Hey all,
The production company I work for has asked me if it makes sense for us to purchase the new NVIDIA Quardo K5000 for my Mac Pro. I’m currently running a
2x3.06 GHz6-Core Intel Xeon
24 GB Ram 1333 MHz DDR3
with a ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024MB
system and as we all know, this will not work for Cycles, leading me to render using either the CPU or the internal render engine. Either way, I end up complaining a lot. And, my boss basically wants to know if this new card will work and/or will shut me up. Any advice anyone has on the matter would be greatly appreciated. I know the card is brand new and not a lot of people have it, but I did notice that it does have OpenCL 1.1 instead of 1.0 which my current card has (and cycles always tells me that I need 1.1 to make it work with my GPU), but I don’t know if there is more to it than that.
Thanks a lot
By the looks of it, it has the same number of CUDA cores as the GTX 680, but has a slightly lesser memory bandwidth, and I presume less clock speed thanks to its lower power draw.
It should preform quite well in Blender, certainly no slacker, and the 4GB will help alot for larger scenes.
Quadro cards don’t add any benefits to blender work. If you want the extra RAM much rather get the GTX 680 with 4GB or a GTX 580 with 3GB for more speed. Better still, for the price, get 3 GTX 680 (4 GB) -not in SLI- for the system. Now, that will make a big difference!
Well thanks for the advice about not buying the NIVIDIA Quadro K5000, but I did some research and according to NVIDIA, the GTX 690 will not work on a Mac Pro… they still recommend the Quadro K5000
Well thats all well and good, but I checked with NVIDIA and the GTX 690 (etc) will not work on a MAC and we are a MAC based production house… any thought on which direction I should go with the GFX card to make cycles really work efficiently? Also, Zalamander, my benchmark time with my cpu was 1 minute 1 second… is that good?
Dual boot windows? Maybe not the most practical thing if you really need to work in OSX but that would allow you more hardware freedom on your Mac. Best alternative otherwise is to build a dedicated Windows or Linux dedicated render system.