This $7000 Card Does WHAT?? – Holy $H!T
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,751 words · ~8 min read
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PC gaming hardware is expensive, right?
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Core i7 Extreme Edition, $1,600.
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2 terabyte 960 Pro NVMe drive, $1,300.
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Two GTX Titan XPPs, we got $2,400.
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You add 128 gigs of RAM, as well as a top-of-the-line motherboard,
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and yeah, that'll be $6,800, please.
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Now, to be clear, I'm not complaining.
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This is a spectacularly first-world problem.
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But pro video production gear is on a whole freaking other level.
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Let me put it in perspective.
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This one PCI Express card costs as much as all that stuff I just listed combined.
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All of it.
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This is the Red Rocket X, a state-of-the-art creation tool
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and simultaneously a revolutionary...
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...delic of a bygone era.
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A $7,000 co-processor card.
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Welcome to holy sh**.
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Cooler Master's 25th anniversary edition, Cosmos II,
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features a unique dual curved tempered glass side panel.
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Check it out now at the link below.
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Okay, so as many of you are probably aware,
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we moved to RED Digital Cinema cameras earlier this year
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in an effort to bump up our production value.
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And, I mean, let's be honest, we're enthusiasts.
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Give Brandon and Max some new toys to play with.
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But have you ever actually tried to work with RED code RAW footage before?
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As Taren would put it,
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it's a nightmare.
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At full 8K on a 10-core Extreme Edition processor
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with a $5,000 NVIDIA Quadro P6000 graphics card,
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this is what timeline performance looks like.
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You see those delays?
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As I'm scrubbing around?
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And even straight playback performance is abominable.
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It's not like it's our 10 gigabit network connection bottlenecking us either.
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We're nowhere near saturating it.
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No.
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It's the CPU.
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Even though we're scaling across all 20 of our threads,
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we are still running out of processing power.
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And we haven't even added any Lumetri colors.
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Yet, either.
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That's only going to make matters worse.
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Throw that into the picture,
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and now we are dropping about 90% of our frames
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while dealing with a quarter to a third of a second delay
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when we're trying to move the playhead around on the timeline.
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Ridiculous.
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And both our CPU and GPU are basically maxed.
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You actually need to drop your preview quality
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all the way down
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to 1 eighth
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in order to get what I would consider to be
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acceptable performance
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with much lower usage.
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True to form though,
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RED Digital Cinema has a solution for you.
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Are you unhappy with your editing experience
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of the footage from your $50,000 camera?
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Buy this expansion card
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to accelerate it.
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Available now for 7,000 easy payments
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of only $1.
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Call now and we'll throw in this nothing.
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Absolutely free because we're RED
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and your wallet is more than just our job.
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It's our passion.
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But what is this thing?
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What does it even do?
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Well, we can figure out a little bit on our own.
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So there's some kind of processor here
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that's under 150 watts of total power consumption
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based on the single slot cooler
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and the single six pin power connector back here.
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There's some memory on board
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so we can see those things.
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So we can see those chips arranged around the chip here
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and the dual DisplayPort ports
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are so it can actually function as a video output device.
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Though our workload necessitates a powerful GPU anyway
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so we won't be using it that way.
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And the main purpose of this thing anyway
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is to accelerate decoding, scaling, and debayering
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of our 3D files.
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The first two I think are fairly self-explanatory
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but the last one
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is the process of reconstructing a full color image
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from incomplete color samples
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that are captured by the sensor
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in a raw recording format.
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But they give us no actual details about the hardware
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other than some nebulous 5X performance claim
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relative to their own first generation RED rocket.
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But why would this older chip
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based on older process nodes
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be better at decoding technology
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compared to a GPU running CUDA
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be better at any of that stuff?
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I mean RED even supports CUDA acceleration
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in their own Cinex desktop application.
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Is this thing even relevant today?
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So with it installed
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we throw on the latest drivers
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and I don't know
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it's kind of weird.
