Best Graphics Card for CS5

[David Knarr]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

The 1GB DDR5 version of the GT 240 or the newer GTS 450 would at least suffice for most systems, especially the "consumer" systems that are to be used for CS5. The only way that the 1GB DDR5 version of the GT 240 might be limited would be if you're stuck with an early Intel Core 2 Duo or an AMD CPU with fewer than four cores.

Randall, We have Premiere CS5 running on a couple of AMD Athlon 64 5200+ systems. Both of these systems have a clock speed of 2.7Ghz and have 6 gigs of memory. These are both HP a1630n stock computers and we are running the GT240 video cards in them. They do okay with Premiere CS5. The GT240 gave us a nice improvement. So I would recommend the GT240 for the lower end systems to.

[David Knarr]

It would be great if you could chime in, David and Harm, with your experiences and if there are any considerations for buying a more expensive card than a GT240 with DDR5 memory right now or in the very near future.

It would be very exciting if a GT240 provides close to the same performance as a GTX480 when it comes to Mercury Playback. I don't play games and am just interested in Premiere CS5 performance. Also, I believe the GT2xx series is compatible with OSX, whereas there are no Fermi (4xx series) drivers (yet) for OSX.

Thanks in advance!

Peter, the GT240 on the systems I used here to test with (an AMD X4 and AMD X6) I am getting the same results as with the 450. Now keep in mind, if and when Adobe opens up the Mercury Playback Engine to take advantage of more CUDA cores, the the 450 would be faster. Also, I have not tested these video cards on anything other than AMD systems.

I don't personnaly have access to any systems with the I7 CPU. But these are my results so far on the AMD CPUs.

[David Knarr]

Just an update, I am not advocating getting the GT240, but right now it is performing as well as the higher end video cards in our systems.

[Peter Chung]

Thanks, David. Are there any reasons why you are not advocating getting the GT240? Is there a card you do advocate?

[David Knarr]

Originally Posted by David Knarr

Just an update, I am not advocating getting the GT240, but right now it is performing as well as the higher end video cards in our systems.

Peter, the only reason why I said that, was everyone has their favorite card (ie. GT285, GT450, etc), I just didn't want to promote one card over another.

I have 6 of the GT240s installed, along with a GT260 and GT460 installed in our systems. Personally, for the money and currenty performance in Premiere CS5 I like the GT240 with DDR5 memory. In our systems, it is performing the same as the other cards with Premiere.

BTW, you mentioned the article with all updates happening often. I am trying to figure out a way to make the updates to our article standout, like putting the updates in red. The only problem has been, is I have been updating every few days and within a week or two, alot of it will be in red.... lol.

[Peter Chung]

Originally Posted by David Knarr

BTW, you mentioned the article with all updates happening often. I am trying to figure out a way to make the updates to our article standout, like putting the updates in red. The only problem has been, is I have been updating every few days and within a week or two, alot of it will be in red.... lol.

Maybe use a different color for each new update or a little blurb about what section(s) were updated? It was hard for me to look through and see what changed. Anyways, I appreciate all the information and experience you share in your article.

[Peter Chung]

Randall, that makes sense as to why they all perform similarly.

If you look on the ppbm5.com site, there is one user, BillG, that seems to have tested his i7 980x setup with different cards. His setup comparing the 285 vs 480 yields almost identical results. It looks like he has boosted his performance gains even more by overclocking his CPU. He sped up the benchmark by 50 seconds just from overclocking from 4.2 to 4.4GHz, if I am interpreting the results correctly. Very interesting!

Harm, is there any way to download the spreadsheet data so that we can sort the results to draw better conclusions?

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Peter Chung

Randall, that makes sense as to why they all perform similarly.

If you look on the ppbm5.com site, there is one user, BillG, that seems to have tested his i7 980x setup with different cards. His setup comparing the 285 vs 480 yields almost identical results.

That despite the 285 having a 512-bit DDR3 bus versus the 384-bit DDR5 bus on the 480 (and the 480 having twice as many cores as the 285).

[Harm Millaard]

Peter,

Bill and I have been looking into that, but we encounter several problems. A SQL database would offer the sortability you so much desire (and you are not unique in that) but loses the colors and conditional formatting (Top, D9, Q3, Med, etc.) so in our view that is out. Apart from the ASP and NET efforts from our side. Keep in mind that both Bill and I do this as a hobby and a service to you all.

