Color - performance with nVidia Quadro FX 4800

I currently use the ATI Radeon HD 4870 for Color, which works perfectly. I'm considering purchasing Smoke once it's released for the Mac, and it requires an nVidia Quadro FX 4800 or 5600. Ideally I'd like to use Smoke and Color on the same box, and I'd rather not swap graphics cards every time I want to open a different app.

Does anyone has direct experience using Color with the Quadro FX 4800 or 5600? I know that the ATI cards have been the preferred cards for Color ever since it's been an Apple product, and I know that all bit depths aren't supported on the nVidia, but I only use float anyway so that's not really an issue for me.

By the way, weren't nVidia Quadro cards once the preferred cards back when Color was Final Touch?

[walter biscardi] "Nope, always ATI "

Thanks, Walter. Looks like my information retrieval system needs some tweaking. Maybe it's time to run Disk Warrior on my brain...

Is the Quadro card just recommended.

In other words, will the ATI card at least run Smoke?

[Loren White] "Hopefully Autodesk will push nVidia to do update for both Smoke and Colors sake. "

The burden lies with Apple, not nVidia. Apple writes the (crappy) drivers. Seems like graphics have always been the weak point with Macs, at least this decade.

[walter biscardi] "None of the nVidia cards has ever proved better than an ATI card in the Macs. I've had the top of the line nVidia cards in the machines when I purchase them and I immediately swap them out for ATI's. "

That's due to the poor quality of Apple's drivers. In the end it doesn't matter whose fault it is I suppose, but it's not a hardware issue, it's a driver issue. In the 3D world (mainly Windows/Linux), nVidia Quadro cards rule the roost.

[Arthur Puig] "All we got recently is updates in iPhones and iTunes. Is this the end of the golden age for mac?"

It's certainly not the end of Apple, they're doing better than ever. The Pro market is a minuscule portion of Apple's business, and they could let it go completely without seeing any real effect on their bottom line.

From Apple's perspective, Pro users are a whiny, ungrateful bunch that look good in press releases whenever Apple needs some Hollywood glamor in its press releases, something that's not really even necessary anymore.

Apple is becoming more and more of a consumer-based mainstream consumer electronics company and less and less of a company that creates technology for high-end professionals. I don't see that trend reversing anytime soon.

we'll see how Autodesk performs on the mac though, I was watching on fxguidetv a presentation about it, and the Autodesk people were saying they are really "excited" than Smoke can run ProRes on a mac without dropping frames.
I think it's hillarious, even my laptop can run prores without dropping any frames running from an external hard drive!

well, I guess it's a matter of interpretation, they did say "it's playing prores without dropping any frames", take it whichever way you want it. Besides, anything on a mac can play prores if you have the codecs, so for us mac people, we get excited with "it can play 4K no drop frames!"

I would hardly think that a product that sells for $15,000 plus a mandatory $2000 per year support fee, and has minimum equipment requirements that go considerably beyond the average desktop Mac would be considered "prosumer."

I would love to see how they go around the fact that there is no SDI out of the Quadro, if they can achieve real time playback on high end data formats, it's an amazing deal, they did say that RT would be compromised due to hardware limitations, I guess the SDI out is one of those.

They do get around it. They are able to achieve real time playout on a Kona 3 card through some very clever (and very intricate) coding tricks. The "compromise" is in what Autodesk refers to as real time mastering, which is essentially a real time downconversion or cross conversion. The Mac Smoke systems are not capable of that. But for regular real time HD output, they already do that, and surprisingly well.

Sounds good. So I see you had a chance to play with it or to see it in action at least, how about rendering? Same concept can be applied to Lustre on a Mac?

[Alan Okey] " The Pro market is a minuscule portion of Apple's business"

Sorry, that should read miniscule. Typo.