How much faster is Mercury with hardware acceleration

[Richard Van den boogaard]

Any GT card is optimized for gaming, not for video applications, so I’m guessing the gains will be smaller in combination with Mercury Playback Engine.

Richard van den Boogaard
Freelance cameraman • Glidecam Operator • Editor • YouTube expert

[Tony Connoly]

If you believe

https://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

the gains from the GT240 with DDR5 are about as much as you’d hope to gain from the hardware assistance at this point.

[Tim Kolb]

I think that people may expect CUDA to have more impact in decode/encode functions than it’s currently designed for… These functtions remain cpu based, the Premiere Pro CUDA payoff comes in executing effects previews.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Vince Becquiot]

[Tim Kolb] “These functtions remain cpu based, the Premiere Pro CUDA payoff comes in executing effects previews.”

I think Tim summarized it pretty well, MPE is mainly aimed at allowing more complex render-less playback, not speeding up encoding. It should however improve the latter with timelines that are effects heavy.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Tim Kolb]

[Vince Becquiot] “It should however improve the latter with timelines that are effects heavy.”

Agreed.

On a timeline that isn’t full of CUDA enabled effects, the encode difference may not be that remarkable.

(In the top of the effects panel, click on the little lego block-like thing that has an arrow on it and says “Accelerated effects” when you roll over it. This will show you the effects in the system that CUDA will accelerate.)

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Charles Mcintyre]

The GT240 isn’t on the Adobe MPE “Approved List” of video cards. I have tried a variety of Nvidia cards with Premiere CS5 and you can get a lot of these cards to “work” using the hack. But… the lower end cards don’t offer much in the way of a speed improvement. One bottom of the barrel card I tried even slowed things down. Right now the GTX 470 is popular because it’s fast and available at a reasonable price. I have seen dramatic speed improvements even with the low end Adobe approved GTX 280. MPE really is a phenomenal technology when you get a higher end card working properly with your system.

Chuck

[Todd Kopriva]

Tim and Vince are right about a lot of the speedup coming in the context of effects. Blending modes, scaling, and deinterlacing are also accelerated.

One thing that people seem to miss is that the CUDA processing isn’t just about speed; it’s also about quality. The quality of scaling is _much_ better when it’s done on the GPU. Details are here.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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[Tony Connoly]

Thank you for that link Todd. I was aware that hardware acceleration could produce different results, but I was not aware that they were necessarily better. Can you comment on whether this applies to the non-certified cards?

[Todd Kopriva]

> Can you comment on whether this applies to the non-certified cards?

When we say that a card “isn’t supported” for a certain feature set, one of the things that that means is that Adobe Technical Support won’t talk with you about it. That’s me. So, no, I can’t comment. If you use the “hack”, then you’re on your own.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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