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Any reasonable alternatives to the Quadro/Mercury headlock imposed by Adobe and Nvidia?
Hi,
We’re trying to upgrade a campus computer lab that services our video production and new media courses. These computers are used for video editing, but they’re also used for courses on web design, social media, and game design. In the gaming courses, students spend quite a bit of time analyzing/exploring virtual worlds and stand-alone computer games.
Our multiple use scenario runs into some problems as a result of the video cards that are required in order to recognize the benefits of the new Mercury Engine. Even if we can convince our administration to cover the costs of a low-end workstation card (Quadro FX 3800), these cards are not nearly as good when handling gaming applications.
Can anyone suggest a solution that would deliver the maximum performance to both gamers and video creators? (Incidentally, these are often the same people.) For example, would a Radeon HD 5870 be able to deliver good performance on both fronts?
As a related question, does anyone know how to quantify the gains from the Mercury Playback Engine? The marketing materials are all very vague and just use words like “faster” and “more reliable,” but how fast are we talking about?
Thanks!
Aaron -
3 Replies
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I’m sure that the recommended cards will make a substantial difference to the performance of your system. My own trial utilising a Core i7 950 PC based system without any fancy gfx card (GT9600) is that CS5 video layers play back smoothly and accurately in preview (un-rendered) even without a CUDA based card compared to CS4.
Perhaps you need to weigh up the cost of an overall upgrade of all your software to a genuine 64bit environment before making the plunge. In my opinion, some companies have some catching up to do.
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Why not use a GTX285 vice a Quadro card if you want to use it for gaming also? its in the same price ballpark as the 5870
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“Headlock” is provocative…
Not really true, but then the average discussion on this tends to be like this… It would help if Adobe was a touch less hype ad a bit more detail on this subject.
The Mercury playback engine is a real improvement over CS4 WITHOUT an approved GPU card.
The Mercury Playback Engine really flies WITH an approved GPU card.
It probably seems odd that the small group of professional graphics cards are approved since many gamer cards seem very similar in configuration to Quadro cards…but try to get someone on the phone who actually has a clue what you’re doing to support a gamer card in a professional post production environment. PNY (the NVIDIA distributor in North America) has actual tech support for Quadro, staffed by people who understand what we’re trying to do. Consumer gamer cards don’t have that kind of support…
The GTX285 is on the list…it’s a gamer card…they didn’t have 2 years to attempt to test every variation of every consumer card available, so…since so many seem to think that PPro is unstable, they decided this time not to try to be compatible with everything all the time…a smart move IMO.
Before you really go with the “headlock” story here, I’d urge you to try PPro CS5 on a 64 bit machine with Windows 7, and at least 8 GB of RAM and use the wimpiest display card you’ve got.
I think that for a student lab, you may decide that you’re good to go…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,
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