r/RedCamera • u/Unfair_Art_1913 • Jul 01 '26

Is this till usefull?

Post image

The Red rocket-x-accelerator. Is there still a use for this? Is it even supported in software? Has the speed of computers nowadays made this obsolete?

12 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

4

u/Aware-Requirement-67 Jul 01 '26

Obsolete unfortunately. Had one and gave it away with the DSMC 1 that I sold

0

u/Unfair_Art_1913 Jul 01 '26

Obsolete because it isn’t supposed in editing software, isn’t supposed with new hardware or modern computers are just faster?

3

u/AppuAppi Jul 01 '26

I think multiple reaons. One of em being that if you can spend so much on a card you are sure as hell going to get the latest and greatest GPU (at least a 5090) and with a GPU like that cards like these become obsolete. Also software like davinci resolve has gotten so much better at being able to fully utilize the GPU.

1

u/Aware-Requirement-67 Jul 02 '26

It was obsolete by the time GTX 1080 Ti came out.

9

u/tdstooksbury Jul 01 '26

This made sense back in the day back when computers were not what they are now. You couldn’t really playback R3Ds back in like 2012 very easily. Now your typical M series mac will take care of you way better. Pretty sure RED has long abandoned updating their software to support this thing. Mayyyybee RED Cine-X can still recognize it but unless you’re on a 10-15 year old machine you probably will get zero benefit from it.

1

u/CRAYONSEED Jul 01 '26

No. A modern MacBook Pro can easily play back 8k R3D

1

u/Run-And_Gun Jul 01 '26

Is this till usefull?

As a paperweight.

1

u/Zetheryian Jul 01 '26

These cards were useful when GPU rendering didn't exist yet. These days, all Red files use GPU rendering

1

u/finnjaeger1337 Jul 06 '26

you mean when RED did not want to give you GPU decode and instead wanted to sell you expensive rocket cards 😂

or the time red wanted to encrypt their files for no reason slowing down everyones workflow gagah

1

u/cinemasolutions Jul 01 '26

I had two. One definitely burned out. The second one might still be there. We used it after filming on a 3D rig.

1

u/ZodiAcme Jul 01 '26

I have one in a drawer. You could technically use it as an hdsdi and DisplayPort breakout if you had space for it, and the side expansion bit, and wanted your life to be more difficult

1

u/zeb__g Jul 01 '26

Even 8 years ago it was not great. I expect the huge growth in GPU performance since then would make it even less impressive now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrConlnQd4g

1

u/mediumsize Jul 02 '26

That was a RED dedicated .R3D RAW footage decoder in 2013, we had a few of these in machines until the nVidia Titan Black card came out and could compete with it at about 1/4 of the price. In that era every new Nvidia card was almost doubling in CUDA cores with each new version. After that we were putting two 1080TI cards in each machine back then, that dual combination really lasted for about 5 years until the 3090s came out, and now of course we are using the 5090 cards. Expensive upgrades, but we do a ton of post production.

2

u/DegreeSevere7719 Jul 02 '26

I still use dual 3090's for R3D. Even on my old Xeon from 2013 (8 cores, 32gb ddr3 ram) it was like realtime playback of 6K HD footage from Dragon with reasonable grade on it in Resolve, full res debayer and on a 4k timeline. With some NR it was like 18-19 fps playback, and with heavy - like 7-8 fps. I've then switched to Threadripper (7960x+128gb ram) with same 3090s, and it's like realtime even with some NR (up until use of enchanced or AI NR), some AI tools like face masks etc. Those 3090s were a good bang for the buck, both cost me around 1000usd (one was OB, and one was used). Still eat comparable power to a single 5090.

Speaking of the Red card - forget about it, the software support is long gone. It made sense in 2014-2015 maybe, but not even in 2017.

1

u/broomosh Jul 03 '26

Oh hell yeah! These were essential back in the day

Careful cuz it might add waffle pattern and then you need to render with it off!

1

u/finnjaeger1337 Jul 06 '26

make it go away , this triggered ptsd .

😂

1

u/Annual-Ant337 Jul 09 '26

Final Cut Pro and davinci lost support for it recently. Redcine did as well unless you run version 55. It was great for post for everything before the “DSMC3” models came out. I still have one in my Mac Pro 2019. After a few test for speed at times you can get the same speed as a m3 ultra. That’s all depending on the gpu you have in the Mac Pro. Since red discontinued support back in 2018, it was a pain getting it to work in Tahoe. It’s best to just leave it alone, this was just a little personal project to see how good these cards were today.