Z97X-UD5H | 4790K | GTX 1080TI/MINI: add another 1080TI?

[Ty Harper]

Hey all,
I've got the following Hackintosh specs:

Z97X-UD5H
i7 4790K
GTX 1080TI (MINI) (11GB)
32GB RAM
1TB SSD (macosx)
500 SSD (scratch, etc)
12TB EXTERNAL
DR15 studio
HIGH SIERRA
ASUS PB278Q (2K)

I'm a hobbyist working predominantly with 1080 Raw ML footage and 4K via a Canon 1DC.

I know my desktop setup is getting old in the tooth and that this is essentially the end of the road for future Nvidia/MAC combos.

My question is whether spending an extra $450 US to add another GTX 1080TI MINI (used) or something like a GTX TITAN would be worth it performance-wise?

Also, would upgrading to DR16 studio make sense as well? 

Thanks in advance!

[Rinad Amir]

Honestly just save up for new rig mate it would be better option

Or get another ti and have it sli .

[KnightsFan]

What type of editing do you do (VFX, color, etc)? Do you currently use Premiere or Resolve Lite? What parts need performance increases?

[Ty Harper]

21 minutes ago, KnightsFan said:

What type of editing do you do (VFX, color, etc)? Do you currently use Premiere or Resolve Lite? What parts need performance increases?

I do basic editing/color grading and strictly use Resolve... was using the free one mostly but was gna purchase the studio version, which I hear is the one that utilizes multiple gpu's... which is partly why I was wondering whether adding another 1080ti mini would help performance.... 

[KnightsFan]

First if you're editing high bitrate footage from an external HDD make sure that's not the bottleneck. A 7200 RPM drive reads at 120 MB/s, even even two uncompressed 14 bit HD raw streams would go over that.

I have a GTX 1080 and use Resolve Studio. Earlier this year I upgraded from an i7 4770 to a Ryzen 3600, and got an enormous performance boost when editing HEVC. So while the decoding is done on the GPU, it's clear that the CPU can bottleneck as well. When I edit 4K H.264 or Raw my 1080 rarely maxes out.

Overall I'd be pretty surprised if you need another/a new GPU for basic editing and color grading. Resolve studio is a better investment imo than a second 1080.

[Ty Harper]

36 minutes ago, KnightsFan said:

First if you're editing high bitrate footage from an external HDD make sure that's not the bottleneck. A 7200 RPM drive reads at 120 MB/s, even even two uncompressed 14 bit HD raw streams would go over that.

I have a GTX 1080 and use Resolve Studio. Earlier this year I upgraded from an i7 4770 to a Ryzen 3600, and got an enormous performance boost when editing HEVC. So while the decoding is done on the GPU, it's clear that the CPU can bottleneck as well. When I edit 4K H.264 or Raw my 1080 rarely maxes out.

Overall I'd be pretty surprised if you need another/a new GPU for basic editing and color grading. Resolve studio is a better investment imo than a second 1080.

Thanks for the insight. I know my cpu will be a potential bottleneck eventually but I'm not comouter tech savy enough to know what that breaking point would be (at 2 1080TIs, 3?). I'll prob never invedt in a Hackintosh again... I'm also not interested in shelling out $2K for something newer.... but $400-$800 on an extra gpu, another SSD.... seems feasible....

[Ty Harper]

I guess the more pointed question would be... if people had the Hackintosh build I have and $400-$800US they were willing to spend to make their DRS15 or 16 editing/coloring, etc experience better... what would they spend it on?

[Phil A]

8 minutes ago, Ty Harper said:

I guess the more pointed question would be... if people had the Hackintosh build I have and $400-$800US they were willing to spend to make their DRS15 or 16 editing/coloring, etc experience better... what would they spend it on?

What’s your screen setup? How many and which ones?

[Ty Harper]

10 minutes ago, Phil A said:

What’s your screen setup? How many and which ones?

ASUS PB278Q (2K)

[KnightsFan]

30 minutes ago, Ty Harper said:

Thanks for the insight. I know my cpu will be a potential bottleneck eventually but I'm not comouter tech savy enough to know what that breaking point would be (at 2 1080TIs, 3?). I'll prob never invedt in a Hackintosh again... I'm also not interested in shelling out $2K for something newer.... but $400-$800 on an extra gpu, another SSD.... seems feasible....

