Nvidia Quadro

[FrankT]

I heard that the Nvidia Quadro line of graphics cards are suited to the task of fan restorations - they can turn a two-hour rendering job into a two-minute job. However, the latest RTX costs far more than I can spare. Does anyone here have a Quadro or something similar, and can they tell me if it's any good?

[deleted user]

I'm gonna guess that this refers to NVENC encoding, please correct me if I'm wrong. If that is the case, it's basically useless. NVENC encoding is very fast, but also extremely inefficient. You will hardly get good quality out of it. NVENC is even available in older GTX 760 cards and such and with rising model numbers it tends to get more powerful and fast (resolution and framerate wise).

However if the Quadro has a different way of helping encoding speed, please ignore what I said, I don't want to badmouth something that might be good. The only thing I know is NVENC and it's only really good for capturing something live at very high bitrates and then doing a proper encode later.

[FrankT]

I'm talking about one of these: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/design-visu.../rtx-6000/

But I can't spare $4,000; I need that for my rent!

[Colek]

It's for 3D models etc. rendering. Not video rendering

[spoRv]

Agree.

DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY WITH QUADRO CARDS!

[FrankT]

It's for 3D models etc. rendering. Not video rendering

Is there a difference?

[deleted user]

It's for 3D models etc. rendering. Not video rendering

Is there a difference?

Yeah, great difference. The main bottleneck for rendering out a video - unless you use heavy CPU/GPU intensive effects - is the video encoding, and sadly the best current encoder for final delivery (x264) doesn't support any GPU acceleration to my knowledge. Though I've seen at least a paper speculating about whether some of the motion estimation could be done using a GPU. Who knows, maybe we'll see some of that someday. The creation of the video frames themselves is faster than realtime typically, as it doesn't usually involve much more than reading the source file and applying some very basic stuff like color correction.

There's of course the mentioned NVENC, which is a blazing fast h264 encoder in all newer GTX/RTX cards, but as I said, the quality is really meh and it's intended for real-time screen capture at very high bitrates more than for a final delivery. For that it's really great though.

3D stuff again depends on whether the 3D software you use supports some kind of GPU acceleration, but I would wager many do. With 3D stuff the image encoding itself is usually negligible (typically you render out tiff/png sequences) whereas the rendering/creation of the actual image can even take multiple minutes per single frame. So in a way, it's the exact opposite of rendering something out of a video editing tool.

I can imagine After Effects might possibly profit from it though, if you use some advanced effects that require a lot of processing power and support GPU acceleration. Not really the typical case for fan restoration projects though, they tend to be more about stabilization, color correction, maybe noise reduction, stuff like that. I don't think those tend to support much GPU acceleration, though I'm glad to be proven wrong.

[SpaceBlackKnight]

Most video editing usually requires a fast CPU, plus power supply and a good MOBO. GPU editing with the Quadro is mostly for rendering 3d effects and advanced high res VFX sequences, which can still take a long time to render especially for a CGI animated film and is why most films are 2k finishes or have effects done that way instead of 4k.

I do see one possible use for the Quadro. If one has a high tier PC and a GPU heavy program like Gigapixel for SD upscales, that would make renderings far quicker.

[FrankT]

What if I used VirtualDub for SD upscales?

[williarob]

I've had 4 Quadro cards over the last decade:

K600
K620
K2200
K4200

I sold all but the K2200, which I'm still using. They're all good cards (the top 2 are the entry level budget cards - about $100 each, while the 4200 was the most expensive. I picked it up on Ebay for $600, but it was retailing for about $2000 at the time), far superior to the GeForce GT 610/720 series cards I was replacing, due to the high cuda count, which I believe is the most important thing where video encoding (for those apps that support it, like Tmpgenc) is concerned. The technology in the Quadro cards is usually passed down to the next generation of GTX cards - so while the current Quadro cards are always on the cutting edge, the GTX cards are using a lot of the same chips as the previous generation of Quadro, and much more affordable.

I had expected the 4200 to blow away the K2200 in performance, but for video encoding there was very little difference. So less than a year after I bought it, I sold the K4200 and used the money to buy a GTX 1070 Ti which has a lot more cudas and support for h265, and I didn't regret the decision. It was definitely an upgrade. With the new card I can render using the Hardware option from Resolve to 264 or 265, and it can render really quickly - a 2 hour film in HD took about 15 minutes, and at 4K took only 4 hours - but the quality wasn't anywhere near as good as Tmpgenc. Useful for previews, where you are just checking the color, but not for your final encode.

Where video cards are concerned, I've always been at least a generation behind - it's just not worth it to me to spend over $1000 on a card that will be available for under $500 in 12 months.