OTOY Forums

Hi

so this is a topic that's been going around for a while but i always seem to hear conflicting information and end up confused.

Obviously we know price vs performance you go with geforce cards over quadro cards. The benefits of quadros are limited for many people. I'm in the category where 10bit displays are very important to me for film work / nuke compositing / grading. I've just bought two Titan X to go in my workstation but I still need to solve my 10bit display problem, I spoke to Nvidia about the possibility of using quadro and geforce cards in the same machine and they totally shot me down and told me they would not work on the same motherboard. Now that was confusing as I've seen some octane bench scores using a mixture of quadro and geforce can anyone shed some light and confirm one way or the other as to whether we can mix cards - do certain cards work together others not?

thanks

Marc

I use a quaddro 4000k for my monitor and 2x780's for rendering and it works fine. Hell, I originally used a ATI Fire Pro for my monitors along with the 2x780s for my rendering and it worked fine.

ok, here's the thing. As far as I know Pro cards & gaming cards work together just fine..but there is (or was) this, maximus technology that nvidia pushed forward to sell more PRO cards - it worked with Quadro + Tesla (& didn't Quadro plus GTX..). So that's what Nvidia is talking about..

Rendering in Octane is process that runs the same on GTX & Quadro cards (as it uses Single precision mostly) - both cards (gaming & PRO) are based on the same chip..just Quadro cards have bit more special features like 10bit supports, sometimes higher Dual precision performance, etc - that doesn't influence performance of OctaneRender.

so to Your question.. Quadro will work with GTX card for rendering, but it's better to leave Quadro for screen(s) while run rendering operations leaving for TitanXs. This way You will not notice that any rendering is happening on the background as Your system will be as snappy as responsive as doing nothing at all.

if You encounter while running this setup, any issues, simply get the card back (You should have at least 14 days to get it back - depending on where You live) & try another route, like getting PRO card from AMD (value wise again, this is pretty tempting as AMD is forced to reduce their prices to compete with nVidia's marketing).

Keep us update & we'll try to help You out, at least with some informations or questions You might have along the way, but..You can have Quadros & GTX together..it's only a matter of some features, like that Maximus not working.

thanks for the replies, i never knew you could have amd and nvidia together either, I guess i need to see how much a quadro card that will display 4k will cost. I guess I could go down the blackmagic decklink route for monitor output as well not sure what the benefits / negatives would be vs a quadro.

space is also an issue trying to keep things cool too any recommendations? my current setup is

Corsair 900d case running 13 fans on a fan controller
2 x Xeon e5-2695v3 (28 cores in total) watercooled with Corsair H80i GTs
Asus Z10PE-D8 WS motherboard (7 pcie slots)
128gb Micron ddr 2133mhz
2 x Fusion iofx pcie drives
2 x TitanX ( on their way)
2 x samsung 850 evo 500gb ssd plus various other hard drives

Im not keen on creating a watercooling loop I can put computers together but thats always scared me a little.

It runs cool now but I did have a problem with my last pc a z800 where the 780 6gb melted my third fusion iofx drive and these things aren't cheap so its made super nervous of heat hence so many fans in this new setup.

with 2 titans occupying a lot of pcie room plus two single slot fusion iofx drives taking up space which i worry about being directly next to a hot gpu it doesnt leave a huge amount of room left so adding another gpu for display is going to need some thought. I see quadro k4000 are single slot but will they be capable to handle 4k playback? I don't really know what the requirement is on just displaying 4k from say nuke studio or davinci resolve.

I guess if i need to go down another dual slot route with a bigger quadro or blackmagic decklink 4k I might have to look at losing one or two of the fusion iofx drives to make room, there is a m.4 slot on my motherboard i've not looked into using I can't remember if its one slot or two but i did notice some really good speeds from some m.4 drives which I could use in place of the striped fusion iofx drives but i've not looked into the pros and cons of that fusion iofx have some good features especially to prevent loss of data which I don't think i will get with the m.4 route.

anyway sorry for ranting if anyone stumbles across this post and has any ideas please share there's a lot i don't know about computers so you might suggest something very basic which will be news to me.

cheers

Marc

I would recommend a decklink card.

it works with nuke. also, its the only way to get a dedicated full screen monitor out of resolve (because the ui configuration is intentionally handicapped).

if you're using 'resolve' (the free one, formerly lite) not 'resolve studio', then you're limited to a single gpu. so, for example, if you're gpu debayering red footage, then your quadro is going to be running all your monitors AND doing the debayer. if you have a decklink card, then you can use your titan x for dedicated debayer (which it is very very good at) while the decklink is running your monitors.

the decklink also has some nice capture features (not sure if you need them). you can do a 'live grade' with it which i use for live keying, which is absurdly useful. i pop a still of a cg environment out of octane and set it up as a background layer in resolve, then overlay the live keyed green screen footage running from my epic so I can match lighting in real time. really nifty.

yes im using resolve studio with a dongle, so buy a decklink for displays and not a quadro? Will a decklink be ok when running 3d applications like 3dsmax will it be good enough for the view port? so i will have two titanx with no cables plugged in at the back and a decklink card running all my displays?

I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think it will work with max. It isn't a configurable monitor, but a dedicated monitor output. (Only tried it with programs that output 10-bit. Max can render out but not monitor 10-bit)

If you've got a resolve dongle and need it for stuff outside of Nuke/resolve/nle then go for the quadro. Only downside is you can't set up a dedicated full screen out of resolve, but resolves 'dual screen' setup is still useful.

Well, I just got my new machine up and running. nvidia control panel lets me set my benQ to 10 bits per channel...

I popped a test gradient into Nuke Studio and it looks smooth... but that can't be right because the monitor is over DP out of a 980ti.... I only have 4 980tis in this, no quadros. no blackmagic hardware.

Resolve and Photoshop still show bands in the same test pattern.

I was led to believe by Nvidia that this wasn't possible. Hmmm.... must investigate further...

yea its a very grey area nvisia seem unwilling to reveal, is your monitor 10bit then? i have a quadro coming to sit alongside my titansxs so i will also investigate to see if there any difference. Let me know your findings