Nvidia Card Peformance differences with Mecury

[Bo Skelmose]

A very good quistion – there seems to be no documentation on that – I have orderd an 4800 card because I supposed it would be the best but I had the same thougt !!

I also wonder if the mercury engine will help effects only and not the play back of a 1280×720 50P stream on a i7 computer.

[Tim Kolb]

PPro CS5 Mercury Playback Engine represents a recoding of that part of the software and is active whether you’re using a CUDA capable display card or not…but the performance will be improved if you have one of the designated cards, the effects are sent to the GPUs…decode is still the job of the CPU.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Bruce N. goren]

Richard,

OH MY GOD !!!

I am SO happy you asked this question.

I just got back from NAB in Las Vegas and I’ve been jumping up and down hoping this topic would come up soon.

Has Adobe gone EVIL??? Is Premiere Pro CS5 crippleware???

The Geforce 285 has WAY more CPU cores than the Quadro 3800(240 vs 192). But guess what? Adobe has coded up CS5 such that if the Geforce card is detected you are limited to only 3 layers of video rather than the 7, 10 and more layers you see playing in the Mercury Engine demos.

The new Geforce 470 will be even more amazing with 448 GPU Cores, but no performance improvement for you thanks to the crippleware code of CS5. No 7 layers of video for you! Next!

Why??? Adobe will spin it several ways, memory, I/O, they may even claim that these “non-pro” cards heat up and get unstable with more than 3 layers of video, but we all know that OEMs like Pony and eVGA engineer these cards to stay cool specifically for gamers who overclock.

My conspiracy theory is that this is all about preserving price point for the software. There is resistance to paying up for software when the hardware to run it on is cheap, so Adobe creates gravitas for the price point by padding your hardware build tab. Maybe they even get a taste of the action from NVidia, eh?

Bottom line, buy a Quadro, I had been planning on the new Geforce 470 ($500), but I want to be able to take full advantage of CS5, so I’ll spend the extra bucks, probably on the FX4800 (only 192 cores yet around $1500 – OUCH!) since they were promoting that model at NAB – but I’m shouting from the rooftops this cautionary tale as there is currently no asterisk next to the GeForce285 on the hardware list.

A thousand bucks here, a thousand bucks there, eventually you are talking real money.

Bruce N. Goren
“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
John Wooden, Basketball Coach

[Tim Kolb]

Bruce N. Goren: “My conspiracy theory is that this is all about preserving price point for the software. There is resistance to paying up for software when the hardware to run it on is cheap, so Adobe creates gravitas for the price point by padding your hardware build tab.”

Yes, well…keeping in mind that AE cost more than the whole Prod Premium suite not all that many years back…I’d say that whatever Adobe has done, preserving the pricepoint of any software they make isn’t on that list.

Gamer cards are a fast moving target…they revise models much faster than the pro cards…I suspect the un-intriguing answer has something to do with not having the personnel to troubleshoot every card made through the life cycle of the product…

Everything from computers to software to cameras have come down in price so much that I fail to see how anyone can say that any manufacturer has done much to protect pricepoints…even a Quadro 4800 display card is less expensive than the 3 yr old 4500 I replaced…by almost half!

Politics will always be a part of business to be sure, but often the reason for arrangements like this are incredibly mundane and boring.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Richard Milner]

Why aren’t you going with the FX3800 which is about half the cost of the 4800?

[Bruce N. goren]

The HDMI output option of the 3800 would certainly be convenient, and who doesn’t want to save $700 bucks?

3800 has 192 GPU cores, so it ought to have the same raw power of the 4800, but I’m worried about throughput bottlenecks with multiple layers. The 4800 has more on-board memory and the specs show a higher graphics memory bandwidth than the 3800.

You might recall that last year Adobe was promoting the CX as the card of choice for CS4, that board has gone away.

This year most of the folks I spoke to both at NVidia and Adobe were saying the 4800 was the best choice, so while I might gripe out loud about not getting the cheapest deal on hardware I had been scheming to accomplish, I prefer to follow the advice of those guys and gals in the know whom I grilled at NAB.

Other than cost, why would you choose the 3800, am I missing something important here?

Bruce N. Goren
“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
John Wooden, Basketball Coach

[Shawn Miller]

LOL – Bruce I love your passion. Unfortunately, the big difference in these cards isn’t the hardware, it’s the drivers. Gamer cards are optimized to be fast, the Quadro cards are optimized (driver wise) to be accurate. I’m not sure how the MPE “uses” the Quadro driver, but if you’ve ever done 3D work, then you know that this is an old discussion. I’ve used GeForce cards and Quadro cards for 3D/VFX/simulation work, and there certainly is a difference in performance between the two. Why Nvidia can’t use a unified driver model for consumer and pro hardware, I don’t know… but then again, I’m not an engineer. I’m just happy that more of my software will now benefit from my currently installed video cards.

Thanks,

Shawn

[Paul Benson]

I have also read that there were ways to put Quadro firmware on the GeForce cards. This was for older cards, and maybe nVidia has added some tricks to prevent that, but hackers usually win that battle. As previously stated, Quadro provides accurate renders vs the GeForce speed renders using almost the same hardware. Maybe wait 6 months and see what hack tools show up?

Pauley

[Phil Hoppes]

Along these lines, is there some reason the Mac version of the 4800 is DVI port while the windows version is displayport? This is a major PITA from my perspective. With DP you can drive a 2540×1600 display with one port so a dual monitor system is just one card. With DVI you have to go dual-link so now if you want a second monitor you need another card. Plus, I have to believe that the 27″ monitor, should it be more than rumor and it arrives with the next gen MacPros will be DP only so now if you want the next gen MacPro you will be saddled with a last generation card that won’t drive the newer monitors.

Also if I understand Bruce Goren’s post, then my MacBookPro will be hosed as it uses a GeForce 9600M GT card. That’s nice……..

[Tim Kolb]

DVI dual-link refers to a type of DVI connection. it does not mean you have 2 DVI ports linking 1 monitor.

The Mac QFX4800 has 2 dual-link DVI ports…so you can drive 2 30 inch displays. For a 1920×1200 display, it simply sends single link out of the port. BTW, I run a Mac 4800 in my PC…if the PC model doesn’t run in the Mac, it’s likely an apple thing.

The QFX 4800 (for PC) has 2 display ports and 1 dual-link DVI port…use any 2.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,