Mercury Engine h.264 playback… Radeon 5770 vs a high end Nvidia card?

[Shane Ross]

Normally you need an Nvidia card…a specific sort of NVidia card…to enable the Mercury Engine. But Kanen Flowers has figured out how to get the stock card in an iMac to do the same thing…enable the Mercury Engine.

https://scruffythinking.com/notes

Now, this is how to do it with THAT card….this won’t work with all cards. Be warned.

[Aj Koch] “Additionally, looking into buying a Maxtor Mini Max as my breakout/playback card, and it has expedited h.264 encoding, but I assume that has nothing to do with playback, correct?”

Not Maxtor…MATROX. And the Mini is an IO card…input/output. It will output a signal from PPro to an external monitor. And if you get the MAX option, it will speed up encoding to H.264.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Mike Molenda]

I’ve successfully (i.e. nothing has broken so far) enabled OpenCL on my 5770 card, using a trial version of CS6 and OSX 10.7.3 Lion.

I’ve found that the software-only Mercury Playback in CS6 handles H.264 DSLR playback pretty well, when compared to CS5 and 5.5. Minimal latency in playback and scrubbing on the timeline. I also like to set playback to 1/2 resolution if I’m doing a lot of scrubbing, and this speeds things up even more.

So for straight up edits, you may not even need the hack. Especially on a beefy 12-core system (I’m on a 2x dual-core Mac Pro from 2006). Bear in mind that disk speed and RAM come into play here as well, so be sure to take that into account!

If you’re going for the full CS6 suite, you will get more mileage out of an NVidia card, since After Effects and SpeedGrade have additional enhancements for CUDA GPUs (NVidia) that are not available on OpenCL GPUs (ATI).

[Aj Koch]

Ah! Thank you both! You’ve been very helpful and I appreciate it. Sounds like getting an Nvidia card would be a good purchase if I’m using CS6’s production suite.

And of course… Matrox… what was I was thinking? I guess the question I was getting at was would the Matrox Mini with Max option have a compounded effect on native h264 playback, since it is supposed to have that blazing fast encoder, but I’m going to guess it’s mostly for external video/audio monitoring, and h264 file compression.

I’m also going to assume I can keep my ATI Radeon 5770 as my GUI card and just have the NVidia run as my GPU? Or won’t they play well together? (Bear with me, I’ve never had to build a machine like this before and I’m pretty much a newb about this stuff.)

Thanks,
-Aj

[Douglas Morse]

THE GPU on the card is used for effects rendering. H.264 playback is through the software Mercury engine and wouldn’t be helped by the GPU (unless effects were applied) That said, h264 runs fine on my 2010 imac with a 5850m card…though I do have to render some graphics effects before they will play back smoothly. I’ve noticed that some people in the forums skimp on RAM which I think affects playback dramatically. Lots of information (clearing up misinformation) about Mercury is on Adobe’s site Their videos are quite good

[Russ Blaise]

Hi Mike, I have the same Mac Pro as you do with the 5770 card. I got it to enabled OpenCL on my 5770 card also with no problems. Thanks!

[Todd Kopriva]

> H.264 playback is through the software Mercury engine and wouldn’t be helped by the GPU (unless effects were applied)

That’s not entirely accurate.

There are a lot of things that are GPU-accelerated, not just effects.

There’s a full list for CS5 here: https://adobe.ly/fz6zFZ

Additional items accelerated in Premiere Pro CS5.5 are listed here: https://adobe.ly/gE0JlS

Note that the statement in an earlier post about needing an Nvidia card also isn’t accurate for Premiere Pro CS6, as described in this post about OpenCL in Premiere Pro CS6: https://bit.ly/Je20M2

———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
product manager, professional video software
After Effects team blog
Premiere Pro team blog
———————————————————————————————————

[Jason Carey]

Hey Shane, I could not find the link to the 5770 Solution for Premiere.

[Shane Ross]

https://scruffythinking.com/notes/mercury-playback-and-the-27-imac.html

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Jason Carey]

thanks