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There's no configuration utility
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or anything like that
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but if you go into device manager
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it's working properly
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and everything seems fine.
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So all that's left to do then
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is go into our video editing software
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and press enable.
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So this is the same project
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that we were just looking at
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and we're going to change this
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use rocket drop down to all available.
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At full quality
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my CPU is still pinned
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and now I'm seeing 90% GPU usage
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even with lumetri color disabled.
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What?
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Okay, well now
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hold on just a minute here.
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Surely there must be something wrong.
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Let's try disabling the rocket
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just to see if we can get back
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to where we started.
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Now hold on
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this doesn't make sense either.
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With it disabled
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our timeline scrubbing
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looks better than ever.
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Our CPU usage is way down
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and even our GPU usage
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is under control now.
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But we are still dropping some frames
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far fewer though.
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Well RED only advertises
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the Rocket X as being capable
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of handling up to 6K footage.
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So maybe what we're looking at here
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makes sense
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if somehow it's enabled.
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Dropping then down to
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half quality in the preview window
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yields perfect playback
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without lumetri color.
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Let's check that out.
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Okay
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and
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all right
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turning it on
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well
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it looks like we are still dropping
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some frames
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in that case.
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But that's probably caused then
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by a GPU bottleneck
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because you can see
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our Quadro is sitting at around
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80 to 85% usage.
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So then finally as a last step
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we drop down to one quarter quality
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and
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that's looking great.
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Acceptable CPU
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and GPU usage
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and a much nicer looking timeline
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than what we were able to achieve
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without the RED Rocket X.
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But in a lot of ways
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this actually raises
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a lot more questions than it answers.
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Why would disabling our add-in card
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give me the best possible editing experience?
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Is it just
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a snake oil hardware key
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to run an improved
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GPU acceleration algorithm?
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So I actually spent
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a couple of weeks
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investigating this
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because timeline performance
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has genuinely been an issue for us.
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But investing in
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one of these
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for each of our editors
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would be a whopping
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$35,000 total.
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And here's what I found.
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First
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some backup
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for what we already knew.
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Without the RED Rocket X
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REDCODE RAW footage
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loves
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CPU cores.
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Knocking my Extreme Edition down to 6 cores
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yielded dropped frames
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even at only one quarter quality.
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But more cores only carries you so far.
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A 22 core Xeon like this
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costs more
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significantly slashes single core performance
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and doesn't even approach the performance improvement
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from the Rocket X installed
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but disabled in Premiere.
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So then
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the ideal
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8K video editing configuration is
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a 10 core
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with a Quadro
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and a RED Rocket X
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disabled, right?
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Maybe not.
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Is the Quadro
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at over four times the price
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really accelerating this process
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any better
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than a high-end GeForce card would?
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We'll be moving to an HDR workflow
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sometime in Q4.
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Expect an update on that.
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So we need
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10-bit color over DisplayPort.
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A traditional Quadro feature.
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But that was actually added to GeForce
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a while back.
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And the results here are fascinating.
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Our Titan X Pascal
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despite its nearly identical
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on-paper specs
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to our Quadro P6000
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is able to use its sky-high
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nearly 1800 MHz boost clocks
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to reduce GPU usage
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lower our dropped frames
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and even drop CPU usage
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a little bit
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at our target
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one-quarter playback quality.
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It even almost managed
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to pull off
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half playback quality.
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Both GPUs by the way were run
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with their power sliders cranked
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and power saving mode disabled.
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So then
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having finished running
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all of these numbers
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I came to the same conclusion
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that RED support
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did get back and give me.
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Premiere is just being Premiere.
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Disabled is enabled
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and enabled is borked.
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And as for
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an optimal workstation configuration
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well it turns out
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the Rocket X does do something
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for users with 8K footage
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even though it's not rated for it.
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But for the difference that it provides
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I'm not going to invest that much
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just to get a bump
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in preview quality.
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