If the CPU is bottlenecking, then money you spend on a new GPU will be wasted until the bottleneck is resolved. Same with the SSD--if that's not working at its max currently, then you can spend all the money in the world and it won't help at all. I bring up the CPU because I had a similar CPU and GPU, and upgrading the CPU made a world of difference.

If you're set on upgrading your GPU, you might want to look at the upcoming 3000 series cards before buying another 1080. The 3070 was announced at $499 for a release in October with over twice the CUDA cores as the 1080 at a TDP of 220W, which is much less than the TDP of two 1080's. Plus it will work even in software that doesn't specifically use dual GPU's.

[Ty Harper]

18 minutes ago, KnightsFan said:

If the CPU is bottlenecking, then money you spend on a new GPU will be wasted until the bottleneck is resolved. Same with the SSD--if that's not working at its max currently, then you can spend all the money in the world and it won't help at all. I bring up the CPU because I had a similar CPU and GPU, and upgrading the CPU made a world of difference.

If you're set on upgrading your GPU, you might want to look at the upcoming 3000 series cards before buying another 1080. The 3070 was announced at $499 for a release in October with over twice the CUDA cores as the 1080 at a TDP of 220W, which is much less than the TDP of two 1080's. Plus it will work even in software that doesn't specifically use dual GPU's.

Just to clarify, there is no bottleneck right now... I'm just looking for ways to better the computer's performance on DRS15/16 with a max budget of $800US. What I was wondering is whether spending $400 on another 1080TI MINI would be a fair investment or would my cpu undermine any performance gains I might get from the purchase... either way, I think phrasing my question as what you and others might spend $800US if they were looking to better the performance of this Hackintosh, is a better way of looking at it, apologies for the confusion, lol...

[KnightsFan]

If there's no bottleneck, I personally would save my money haha. I think that for normal editing, your 1080TI probably already outperforms your CPU so adding another would likely give no benefit.

[kye]

7 hours ago, Ty Harper said:

I do basic editing/color grading and strictly use Resolve... was using the free one mostly but was gna purchase the studio version, which I hear is the one that utilizes multiple gpu's... which is partly why I was wondering whether adding another 1080ti mini would help performance.... 

That's what I thought as well.

It doesn't directly talk about your setup, but there are a bunch of articles on Pugets website talking about what benefits you get from having multiple GPUs, like this one:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/DaVinci-Resolve-14-GPU-Scaling-Core-i9-vs-Xeon-W-vs-Dual-Xeon-SP-1121/

Of course, buying a second GPU also means buying Resolve, so it's more of an investment.

6 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

First if you're editing high bitrate footage from an external HDD make sure that's not the bottleneck. A 7200 RPM drive reads at 120 MB/s, even even two uncompressed 14 bit HD raw streams would go over that.

I have a GTX 1080 and use Resolve Studio. Earlier this year I upgraded from an i7 4770 to a Ryzen 3600, and got an enormous performance boost when editing HEVC. So while the decoding is done on the GPU, it's clear that the CPU can bottleneck as well. When I edit 4K H.264 or Raw my 1080 rarely maxes out.

Overall I'd be pretty surprised if you need another/a new GPU for basic editing and color grading. Resolve studio is a better investment imo than a second 1080.

I found with my system that the CPU was the bottleneck until I added an absolute ton of processing, so I had to upgrade to my new laptop.

6 hours ago, Ty Harper said:

Thanks for the insight. I know my cpu will be a potential bottleneck eventually but I'm not comouter tech savy enough to know what that breaking point would be (at 2 1080TIs, 3?). I'll prob never invedt in a Hackintosh again... I'm also not interested in shelling out $2K for something newer.... but $400-$800 on an extra gpu, another SSD.... seems feasible....

You can use the Activity Monitor application under Utilities to see the load on your system (go to Window and enable CPU History and GPU History then go do things in Resolve and see what got maxed out).

