A few words on Acceleration

NVIDIA Quadro 4000 Blackmagic/DaVinci recommend installing a second graphics card into your Mac – Resolve will then use the Graphics Processing Unit on the card (basically a very fast computer dedicated to image processing) to accelerate the rendering of your timeline. The latest version (7.1) even lets you install multiple GPU cards using a Cubix PCI Express expansion chassis, for real horsepower. The GPU cards must support CUDA (NVIDIA’s technology which allows third parties to access the GPU’s power) though the choice of cards available for the Mac is limited.

We set up our system with a couple of NVIDIA Quadro 4000 for Mac cards, one for the GUI (replacing a GeForce 8800 GT) and one for Resolve processing. If you use two GUI monitors, you should note that the 4000 has one DVI-D Dual Link connector and one DisplayPort. There is a DisplayPort to DVI-D adapter included with the card, but it’s the passive type that only emits single link DVI, so you’ll be limited to 1920x1200 unless you buy an active converter (about £80), or have a secondary monitor with a DisplayPort input.

The first thing you notice is the effect on the Final Cut timeline. Some plug-ins, like Magic Bullet Colorista II from Red Giant use OpenGL for rendering, so the faster the card the better they work. A load of effects that absolutely, positively had to be rendered with the old 8800 GT card will play in real time with the 4000 – bonus! Note that these benefits are from replacing the user interface card (the one connected to the computer’s monitor) – OpenGL plug-ins won’t benefit from the second card. On the down-side, Apple’s implementation of OpenGL is rather old (hopefully it will improve with OS X 10.7 later this year) so the Quadro 4000 doesn’t bring as much speed improvement as its specification suggests – certainly if you have a newer Mac Pro with the ATI Radeon 5770 or 5870, it wouldn’t be worth upgrading.

Fire up Adobe Premiere Pro and it’s a different story. The Mercury Playback Engine in CS5 is written to use CUDA for pretty much everything, and it flies – most of the standard effects use the NVIDIA card, allowing you to run everything in real time, including the decode of 4k RED footage. Annoyingly, though some third party plug-ins support CUDA, After Effects and Photoshop don’t seem to benefit (yet?) – though they get the same OpenGL boost that FCP has.

Obviously, Resolve benefits greatly from the addition of the second Quadro 4000, though the highest performance available would come from using NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 285 (fastest) or Quadro 4800 (next best). Sadly, the GTX 285 has been discontinued. On the plus side, the Quadro 4000 is half the price of the older 4800, though the GTX 285 was very cheap. Further towards the plus side, if you use the PCIe extension chassis, you can fit as many Quadro 4000s as you have slots, as each 4000 is a single PCI card width. The GTX285 and Quadro 4800 are both double width, so you always have an unusable slot between cards. For more information, see the Resolve configuration guide at http://www.blackmagic-design.com/downloads/davinci/pdf/DaVinciResolveMacConfigGuide.pdf.

The Quadro 4000 has cooling fans fitted, and they do make a lot of noise, irritating to be in your ear in an edit suite, but in a grading suite, where silence is less important, you’ll probably get away with it. It has a street (i.e. www) price of about £640 plus VAT.