Quadro FX for AE, worth the money?

[Paul Roper]

Dave, do you ever tire of giving that same reply on a weekly basis whenever this same question is asked?!

…Not that I disagree – it’s excellent advice! I’m still awaiting my 32GB RAM upgrade; then all my processors can zoom along at their full potential. Let’s just hope that in CS6 Adobe make sure that ALL the effects (including the most processor-intensive: PARTICLES) are 64 bit multi-threaded!

– Paul

[Todd Kopriva]

Here’s a video that I made about OpenGL in After Effects:
https://www.video2brain.com/en/videos-5359.htm

Note that the gist is what Dave said.

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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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[Chris Bobotis]

Dave, I beg to differ. Many a third party AE plug-in uses either CUDA or openGL and they benefit from this card.

As a result, AE benefits. Furthermore, AE has an openGL renderer (see Todd K’s Vid : https://www.video2brain.com/en/videos-5359.htm) and if you only use it for previewing then you are saving quite a bit of time. Sooooooooooo my take on it is that a better graphics card is a good investment – the question posed was is the Quadro FX worth the money? I run high end cards and find they are well worth it. Bang for the buck? Best bet? I cannot answer that – really depends on what your requirements are. We run all major 3D apps as well at Mettle so we do see a huge benefit there too. Makes it even easier to justify the investment when amortizing over several uses.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Chris
mettle.com

[Todd Kopriva]

My stock answer these days is that people should make their buying decisions for graphics cards based on Premiere Pro—knowing that what works for Premiere Pro will be more than enough for After Effects, too.

Chris, of course, has a specific few plug-ins in mind when he points out that some make use of OpenGL. 😉 … and that’s a valid consideration. Even if you leave the OpenGL renderer in After Effects turned off, these plug-ins can take advantage of OpenGL. And some (though few) can even take advantage of CUDA.

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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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[Chris Bobotis]

Guilty as charged 😉

Yes our products FreeForm Pro and ShapeShifter AE both use the GPU but so does VC Element 3D, Optical Flares (I believe), RGS Magic Bullet, Knoll Lens Flare, some of the Boris Continuum filters, I believe some of the Genarts and Digital Anarchy plugs too. I am sure I missed quite a few and I mean no disrespect to those I missed just trying to a point across. Hetereogeneous computing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_computing) is here and i believe it is here to stay…

HTH,

Cheers,
Chris
mettle.com

[Todd Kopriva]

To the original point:

If I had a thousand dollars left in my budget, I’d make sure that I had already stuffed a lot of RAM and fast CPUs into my system before I spent the extra grand on a higher-end graphics card. _Everything_ benefits from more RAM and faster CPUs; only _some_ things benefit from a higher-end graphics card.

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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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[Todd Kopriva]

BTW, I just finished an entire free training series on performance optimization for Premiere Pro and After Effects:
https://www.video2brain.com/en/products-115.htm

That video that I linked to earlier is from that series.

One of the goals of this series is to give people information to make buying decisions like this.

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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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[Walter Soyka]

[Todd Kopriva] “If I had a thousand dollars left in my budget, I’d make sure that I had already stuffed a lot of RAM and fast CPUs into my system before I spent the extra grand on a higher-end graphics card. _Everything_ benefits from more RAM and faster CPUs; only _some_ things benefit from a higher-end graphics card.”

Agreed wholeheartedly.

Generalities aside, I think you’d need a very specific reason to select a Quadro FX 1700. It’s an old card, and the same money would buy you a much faster GeForce today.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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