With NVIDIA QUADRO is enough for performance boost in AE & PP cs5

[Walter Soyka]

For After Effects, your graphics card doesn’t matter. AE lots likes of cores for multiprocessing, and requires lots of RAM for each of those cores.

For Premiere Pro CS5, your graphics card can have a huge impact.

From Adobe’s web page on the Mercury Playback Engine:

Mercury brings performance gains on all of the GPUs supported today in CS5. If you’re upgrading your system today and want to get the most out of your configuration, the following graphics cards offer significant additional acceleration by the Mercury Playback Engine:

GeForce GTX 285 (Windows and Mac OS)
GeForce GTX 470 (Windows)
Quadro 4000 (Windows)
Quadro 5000 (Windows)
Quadro FX 3800 (Windows)
Quadro FX 4800 (Windows and Mac OS)
Quadro FX 5800 (Windows)
Quadro CX

Adobe is planning to support additional cards in the future, including some of the new NVIDIA solutions based on the upcoming Fermi parallel computing architecture.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Davd Keator]

I’ve done some testing…
Quadro vs GeForce: no difference between the two in speed. As in comparable gpu’s:
600 = gt430
2000 = gts 450

Quadro gives you 10 bit out to those nice 1.07billion color monitors… GeForce limited to 16.7 million colors… No big deal unless you are grading for film…for Tv and web, my clients can’t tell the difference O_o

I have a 980x with 12gigs & the newer i7 2600k with 8 gigs. The 2600k is over clocked to 4.2ghz, the 980x is at 3.9ghz… I’ve tested the different cards in each…
Gt 430 & 600 too slow for MPE: CPU waits for GPU!

No difference for 450 to 570 GeForce. Just a lighter wallet as you go up in numbers…

Bare in mind though: this testing has been compared only with the PPBM5…. 4 layers max! This load on GPU and CPU may be too small! I have not tested on a 10 to 20 layer project. We just may see a need for the 480/580 cards…but I highly doubt it…

I have chosen to stick with the 460’s for the MPE: I just use any old card for the other monitor.
G460 pushes preview & main…Ion pushes browser/file manager etc…

Interestingly the 2600k and 980x are the same speed in cs5 encoding in the tests!!! That 1155 chipset rocks! $1200 computer is the same as my $3500 system… Perhaps that’s the real reason for the recall! Lol…

Just get the 450 or the 460… Nothing more nothing less for PPro CS5…
After effects likes open gl…ati destroys nvidia at open gl. Oh well…. At least the GeForce’s are decent…

But you will see massive improvements with ram! I wish my computers had 192 gigs!! But 12 is nice, 24 is my next up grade… I will test the diff then…

Good luck

[Davd Keator]

I for got to specify: no degradation from multiple monitors that is as long as only one of the cards is used for MPE. I tried to use two cards it just crashes…either just have one of the cards in the cuda list or manually take one off in the 3d performance usage when applying the cs5 card hack.

[Erik Waluska]

I’m putting together a new i7 2600k system right now and I have everything except the graphics card because I’m still unsure of what I need. The Quadro 4000 seems like a great option for premiere pro but I mainly use After Effects for 80% of my work, Avid for editing, and Softimage for 3D. So from what you are saying, it sounds like I might as well just get a GTX 460 because the other apps I use wouldn’t really benefit from the quadro? I’m not opposed to spending the money for the quadro, but only if it would be worth it. Any advice would be appreciated.

[Davd Keator]

That I could not say: My concerns were with Premiere Pro CS5. The card is perfectly fine with After Effects. I have used Maya very few times. My team said they can nnot tell the difference from the Geforce and the Radeon. I do not have any high end Work Station cards. The Q600 is only good for a high quality 10bit output in my opinion. It works but not as fast as my CPU for editiing.

My best guess would be get a gts 450 – $95. See if your Autodesk software rocks. They recomend Firepro or Quadro: that means it is not Cuda specific just OpenGL. Therefore any good card will work for you.

After effects too is Open GL.

I would drop avid for editing and switch to PPro CS5 way faster, more support for newer hardware and codecs from the cams…

[Erik Waluska]

“I would drop avid for editing and switch to PPro CS5”

I knew you were going to say that! haha
Yeah, Premiere is very tempting, especially considering the integration with the rest of the Adobe apps — amazing really. I started editing on Premiere and then got swayed into believing that everyone who’s serious uses Avid and if you want to work in the industry you had better know how to use it. That was many years ago and while it may be true for Hollywood productions it seems that many smaller houses are going with Final Cut or Premiere. Our facility is mostly Final Cut. I have the production premium suite with Premiere Pro, I just haven’t used it. Maybe it’s time to check it out.

Anyway, thanks very much for the advice on the graphics cards, I may give the gts 450 a shot and see how it does. I’m still researching other options but that sounds pretty good, especially for $100 vs. $850 for the Quadro 4000.

[Davd Keator]

Yea, g with 450 if it works well leave it, if not use it for the 3rd and fourth monitor. The 1155 chipset has it’s issues with the sata brifge, oh well… Not to mention such limitation on the pci-e slots.. but, unless you are working with red-rockets, high power raid arrays, who needs the extra slots anyhow, a 450 on a 2x or 4x slot works just great for driving monitors and desktop publishing.
Then just get your Quadro afterwords when more money is available.

FCP is nice, Apple was smart for giving computers away to schools all those years ago. Got 10% of the market hooked on their computers. The proress codec has many limitations and is even getting dropped from the codec format of choice.. They are developing a wavelet codec like Cineform. Hopefully they will get their acts together, openg / cuda and better third party support, or they will continue to see the loosing battle of the editing world.

Well we can see them giving up already anyhow with their focus on the mobile devices and not so much in the pc realm.

Once you go PC you will get a taste of freedom, it’s tough being an indentured servent. PC be free my man…

Later….