Best Graphics Card for CS5

[Peter Chung]

So if this RAM was DDR3 1600 with 9-9-9-27 timing, would it be a great deal? I'm looking at this Kingston RAM for $90 after $30 MIR. So it would be $180 for 12GB.

Thanks for your inputs!

[Rob Johnson]

Hello All,

First, my many thanks to Bill Gehrke and Harm Millaard for compiling an excellent and exhaustive list on CS5 systems vs. nVidia video card performance. You both are truly a credit to the community.

So. I've finally upgraded (better late than never) to Production Suite CS5. My system: I'm running a Dell i7 920 435MT (2.67GHz stock), 12 Gigs of RAM (running @ 1066MHz) and Windows Ultimate 64, three physical disks (no RAID); two internal (SATA) and one external (USB 2.0).

For overclocking, I've had to implement a software overclock, to 2.91GHz, as the BIOS of the 920 will not permit overclocking and there are no BIOS upgrades for that model that I've found. Basically the Dell 920 is an "entry" level i7, thus Dell seems to cripple them right our of the gate.

So now, decisions, decisions. According to Bill and Harm's spreadsheet, it would appear that the GTS 450 might be the best choice for CUDA enabled MPE rendering. I was pretty much set on that card. But some in this thread have mentioned the GTX 460.

Going off David Knarr's information at Studio1Productions.com, (thank you, David), the GTS 450 has:

192 CUDA Cores
Standard DDR5 Memory (1024MB Typical)
128 Bit Memory Interace Width
783 Mhz Core Clock

The GTX 460:

336 CUDA Cores
Standard DDR5 Memory (1024MB Typical)
256 Bit Memory Interface Width
675MHz Core Clock

Since I wanted to stay around $200 or under, I guess it would seem obvious that the GTX 460 would seem to be the most reasonable choice. But looking at the results of MS Studio1's system in the spreadsheet (an i7 920 system similar to my own, albeit overclocked to 3.3GHz), it looks as though the GTS 450 fared very well in the tests, at least relative to other systems of the same caliber.

I've already come to grips with the fact that I'll be upgrading the power supply (Corsair 650W), so there'll be plenty of power for either card. (I also plan to increase to 24 Gigs RAM). So what do you think, guys? 450 or 460? I've also considered, as we all always have to do, that certainly Adobe will mostly likely upgrade and make better use of the card and CUDA in later (CS6?) versions of Premiere, and perhaps even After Effects. So how 'bout it guys? All opinions welcome.

Rob

[Steve Kalle]

From my own testing, I found the gfx card to have more of an effect only with more layers and several effects on each layer. And when MRQ is enabled, the gfx card is involved even less. Harm and Randall posted their GPU usage during MRQ rendering and it was very low; thus, the CPU is the most important followed by ram.

I would just go with the GTS450. Save the money and get another drive, Seagate or Samsung or a SSD for the OS. I have an Intel X25 80GB in my HP and also a Seagate 7200.12 160GB in the same PC with Win 7 installed on both. The SSD is for 'work' and the Seagate is for testing and Matrox. I recently used the Seagate OS and WOWWWW is everything so much slower than the SSD. Premiere takes 3-4 times as long to open and same with AE. Trying to open a program and do something else on the Seagate takes far longer.

ONCE YOU GO SSD, YOU WILL NEVER GO BACK!

[Rob Johnson]

Steve, thank you for the heads up on the SSD situation. I had looked into it in the past but had dismissed it. I must confess your mention of it has rekindled my interest.

Currently I'm looking at the OWC 120GB Mercury Extreme Pro and the Intel X25M 120GB. Apparently the OWC has some sort of better management of wear leveling over time, if you can believe the adverts. And based on what I've seen on YouTube vids, seems to the remarkably fast. Heck, maybe I'll just get three; one for the OS (clean install Win 7), one for the project/read drive and one for the export drive. I think I could be sure my drives will not be the cause of a bottleneck after that. No, after that it will be my DDR3 RAM which is only running at 1066MHz. But conventional computer wisdom says there has to be at least one bottleneck somewhere.

On the card, I'm probably going to go with the GT 240 (1GB DDR5). With the MPE in the current version of Premiere CS5, it seems to perform about at well as every other card.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Rob Johnson

On the card, I'm probably going to go with the GT 240 (1GB DDR5). With the MPE in the current version of Premiere CS5, it seems to perform about at well as every other card.

My further testing of both the GT 240 with 1GB of DDR5 memory versus the GTX 470 revealed that the GT 240 is definitely slower than the GTX 470 in the PPBM5 tests when both cards are installed in identical i7-9xx systems at the same CPU clock speed (3.67GHz) -- about 10 seconds slower in MPEG-2 DVD encodes and about 20 seconds slower in AVC Blu-ray encodes. However, that difference, although noticeable, is still much smaller than the difference in price between the two would have led someone to believe.

