CS5 GPU Rendering?

[Philip Collins]

According to the people who sell graphics cards, CS5 will really be able to use the GPU to speed up rendering times. This is great news! Especially for me, who was planning on updating my computer after my CS5 trial runs out. I am using that month to try to find the real bottlenecks and optimize my upgrades to fix them.

Here is my question to the mad geniuses of the DVINFO forums;

Do 'workstation' graphics cards make any difference with programs like After Effects and Premiere Pro? I know they didn't with CS4 and below, due to the lack of GPU rendering access, but now that the game has changed, how would say an EVGA GTX 470 stack up to a PNY Quadro FX 5800?

Looking at the price, one would hope the quadro would take you to lunch sometimes, in addition to allowing 1080p full-res previews in AE, but I just really have no clue about the differences in GPUs for anything other than making assassin's creed look pretty.

And I don't care about making Assassin's Creed pretty on my editing workstation, because all I do there is watch and edit HD video and high resolution After Effects comps and multi-layer Photoshop files.

Please help me be smarter!

[David Dwyer]

Philip,

The only official GTX card support is the GTX 285 until Q3 where Adobe is meant to support the GTX 480.

However you can mod the software to most of the GTX range (765mb+) See http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-cr...-200-gpus.html

As there is no official support there aren’t any benchmarks comparing these cards so can't comment.

[Pete Bauer]

Hi Philip, and welcome to DVinfo. By "updating" your system, do you mean tweaking an existing system, or building a new computer? The feedback you get will depend on which. Subject to change as we all get more experience with CS5 under our belts, but so far I'm thinking that fast performance in PPro means:

- first, a fast CPU (an i7): Decoding the video streams on your timeline is still done by the CPU. The faster the CPU, the more streams you can run smoothly. CS5 is said to be optimized to take good advantage of multiple cores. So the more cores, the better.
- then, lots of RAM: PPro and AE are 64 bit applications and can use more RAM to crunch through the timeline. PPro, AE, Encore, and Adobe Media Encoder also dynamically share RAM amongst themselves.
- lastly, GPU acceleration: For now, very few nVidia cards are certified by Adobe to run the GPU acceleration portion of their new Mercury Playback Engine, which is only in PPro. AE still uses OpenGL. This helps those effects (about 40, the majority of the common ones like color correction, noise and blur, etc) that are written to support GPU acceleration. GPU use does make a big difference in timeline playback and rendering. That said, both PPro and AE have been optimized and even in software mode (not using a certified graphics card) and the improvement in performance over CS4 is significant, with reports posted showing on the order 20% or less rendering times, for example.

A lot of us have seen the AE Rotobrush Tool demos. When I see stuff like that its always in the back of my mind that well, sure, the demo looks great but how will it work for me? Last evening I gave it a try on a less than optimal clip and was astounded. Even where I had to adjust the edge detection, it was actually simple and quick. No joke, if you've got a scene to rotoscope, this will save you hours. It works.

To answer the specific question about the GTX vs Quadro...the 470 isn't on the Adobe list and the FX 5800 is the top of the line and on the list. The difference in performance would be reflected in their price differences, at least for effects-intensive PPro timelines.

Anyway, I'm eager to get back to checking out CS5 more (less eager about the yard work that also awaits me). There are quite a few threads in this forum on all of these topics so grab your morning coffee and go to it!