Jakepro25]

I cant seem to find any drivers for the W8100 as Apple don't put AMD cards into Macs so there is no need for AMD to make MAC drivers, your best bet is a Nvidia K5000 or K6000 as Nvidia do have MAC drivers for those cards.

Jake

 

[Invading]

Thanks for your answer.
The new Mac Pro is equipped with two firepro's. But you're right with your advice for the k5000 or k6000. I'm looking at the k5000 for mac now. What looks great on this is: it supports open GL, open CL as well as cuda. So might be the best choice for my needs. Of course native support is great. The k6000 looks extreme, costs a lot more too ;-)

I was also looking at the GTX 980 which is a nice card for the money. But it being a gamer card I'm not sure it will do the job I need it for.

Pricetag is high though. On the other hand I need a reliable and very well performing System. Working with live Video is all about trying to eliminate bottlenecks in the system which could cause bad Video playback like stuttering and so on.

Any other inputs are off course very welcome.

 

[Jakepro25]

Thanks for your answer.
The new Mac Pro is equipped with two firepro's. But you're right with your advice for the k5000 or k6000. I'm looking at the k5000 for mac now. What looks great on this is: it supports open GL, open CL as well as cuda. So might be the best choice for my needs. Of course native support is great. The k6000 looks extreme, costs a lot more too ;-)

I was also looking at the GTX 980 which is a nice card for the money. But it being a gamer card I'm not sure it will do the job I need it for.

Pricetag is high though. On the other hand I need a reliable and very well performing System. Working with live Video is all about trying to eliminate bottlenecks in the system which could cause bad Video playback like stuttering and so on.

Any other inputs are off course very welcome.

The GTX980 will work very nicely BUT, if you are using programs like CAD for stuff which needs micron detail (I.E, a bracket for a million pound stadium which you need pinpoint accuracy for) then get a Quadro no question. But if you don't need it accurate a 980 will be great and a heck of a lot faster as well

 

[Invading]

The thing I'm not getting clear is: How well will the GTX 980 perform with 4 projectors connected running 1080p or even 1920 x 1200.
Especially when there needs to be processing of geometry or so called projection-mapping. As you maybe have seen, I have a fully working built with 2 GTX 780 OC Windforce. These are also gaming cards, their not up for the job though.
Bottleneck there could be the cpu and 16GB of ram too.

These Bottlenecks should be nicely tackled with this new built though. 10 core Xeon and maxed out ram 64GB

 

[Jakepro25]

To be honest, the xeon and the 64GB of ram is a bit overkill, a top of the line I7 4970k will be more than enough for a mediacenter and for the Adobe products, regarding the GPU, you can run 4 1920x1080 monitors via 3 displayport and 1 HDMI.

Also what is the bottleneck?

 

[Invading]

Are you working with live Video with multiple outputs?

In my experience it is crucial to have as much ram as possible and the whole way of dataprocessing starting from Harddisc till the outputs of the GPU should be as fast and efficient as possible.

On my latest Project I worked with a new Mac Pro with quad core Xeon, 16 GB ram and 2 firepro d700's. We used 4 separate outputs not even Full HD and 1 for the GUI. The outputs where some projection mapping was done, weren't running fluently. Remember this was a official Mac Pro. I tried with different codecs and everything, no way. Two d700's should be more then powerful enough: specs say it can drive up to 3 4K displays which would be 12 times Full HD.

The dataflow for projects like these are enormous, for mapping this dataflow needs to be processed to before it goes out. Just imagine how many pixels needs to be processed for 1 Full HD Picture, now multiply this by 5 (for this project: 1 GUI Screen, 4 Outputs), the take in account that the System also needs to reorder these pixels and that 25 times in a second. This takes a lot of processing power and the number of data get's extremely huge in no time.

Now the question is... how much of the task is done by the GPU and what is depending on CPU power, this is where the thing gets fuzzy... As long as you don't need to change anything on the picture (keystoning sizing or even bending) it's quit straight forward. Choose the right codec the right player and the cpu won't have much to do with the process. If you start using effects or this reshaping of the picture... it's a whole new story. And here it get's hard to find out how the dataflow goes. First gpu calculating the input image, back to the cpu making these needed changes then back to the gpu to send it to the output. When this is the case... the i7 as well as the quadcore xeon are suddenly working much harder to get it done in time. When the cpu has for instance 10 core's 20 threads can be processed at a time, which is very useful in this matter.

I'm not writing this to tell anyone how a video system works, just to explain how I see the process. When I oversee something, especially regarding the mentioned software: QLab & Madmapper. Please correct me, any thoughts are welcome.

 

[Jakepro25]

I cant really help you with this "madmapper" as i don't have a clue what it is used for or know how it works, but on the website it says it its built on OS X, so have a look on apples website, find the top spec mac and see if you can replicate it. If it works on a basic mac then build a basic Customac. If you need more power then build a duplicate of a top spec mac and save yourself a tonne of cash

 

[Invading]

Thank you Jake, that's exactly what I'm planning. I just can seem to find out which GPU to take. Madmapper uses openGL, thats what I know.

What is your business? Also in Video?

Performance wise what is needed is maybe comparable with this:
Work in Aftereffects, make a composition which is lets say 4K 3 minutes Long
Put in 4 Full HD Video's and divide them over this 4K surface. Then, make some major transforms, some nice transitions, eventually a Mask. In the mean time, connect a Full-HD Video camera to a capture card or device and implement this stream directly into aftereffects (don't know if this is possible) and also put it somewhere in the 4K surface.

Now take 4 Full-HD displays and connect them to the system. Make the preview screen work on all four displays. Now the system must be powerful enough to do a realtime rendering at lets say 25fps, all four screens must be in perfect sync and dropped frames are not acceptable (stuttering).

This is roughly comparable with what the system should be capable of ;-)

 

[Jakepro25]

Thank you Jake, that's exactly what I'm planning. I just can seem to find out which GPU to take. Madmapper uses openGL, thats what I know.

What is your business? Also in Video?

Yeah, I do some video editing, not major but is quite constant.

Performance wise what is needed is maybe comparable with this:
Work in Aftereffects, make a composition which is lets say 4K 3 minutes Long
Put in 4 Full HD Video's and divide them over this 4K surface. Then, make some major transforms, some nice transitions, eventually a Mask. In the mean time, connect a Full-HD Video camera to a capture card or device and implement this stream directly into aftereffects (don't know if this is possible) and also put it somewhere in the 4K surface.

Now take 4 Full-HD displays and connect them to the system. Make the preview screen work on all four displays. Now the system must be powerful enough to do a realtime rendering at lets say 25fps, all four screens must be in perfect sync and dropped frames are not acceptable (stuttering).

This is roughly comparable with what the system should be capable of ;-)

Right, now i see why you could need that Xeon, but really you wont see much (if any) improvement over 32GB of ram, if your doing that much with the GPU and money isn't a question then i would go for the Nvidia Quadro K6000, maybe even two if your budget allows for that, or get the BEAST of a card which is the Nvidia Tesla K80, but you will need another GPU for screens/projectors and i'm not sure whether Apple/nvidia have native support for it.