We have been looking into publishing pre-sorted result pages for the top-xx submissions, that are static by nature. The drawback for us is the effort it takes to update all these sheets every time we get another top-xx result. xx being undefined at the moment.

We have been looking into adding a down-loadable version of the spreadsheet, but we do want to protect the macros, conditional formatting and formulas used in the spreadsheet, so that means we have to create a new spreadsheet with values only and that creates new problems.

Rest assured, we are looking into this, but have not yet found a sensible solution. As soon as we have found one, we will let you know on the PPBM5 site.

[Peter Chung]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

That despite the 285 having a 512-bit DDR3 bus versus the 384-bit DDR5 bus on the 480 (and the 480 having twice as many cores as the 285).

I would think the 285 would be much slower due to the DDR3 memory...

[David Knarr]

Originally Posted by Peter Chung

Maybe use a different color for each new update or a little blurb about what section(s) were updated? It was hard for me to look through and see what changed. Anyways, I appreciate all the information and experience you share in your article.

Peter I have tried using different colors offline and after about a month, it starts to look really bad. I think what I am going to do is at the end of the article I have put a section with the date and the update made to the main article.

Right now the article is pretty much complete with the exception of new driver updates and new video cards to add to the list, so I think my idea of putting the update info at the end would work. At least I hope so.... lol.

[Peter Chung]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

Peter,

Bill and I have been looking into that, but we encounter several problems. A SQL database would offer the sortability you so much desire (and you are not unique in that) but loses the colors and conditional formatting (Top, D9, Q3, Med, etc.) so in our view that is out. Apart from the ASP and NET efforts from our side. Keep in mind that both Bill and I do this as a hobby and a service to you all.

We have been looking into publishing pre-sorted result pages for the top-xx submissions, that are static by nature. The drawback for us is the effort it takes to update all these sheets every time we get another top-xx result. xx being undefined at the moment.

We have been looking into adding a down-loadable version of the spreadsheet, but we do want to protect the macros, conditional formatting and formulas used in the spreadsheet, so that means we have to create a new spreadsheet with values only and that creates new problems.

Rest assured, we are looking into this, but have not yet found a sensible solution. As soon as we have found one, we will let you know on the PPBM5 site.

Thank you, Harm and Bill, for your service. I am trying to get some insight into optimizing for CS5 performance thanks to your benchmarks.

I was having problems trying to just copy and paste from the benchmark results page into excel as it would be tab-deliminated data and wouldn't import properly into excel. However, I was able to get the data into Excel via a web query.

Just being able to sort through and filter things makes it easier to analyze the data and draw conclusions.

Anyways, I already appreciate all the work you've done putting the tests and site together and updating them.

Thanks again,
Peter

[Peter Chung]

I noticed that some of the faster Disk Access setups also have faster non-MPE speeds. Most of the faster setups have RAID0 setups, some with SSD drives and some with up to an 8 drive RAID0! Is this even safe? Wouldn't it be disastrous if even 1 drive were to go bad, especially in BillG's 8 drive RAID0 setup?

[Randall Leong]

If even one drive in a RAID 0 setup goes bad, the data (if any) on the other seven becomes unusable. (At least without the need to use astronomically expensive data recovery services.)

Though I have to admit that even single-drive setups are not immune to total data loss. In fact, the very slowest Disk Access setups are those systems that use just a single drive (or single drive volume) for everything - the OS, programs, projects, renders, page file and video source and output files. Those are the systems that have the greatest risk for data loss due to the extra wear and tear on the single drive. Those are the very reasons why Adobe does not recommend single-drive systems at all with any of its prosumer-level Creative Suite applications.

And yes, a two-drive software RAID 0 array on an Intel SATA controller does not improve the disk access scores enough over a very fast single disk (separate from the OS disk) to justify the trouble of creating such an array.

[Harm Millaard]

Peter,

This is a very valid and good point you make. Normally no one would even consider a 8 disk raid0 for editing, but for benchmarking it is OK, at least for that purpose only, IMO.

Rendering does require that the preview files are written to disk and then disk speed does come into the picture as well, not only CPU/GPU/memory speed.

Bill is constantly trying out various disk setups, with multi SSD's, SCSI's, SATA's with different cards (LSI, ARECA 1680, and shortly 1880) and different raid configurations. I always wonder how his basement looks with all the stuff he gathered in the past years.