Quadro P4000 (Pascal) cards with Millumin

alenmecan

Hello all,

now that there are installs of Quadro P4000 in hackintosh systems, I was wondering if anyone here has had any chance to try them out with Millumin?

I have 2 of the Maxwell cards (Quadro M4000) and am planning to try it in my main machine as soon as I can. Ideally I would be able to use both for 8 outputs.

These cards have a "Sync port" for syncing 2 cards, or up to 4 cards with the optional sync card.

Please let me know if anyone has had any experience using these cards with Millumin.

alenmecan

I have actually had time to try this out on several machines in the last two weeks. 

I am sorry I do not have the time to test all of the most obvious configurations, I promise I will try to.

These last  2 weeks I tried using 2 Quadro M4000 cards in Millumin in an old Mac Pro and 2 different hackintosh installs.

I normally use a GTX980 and the performance of the M4000 is actually similar (although the Quadro is 2x more expensive).

The most interesting feature (hardware SYNC) works, BUT in current drivers the performance drops a lot. A project that was running on 60fps easy drops to 25-30 fps....

In the SLI mode, there is also a drop in performance compared to 1 card - whether Quadro or GTX.

The interesting thing is that each card does its own work and handles it´s own loads.

I used Millumin 1 and 2, two instances of VDMX as syphon sources, 3 actual inputs from capture cards (BMD decklink duo and BMD 4K Pro) and clips encoded in HAP and HAP Alpha (NOT HAPQ or HAP AlphaQ). 

I would appreciate any thoughts or requests for further tests based on this.

Greetings

Millumin

Hello @alenmecan,

What do you mean by "each card does its own work and handles it´s own loads" ?
Are you running a Millumin instance on each GPU ?

Recently, I wrote some explanations about multi-GPU support here.
I hope it could help you, but keep in mind that using multi-GPU is quite tricky by now, I mean for real-time softwares.

Best. Philippe

alenmecan

Hello,

I have tested the 2 cards with a hackintosh and the Nvidia web driver is not ready for primetime yet.

Regarding the workload, using 2 cards (in 1 instance of Millumin) the load is different per card. If I used the 1st card just for a monitor output and the second card for the 2 projectors output, the load on the 2nd card was significantly higher.

The "Sync" feature of Quadro cards (where you phisically sync 2 cards with an SLI bridge (using a sync connector) is NOT working in MacOS. The feature is grayed out in the driver, as well as the option to use the ECC RAM.

Using the MacPro 2010, the cards worked correctly (SYNC not available though) but the framerates with that machine are not really adequate for modern work. 

Hopefully I will try this again as the new drivers come out, but at the moment it is much better for me using the Datapath FX4 I have with a single video card (I use a GTX980) to get more outputs...

Millumin

Hello @alenmecan,

Thank you for these infos.
I'm not even sure that the SLI would make miracles for video purposes, since a lot of data has to be exchanged/transfered between the 2 GPUs.

So yes, for now, it's better to stick with only one GPU. I guess this applies whatever the platform (Windows, macOS, Linux).

Timecode synchronization of several computers could be a solution for you.
But at the same time, the GTX 980 should be able to run at least 2 x Datapath FX4 : with a MacBookPro Radeon Pro 460, we're able to run 2 x 4Kp60 monitors, with 2 x 4Kp30 HAP movies.
Also, eGPU improved a lot in the recent years. This would become a standard solution for sure.

To finish, I'd say that dealing with multiple GPU should be closely managed with the software. It should be 1 canvas per GPU, rather than 1 big canvas for 2 GPUs. This would better optimizes how the data flows.
This is what I'm talking in this thread. Of course, this isn't as easy as it seems.

Best. Philippe