Specifically, with the exact same 12GB (3 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 9-9-9-24 RAM, the system with the GT 240 had to be overclocked to 3.7GHz just to achieve the same amount of total time (297 seconds) as the system with the GTX 470 and an i7-950 CPU at its stock 3.2GHz (3.06 without Turbo) speed. Both of these systems were tested using a RAID 0 array with two modern 1TB 7200RPM hard drives. Remember the 317-second total time with the i7-920 system overclocked to 3.675GHz and equipped with the GT 240 and only 6GB of DDR3-1600 RAM (as listed in the PPBM5 results list on the PPBM5 web site under the name "Randall's Mod Rod")? In that particular system, doubling the amount of RAM reduced the total PPBM5 benchmark time by only 20 seconds. This confirmed my suspicion that Premiere Pro CS5 versions 5.0.2 and 5.0.3 are "friendlier" to those systems with less than 12GB of RAM than versions 5.0.0 and 5.0.1 were. And my experiment with my main i7-950 system with an additional 4GB of RAM -- 16GB versus 12GB -- revealed that the MPEG-2 DVD encoding time took less than half as long with 16GB as it did with 12GB.

[David Knarr]

Hi Randell,

Even though you are test with two identical systems, won't there be some minor timing differences?

What about when you do the test in the same computer, are you seeing a difference in rendering speed?

I ask, because I have run tests using two identical systems, same motherboard, harddrive, CPU, CPU speed, memory, memory speed, etc and I also saw a slight difference in rendering speed. For example, system 1 has the GT240 and system 2 had a GT460. System 2 rendered faster. This lead me to believe the GT460 was a little faster.

However, when I would test the 2 different video cards using the same computer, just swappng the cards out and reinstalling the NVidia driver, there was hardly any difference in the rendering speed. Maybe 3 to 4 seconds between the two on a 6 min timeline. This was much smaller that what I saw when using two identical systems. The difference I figured was due to Windows 7 processes.

I also ran a system timing test on both systems and it did report that while both systems has identical memory speeds, cpu speeds, etc. system 2 was reporting 4% faster on the timing tests.

I am interested in hearing more about your findings as I am ruinning on AMD systems and not Intel.

Best Regards
Dave Knarr

[Tom Miller]

has anyone tired the GTX 570?

I'm in the middle of building my new system

i7 Sandy Bridge 2600k
asus maximus iv extreme
12GB of RAM
GTX 570
all water cooled
Blu ray Burner

all that stuff has wiped me out of money so ill be adding faster hard drives maybe RAID and anything else i can upgrade at a later date

[Steve Wolla]

I really want to upgrade my current system to run CS5.5 Production Premium, and want to include in this an upgrade of the video card.
Current System looks like this:

Windows 7 Professional 64 bit (just upgraded from Vista "Ultimate" 64 bit)
12GB DDR-3-1066Mhz SDRAM (6 DIMMs)
1GB ATI Radeon HD 4850 (2 DVI, HDMi, adpt.)
Intel i7-950 processor
Seagate 1.5TB 7200rpm SATA 3Gb/s C Drive for applications, etc.
Seagate 2.0TB 7200rpm SATA 3Gb/s K Drive for projects
WD 4TB 7200 rpm eSATA 3Gb/s F drive for back-up.

Can I upgrade to a catd like the Geforce GTX 570, or what would be my best bet?
Thanks in advance,
SW

[Andrey Vas]

Well your system is pretty good except video card. You could upgrade to GTX470 but it operates little too hot. 570 is much better. But I preferred Quadro4000 if you edit AVCHD that is the best choice. I know it is pricy but it is worth it.
If you chose to go with 570 or 4000, this is just a reminder, they are not officially on the adobe list for supported cards but you can add them very easily and enjoy the performance.

[Ron Chau]

Latest list of supported cards shown towards the bottom in their tech specs page.

Tech specs | Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5

4000 and 570 are supported.

[Steve Wolla]

How can I find out if the GTX570 is compatible with my other components? Or is that an issue?

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Steve Wolla

How can I find out if the GTX570 is compatible with my other components? Or is that an issue?

You just need to make sure that your PC's power supply unit (PSU) can handle the load. Some cheap 750W and 850W PSUs can't really handle more than about 500W to 600W without going ape.

[Jared Gardner]

I'm having trouble analyzing all of these results. How is it that a really cheap card with not so many cores can perform almost as well as a card with nearly double the cores? That guy got an email from Adobe and they told him that the more cores you have, the better/faster Adobe stuff will perform. Well these results are showing that, but... not nearly as much. You'd think doubling your cores = doubling performance. Why is this not so?

I'm still unsure of which card to get. If for some reason Adobe steps it up and releases an update where it can utilize those other cores, then I'll get a 570 instead of a cheaper card. But if for some reason it won't matter, I'll just get a cheap 260 or something.

[Jeffrey Fuchs]

I have the GTX570, it works great!

[Bart Walczak]

Jared, my experience is that to saturate even the cheap hacked GTX460 I had to add about ten GPU supported effects to a single clip - then I got 100% GPU use, and Adobe was stopping playback after a few moments. I guess up until this point it was the CPU/HDD that was the bottleneck as far as performance is concerned.

Therefore what kind of card you need is determined by how many effects you actually use. GPU does not accelerate decoding and playback of a clip itself.