New macs - pci express - What will this mean?

http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bi...&postid=855121

What will the shift to Nvidia mean?

Cheers

Toby

Well, this could be a good thing in the long run. If the software can use the Nvidia cards for the same effects, we could hopefully get the quadro 4000 card with SDI out eventually for the mac..
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_20375.html

It seems as though this card can handle doing all the effects, while outputting HD/SDI so we would finally have an integrated SDI output solution. That would be a dream come true for me.

Jason

Short term though the PCI express leaves me with redundant SATA and Blackmagic cards. Makes upgrading a far more expensive exercise than I would like.

Cheers

Toby

true, but by the time you need to upgrade your machine to a new one, you would probably want to get a hi-def SDI card anyways ( assuming you dont have one now) and SATA cards are really not that expensive.

Besides, who knows when you will really need to upgrade to new machines? It is still not known what kind of performance increases these will give you. The increase might not be very noticeable in using catalyst for a normal show. I'm sure once you start looking at high def, this will be a big increase, and by the time you need to go high-def, you will probably need a whole new machine anyways, then you can keep your current setup for doing standard def.

Jason

hopefully nVidia/ATI wont mean anything.

but i dont have any computer to test with.

i rewrote to be card agnostic some time ago - though this isnt in v3.3

the new macs support multiple video cards - which may open the way to more than 2 outputs. dont know yet.

and the shift to pci-express- may open the way to a usable xserve in the future.

at the moment they dont have any agp graphics card support.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tharding

Short term though the PCI express leaves me with redundant SATA and Blackmagic cards.
Toby

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and redudant scsi.

pci-express is totally different from pci-x or pci.

not any kindof compatibility.
it would have been less confusing to have given it a new name.

we are told atto with have a pci-express ul5d in november.

the apple hardware technote is at

http://images.apple.com/powermac/pdf...erMacG5_TO.pdf

i believe we have information from blackmagic that versions of all their cards will be available with pci-express shortly.
And miglia is a possibility too. though not confirmed

Atto will release a new PCIe SCSI card in early November - the UL5D. This is a dual channel card. Decklink have already released the Extreme as a PCIe card, with the others to follow.
Aurora and Miglia have got back to me but haven't given specific release dates on products.

Hugh

Atto will also release the first PCIe Fibre Channel card.

The big thing, guys, is multiple graphics cards. The PCIe architecture will support multiple nVidia cards - two FX4500's or 7800's and four 6600's.

SDI is a double-edged sword. It would be cool to have the option of outputing to SDI/ HD SDI without having to go through a scan converter.

Richard and I will report our findings when we get our new Macs.

Hugh

If anyone is intrested:

http://www.macsonly.com/index.html#_141


Jan

performance in catalyst will depend on things people havent tested yet.

it will depend on whether quicktime can spread the codec image decoding effectively across multiple cpus, and whether they have got disc access to be multi-threaded.

up to now disc access across the entire system has been single threaded - which means only one discs is ever accessed at a time.
so having 2 or more discs doesnt make things any quicker - it still seemed to have to wait for the slowest one...

Catalyst can take advantage of multi-cpus, it is multi-threaded.
but everything important depends on what apple has done.

Richard,

So we are waiting till the next xserves come out, hopefully they will have an AGP slot. If they dont, then we cant use them for catalysts? What if blackmagic makes an sdi card that fits in there? Do you still need the video card to do work for the software? We can always convert from sdi to rgbhv, right?

G5 towers are so big, and when you have 6 or 10 on a showsite, its a lot of cases to manage.

Also, do you know any good utilities to keep content on a bunch of machines syncronized? I plan on having a gigibit switch on hand to make transfers easy. I dont want it to update all the time, just when I run the "utility". I would use automator, but its only supported in the newer os x.

Jason

I am confused now, new g5 towers come with a pci-express video card. The xserve g5s come with a pci-x slot for use with gigabit ethernet, fiber channel or video card. I am assuming that pci-express is better than AGP? How does pci-x compare to AGP?

Jason

http://www.econtechnologies.com/site..._overview.html


PCI-x.... 16 lane information transfer on the fastest slot, then either 8x or 4x.
Faster than AGP, and I believe in time prone to less errors and latency.

G5's too big??? consider Mac minis, if you only run 4-6 layers on them, and have them stripped down they are small little buggers, perfect for fitting a bunch in a case with a KVM switch.