Best Graphics Card for CS5

[Harry Lender]

Ok. Yes I have searched this forum and elsewhere and discovered that NVidia cards are the best for Premiere Pro CS5. My budget now will only allow up to $200 or maybe $300 if it's really worth it. Is there any Nvidia cards that fit into this price range that will perform for CS5?
Many thanks in advance for all your replies.
Harry

[Harm Millaard]

nVidia GTX-460

[Manuel Lopez]

Zotac GTX 460 2GB with DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort: techPowerUp! News :: Zotac Readies Non-Reference GTX 460 with 2 GB Memory

[Pete Bauer]

"No word on availability or pricing." My guess is that non-reference card will be well above the OP's budget.

[Harry Lender]

Many Thanks everyone for you replies. That's what I was looking for.
Harry

[Harry Lender]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

nVidia GTX-460

Harm:
Will this card work without any hacking? In other words right out of the box?
Thanks again for your help.
Harry

[David Knarr]

You will need to do the hack.

[Randall Leong]

As David stated, you will need to do the "hack" (which, in this case, is tinkering with a couple of configuration files).

As for the currently produced GPUs, all of the ones that are officially supported without the "hack" are either EOL or about to be EOL'd. The Fermi-based Quadros will replace the current Quadros.

[Harry Lender]

I went to Newegg.com and found several NVIDEA cards. Need alittle help on which to chose.
Thanks Again

Newegg.com - Computer Hardware,Video Cards & Video Devices,Desktop Graphics / Video Cards,GeForce GTX 400 series,GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi)

[Harm Millaard]

Limit your choice to cards that have at least 1 GB of memory.

[David Knarr]

I agree with Harm, stay with the 1 GB memory cards. Also, I recommend going with an overclock card that has dual cooling fans. This will help to keep the video card cool so you don't have any perfomance issues with the Mercury Playback Engine.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

Limit your choice to cards that have at least 1 GB of memory.

I agree with this, especially since most of the 1GB GTX 460 cards cost just a few dollars more than their 768MB brandmates (if they are in stock). Plus, the 1GB cards have a 256-bit GDDR5 memory bus versus only a 192-bit bus on the 768MB versions.

[Harm Millaard]

Add to this that Adobe requires 896 or something like 860+ MB for the hack to work. 768 MB does not allow the hack to work. So better be safe than sorry and go for 1 MB+ memory.

[Jon Larson]

Harm--The GPUSniffer app actually says it needs 765MB, so a 768 might work--here's a sample from my laptop:

"CUDA Device # 0 not choosen because 765MB are required, and 111MB are present."


And to the OP, we just purchased this card: Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GV-N460OC-1GI GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

It has two fans which are inaudible from outside the case, even after 30 mins of CUDA enabled encoding in Premiere.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Jon Larson

Harm--The GPUSniffer app actually says it needs 765MB, so a 768 might work--here's a sample from my laptop:

"CUDA Device # 0 not choosen because 765MB are required, and 111MB are present."

Actually, that 765MB requirement refers to unused (free) graphics RAM, not total graphics RAM. And a 768MB card will not work with MPE's GPU acceleration feature because at Adobe's minimum required resolution of 1280x900, more than 4MB of graphics RAM would have already been used up with the desktop color depth is set at 32 bpp (High color). And more graphics RAM than that would already be taken up by Windows Aero and Windows graphical enhancements that are included in the OS itself. (And those amounts of used graphics RAM put together are from just idling at the Windows desktop!) Thus, by the time CS5 loads up, nearly 20MB of that 768MB of RAM would have already been used up by Windows itself.