Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) is a group of software used for website design, video and photo editing and much more multimedia projects. The accompanying hardware makes the difference not only in using the software but also in the final product result; so, why use Nvidia Fermi based cards like the GTX 460 or professional Quadro cards with CS5?
Here are a few reasons:
- Video rendering and playback – the new Mercury Playback Engine has GPU acceleration and uses CUDA to speed up effects and operations like Ultra keyer, proc amp, Gaussian blur, edge feathering, flips, sharpening, and color correction
- Mercury-ready transitions: cross dissolve, dip to black, and dip to white
- Reduced CPU utilization
- Ability to unlock the GPU acceleration potential for CS5 and essentially any CUDA-enabled GeForce card within the Windows version of CS5
For more information: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/adobe-cs5-cuda-64-bit,2770-3.html
CS5 does not utilize all that Fermi has to offer. The good news is that there are available plugins that do utilize Fermi such as “Beauty Box Photo” (See: http://www.digitalanarchy.com/beautyPS/main.html).
Ultimately, if you really want to use Photoshop with GPU acceleration, plugins are necessary.
Premiere Pro Performance
This is where CUDA absolutely shines. Render times with CUDA GPU acceleration with the mercury engine, are 6-10 times faster.
For more information: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/adobe-cs5-cuda-64-bit,2770-10.html
This CUDA improvement extends to CS5 Premiere Pro AME Export where times decrease from approximately 20-30 percent when CUDA is enabled.
On the downside, transcoding is still all done by the CPU.
“On the other hand, if you want to take three 1920 x 1080 clips, color correct them, perform luma adjustment, add drop shadows, composite into a single stream, then downsample into a 1280 x 720 MPEG-2 file for DVD export, the benefit from GPU-based acceleration can be enormous. If you’re stepping up from 30 to 60 frames per second through frame doubling, then CUDA won’t help, but if you get that doubling through tweening (Premiere’s method for automatically adding or modifying one or more frames between two existing frames), then CUDA can slice the generation time substantially.”
The following cards are presently supported
- Quadro 5000
- Quadro 4000
- Quadro FX 5800
- Quadro FX 4800
- Quadro FX 4800 Mac
- Quadro FX 3800
- GeForce GTX 470
- GeForce GTX 285
According to CPU utilization testing from Tom’s Hardware Staff, the best “bang for the buck” in AE CS5 is a quad-core with HT and multiprocessing enabled as it delivers most of the chip’s potential performance while still leaving loads of available processor bandwidth for other tasks.
Conclusion
We should at least get GTX 460′s for the videographers. Regarding Photoshop, there will be no real improvements without plugins. In fact, maybe a higher end GTX 470 or 480 might be in order.
