ATI HD Radeon performance in CS4?

[Tim Kolb]

Well…when you refer to GPU performance in CS4 of course, you are speaking primarily of After Effects previews and Photoshop functionality… Premiere Pro has very little GPU advantage (other than a handful of effects and transitions) if you don’t happen to use plugins that are designed to exploit a GPU like many of the Magic Bullet offerings, etc.

The Quadro CX comes with a hardware boost for H.264 encoding if you do a lot of that…

Overall, I’d say that Adobe products seem to warm up to the NVIDIA cards a bit more than the ATI stuff on a PC anyway… I’m not sure how the Radeon products interact with video I/O like AJA or BlackMagic… If you’ll need something like that in your system, I’d check with the manufacturer for any known conflicts.

On a Mac, things are a bit different as your options for NVIDIA display cards are pretty limited.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Brian Louis]

Like Tim said nVidia tends to work better the ATI, paticularly in the drivers dept. to keep around the same price ballpark as the 3650 a Geforce 9000 series like a 9600gt 512g works fine with Ppro, for a few bucks more you can go to a GTS200 series like a 250 or 260.

[Vince Becquiot]

If you want to go with ATI, look at the ASUS EAH4870. An all around great card. It will be all you ever needed for Premiere and more.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Mikkell Khan]

Alright, thanks for the advice. I watched a video review of the card I’m getting for this desktop and it says its great at decoding HD footage and taking the strain from the CPU. Taking that into consideration, should the ATI Radeon HD 3650 be enough for me with Premiere say with basic cut editing and rendered effects like 3d transitions and after effects…effects?

Mikkell Khan
Director
Diamond Films Ltd. (Trinidad and Tobago)

[Tim Kolb]

As I stated earlier, there is very little performance to be gained in everyday editing in Premiere Pro from a serious OpenGL card at this juncture…I would guess that the capability is coming though.

That is true no matter what card you put in the machine.

Photoshop CS4 does capitalize on the GPU and AE has always used the GPU for previews. (not rendering unless you choose to save the preview). This and Iridas SpeedGrade is what I use the larger display cards for…if I did more 3d work, I’d certainly see better response as well.

There are 2-3 transitions in PPro and another couple effects that actually use the GPU, but they are not mainstream…”ripple” and so forth.

If you get some Magic Bullet plugins or something in the way of a third party plugin, those may be engineered to use the Open GL capabilities on a display card, but mainstream functions in Premiere Pro simply don’t at this point.

While your UI will certainly be more snappy with a faster display card, decoding of video of any kind and /or encoding (other than the H.264 feature in the Quadro CX and dynamic-linked AE comps inside of Pro) is done by your machine.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Mikkell Khan]

Ah, so my focus should be on processor then.

That is good, because the machine is coming with an i7 920 core.

Mikkell Khan
Director
Diamond Films Ltd. (Trinidad and Tobago)