CS5 x64 and Mercury Playback Engine

[Brant Gajda]

^^

Well the 285m has CUDA support which "should" work.

[Harm Millaard]

Personally, I would wait until MPE is released and then decide what video card to get, based on some reliable tests, so at least you know what price/performance you can expect to get.

[Paul Newman]

Originally Posted by Tim Kolb

Hmmm... While I don't record the output of the graphics card, and I have no NVIDIA gamer cards, I've not seen this on any Quadro cards, and I've had a bunch. Have you tested all these cards on the same system?

It can't be on all cards...every Autodesk, Avid (turnkey workstation), NuCoda, etc, etc system runs on the Quadro cards...I would think we'd have heard something about this by now...

Is there any other factor involved?

Hi Tim,

Well this was my point really, I've run many cards on several systems and always have this slicing effect, whether on a laptop running media player, or a high end Nvidia card outputting HDMI - that said, I've never had a Quadro card except my FX1700 (which showed the same problem) so I'm very keen to see a system running with HD output, through any Nvidia card that is clean of any refresh errors.

Please bear in mind that this would never bother anyone working on say, frame by frame animation, it's really only noticable when playing real time quality imagery from an NLE into an external monitor.

As a rule of thumb, I use Edius with an HDStorm card which gives me full HD output in both component and HDMI, I never see any of these issues, but the same project played out through an HDMI feed from say the GTX285 is full of "slicing" glitches.

If you say you've never seen this, then I'd love to go check out an edit suite in London which uses say a Quadro card in conjunction with any NLE to see the results - I just want to fix this issue without risking spending huge money on a card which may only result in the same problems.

thanks

Paul

[Steve Kalle]

Hi Paul. How do you get any work done in Ibiza :)

On a serious note, I have recently seen the tearing but only when scrubbing through the timeline - using 8800GT, Premiere CS4, DVI into LCD, 30p, 60Hz.

[Paul Newman]

Hi Steve,

that's why I'm in London working right now - too much swimming and partying !!

So playing out in realtime, you get a clean, error free image? this with an "NTSC" project - I wonder if this is a PAL related issue, in other words, although I set the output frame rate to be 50 in line with the monitor, I always get tearing - I'm gonna test a 60hz based project and shoot some 60hz EX1 footage right away.

OK, just tested with EX project 60i, also 30p external monitor 60hz, still the same problem!

Paul

[Steve Kalle]

Paul, are you using only HDMI to check this or have you tried via DVI? HDMI might be the culprit?

I have no tearing while using XDCAM 1080 30p & 720 30p presets as well as 720x405 custom preset.

I should also add that I use Media Player Classic all the time and never have any problems.

Any chance you could record some video tearing so we can see what you are seeing?

[Paul Newman]

This is present on all outputs, RGB, DVI HDMI and even component from an older 8800 card. I'll try and capture something that moves rather than a still image.

Paul

[Jarred Capellman]

It's a shame it is CUDA only instead of OpenCL to open up the acceleration to the ATI/AMD cards.

[Tim Kolb]

It's sort of the ongoing issue with computers in general in my view...

As the configurations get more diverse, and the options get more numerous, each vendor who has the initiative to reach out and utilize some aspect of a computer system they don't manufacture or control to improve performance, has to make some choices.

Drivers and software for some hardware like AJA or BlackMagic cards, can be adapted to different host applications for a limited set of specific functions, but even in that product niche there are solutions like Matrox IO/acceleration solutions which are focused on one host application due to the complexity of what they're doing.

Making a Matrox RT solution for Premiere and Vegas and Edius for example, would require 3 quite fundamentally different approaches as the way each of those NLEs handle the job of creating and displaying frames very, very differently. The software engineering costs would simply be prohibitive in proportion to the potential sales increase...

If you're Adobe, you're now going to re-code nearly everything in the core of the software to get a systemic performance jump like that. At some point, you have to decide how much time you have to dedicate to the effort, and where that time is best spent. Premiere Pro isn't exactly the most svelte of software programs now...developing a version with multiple preview acceleration engines that use all the available display card protocols would create an exponential increase in the software's girth not to mention potential obscure incompatibilities, and sheer development manpower required to get the software coded.

Nothing is released of course, so what will and won't be supported and even what benefits may be coming without specific hardware dependency has yet to be seen.

[Jarred Capellman]

That is one of the benefits of the OpenCL platform, both nVidia and ATI/AMD can use it, just like the OpenGL Acceleration in CS4 (although it appears most of the plugins were written with CUDA in mind it seems).

I am a Senior Programmer, so I know how much of a pain it is to program for multiple platforms, I hate having to work within different .NET versions even. When coding though I tend to not focus on any one platform, even when I do code for a specific platform I always abstract the low level stuff out and write some custom optimizations, but leaving the door open for other platforms.

But then again like you said, it's not out yet so we have no idea whether or not ATI/AMD cards will get acceleration too.

[Tim Kolb]

...yes, time will tell.

However, I do think that the Quadro cards certainly have been much more aggressively marketed to the pro user of late. At some level, the market posture of a product has an impact on its potential for such alliances...

I know a lot of Mac users who use ATI cards, but since Mac only certifies one card out of the entire Quadro line every three revisions or so, its not like they've historically had a huge set of options in this area.

I don't happen to know any PC users who have a really top of the line ATI card (whatever that may be...any of them that have bothered to invest the money in a muscle-bound graphics card seem to have Quadro cards in my anecdotal experience.

Also, the OEM market seems dominated by NVIDIA...so they've positioned themselves very well for this sort of collaboration it seems.

(Maybe things would be more competitive if AMD did some more effective marketing to the pro user?... I've had ATI cards over the years, but I know that I'm not very ATI savvy anymore as I don't seem to encounter any info on their products these days. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places?)

[Jarred Capellman]

It wasn't until the HD 4xxx series came out that I made the switch to ATI, especially with the SoftMods to turn them into the FireGL series at a fraction of the cost, kind of like the old SoftQuadro Mods.

Currently I have a 5850 that for Photoshop and 3ds max 2010 is perfect with. The Beta Premiere/Media Encoder Plugin that AMD/Adobe were developing that uses the Stream Processors on the 4xxx/5xxx series cards really makes a difference when encoding in h.264 for Blu-Ray. It cut my times down by well over half.

If you would have asked me back in the NV20/30 era about ATI I wouldn't recomend any of their products, but ever since AMD took control of ATI, their drivers and quality have gone up considerably.

[David Dwyer]

With the release date now set do we have a offical list of supported cards?

[David Chilson]

This is what I could find. I have the 285.

The Mercury engine will require one of a few specific Nvidia cards to work. (Initially qualifying: the Quadro FX 3800, FX 4800, FX 5800, or CX, and the roughly $400 GeForce GTX 285.) Adobe plans to extend support to more GPUs in the future, including Nvidia's next-generation GeForce GF100 cards.

[David Dwyer]

Originally Posted by David Chilson

This is what I could find. I have the 285.

The Mercury engine will require one of a few specific Nvidia cards to work. (Initially qualifying: the Quadro FX 3800, FX 4800, FX 5800, or CX, and the roughly $400 GeForce GTX 285.) Adobe plans to extend support to more GPUs in the future, including Nvidia's next-generation GeForce GF100 cards.

Yeah its the fermi cards I'm interested in.