6 hours ago, Ty Harper said:

I guess the more pointed question would be... if people had the Hackintosh build I have and $400-$800US they were willing to spend to make their DRS15 or 16 editing/coloring, etc experience better... what would they spend it on?

I would definitely upgrade to Resolve Studio.  IIRC the free version of resolve only lets you have a single node?  If that's the case then having the ability to have more than one node let's you do a few killer things:

• Choose what order your effects get applied in by separating them into different nodes
• You can start to work with selective adjustments where you take a key and adjust only certain ranges of colour (eg, skin tones) or certain areas within the image (eg, track a moving window on someones face)
• Apply multiple OFX plugins
• Use Temporal Noise Reduction that compares multiple frames to do NR instead of blurring just one frame at a time

[kye]

Also, I forgot that multiple nodes allows you to do things like layer adjustments and parallel nodes, which allow all the kind of effects that having layers in an image editor gives you.

[kye]

Also also, having multiple nodes allows you to have parallel processing of the image, for example you can take a key of an object, split it and the rest of the image into two separate paths though the node graph, and for each one you can have it pass through multiple nodes, before they get combined again.

[kye]

Also also also...  being able to apply multiple treatments to an image is really where professional colour grading begins.  You'll see in every colourist / colour demo that they start with the image and then they'll show several wipes to show how they did something, then something else, then something else again, etc.  That really needs multiple nodes to do as you need the full control of one or more nodes to properly do each correction.

[Phil A]

On 9/6/2020 at 3:11 AM, kye said:

I would definitely upgrade to Resolve Studio.  IIRC the free version of resolve only lets you have a single node?  If that's the case then having the ability to have more than one node let's you do a few killer things:

• Choose what order your effects get applied in by separating them into different nodes
• You can start to work with selective adjustments where you take a key and adjust only certain ranges of colour (eg, skin tones) or certain areas within the image (eg, track a moving window on someones face)
• Apply multiple OFX plugins
• Use Temporal Noise Reduction that compares multiple frames to do NR instead of blurring just one frame at a time

 

That's not correct. The free version can do 99% the same as the studio version for most users, you're only missing out on resolutions bigger than UHD, it doesn't have the noise reduction and film grain OFX, etc. For normal editing and grading, it's widely the same.

I don't think it makes sense to invest any money into your system if you haven't actually identified a bottleneck. I would edit/grade a project and run resource monitoring to find out if you every approach a limit regarding CPU, GPU or storage. There's no benefit to increase e.g. GPU performance up to 200% of now when you maybe never reach over 60% currently.

[kye]

3 hours ago, Phil A said:

That's not correct. The free version can do 99% the same as the studio version for most users, you're only missing out on resolutions bigger than UHD, it doesn't have the noise reduction and film grain OFX, etc. For normal editing and grading, it's widely the same.

I don't think it makes sense to invest any money into your system if you haven't actually identified a bottleneck. I would edit/grade a project and run resource monitoring to find out if you every approach a limit regarding CPU, GPU or storage. There's no benefit to increase e.g. GPU performance up to 200% of now when you maybe never reach over 60% currently.

Which bit isn't correct?  I've never been able to get a clear idea about which restrictions there are on the free version.

If the free version has multiple nodes, then that's pretty awesome, and makes it a lot more useful.

 

[Geoff CB]

18 minutes ago, kye said:

Which bit isn't correct?  I've never been able to get a clear idea about which restrictions there are on the free version.

If the free version has multiple nodes, then that's pretty awesome, and makes it a lot more useful.

 

https://documents.blackmagicdesign.com/SupportNotes/DaVinci_Resolve_15_Feature_Comparison.pdf

Main things you loose is resolutions over UHD, HDR, noise reduction, multi-GPU support, and project sharing. 

[kye]

49 minutes ago, Geoff CB said:

https://documents.blackmagicdesign.com/SupportNotes/DaVinci_Resolve_15_Feature_Comparison.pdf

Main things you loose is resolutions over UHD, HDR, noise reduction, multi-GPU support, and project sharing. 

I've seen that before...  years ago actually.  When it was written 🙂 

Seriously though, I looked through that and multiple nodes wasn't mentioned, so I wasn't sure.  I find BlackMagic aren't the greatest about keeping the documentation up to date and easily findable.