CUDA Card- Beneficial for my setup?

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themagichoof

Active member
I've got an i-7 2600k cpu overclocked to 4.8ghz, 16GB of ram and an SSD drive on Windows 7. I plan to use this with Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, etc.

1) Considering my specs, would a CUDA card help me out much?

2) Exactly which features are sped up by using CUDA? (I'm hoping final rendering in the rendering queue at least)

3) Should I go for the GTX 570 card or the GTX 580?

4) Can SLI even work with CUDA? I might get two 570 or 580 cards someday.

I'm trying to figure out all of this CUDA stuff so I appreciate replies in advance. Any other thoughts and advice you may have to offer are appreciated.
 
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themagichoof said:
1) Considering my specs, would a CUDA card help me out much?
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Absolutely.

2) Exactly which features are sped up by using CUDA? (I'm hoping final rendering in the rendering queue at least)
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http://www.nvidia.com/object/builtforadobepros.html

3) Should I go for the GTX 570 card or the GTX 580?
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Between those, I think the 580 is the one that is officially supported. But it's also at the bottom of the list in terms of performance (and price of course). If you can afford it, a Quadro card will be much better. Here's a list of all the cards and features: http://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/product-comparison/product-comparison-master-revised.pdf

4) Can SLI even work with CUDA? I might get two 570 or 580 cards someday.
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See above link for pdf. It includes info on SLI.

I'm trying to figure out all of this CUDA stuff so I appreciate replies in advance. Any other thoughts and advice you may have to offer are appreciated.
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Maybe you could look for primary sources of info before you post questions like this in the future? I saw it was your first post and thought I'd help point you in the right direction. But I suspect you'll get better mileage by doing a bit of searching first, and THEN asking questions after you've got the basics understood.

One point about the overclocking - it could cause you some problems with the software you're running. So if you start to see a lot of crashes of the Adobe software, try going back to the standard clock speeds. With a CUDA card you won't really get much out of an overclocked CPU. At least, that's been my experience.

Anyway, welcome to the forums. Hope all of this helps.
 
keylight said:
\Maybe you could look for primary sources of info before you post questions like this in the future?
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I actually have been searching quite a bit over the past two days but never found much of a definitive answer due to conflicting opinions, so I decided to post my own thread. Thanks for the reply though.
 
I'm still confused on some things. I understand that the preview window and FX are sped up a bit, but is CUDA processing actually used in final rendering? That's the main thing I want to clear up - I want to cut down on rendering time.

The other thing is that I've heard people say that there is not much performance difference in a GTX 570/580 for Adobe CS5.5 compared to a Quadro, and that the Quadro has stuff that can't be made of use in CS5.5

I also heard someone mention that AE/PPro can make no use of an SLI setup, but it appears to be supported on that comparison pdf you linked.

On the link you posted about the Quadro cards, it has After Effects listed as being supported. On the official Adobe page located here: http://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprot...y-playback-engine-and-adobe-premiere-pro.html it says After Effects doesn't support CUDA.

Something else that's confusing me is that it says on the page I just posted, "It’s worth mentioning one set of things that Premiere Pro doesn’t process using CUDA: encoding and decoding.". First, I'm not sure I understand encoding Vs decoding Vs rendering. 2nd, it says on the page you posted located at http://www.nvidia.com/object/adobe_PremiereproCS5.html "encode video up to 13 times faster cutting down on final project time". So what's the answer?

That's why I wanted to post, can't get a clear answer. But as soon as I do, I'll probably be getting a new card :)
 
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Short answer is no. If you use media encoder it doesn't use CUDA at all. (CS5) Only with straight export. And it will only accelerate certain effects, not the rendering itself. A quadro card will not do anything better, only way more expensier. Go with the gtx580 especially if you are going to game.
 
maarek said:
If you use media encoder it doesn't use CUDA at all. (CS5) Only with straight export.
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What do you mean? If I use the adobe media encoder it doesn't use CUDA, but if I do a straight export, it does? I admit, I don't even have Premiere Pro yet so I'm a little confused. But as far as I have learned so far, going to Export calls up the adobe media encoder so it's the same thing.


But please clear this up for me as it's confusing me to no end:

It's worth mentioning one set of things that Premiere Pro doesn't process using CUDA: encoding and decoding.
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Then 3 seconds later it says,

CUDA processing can be used for rendering for final output, too.
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So... what's the answer? Encoding and decoding both take place during final export/rendering.

One last question: I think there was this plugin called elemental accelerator which actually used CUDA, but it was 3rd party. Is that plugin still supported with CS5.5?
 
Premiere Pro has two export options, Direct and through Adobe Media Encoder.

A Direct export will offer the CUDA acceleration. As PP is using CUDA for it's own playback purposes, and you can only have one instance of it at a time, going through AME does not use CUDA acceleration. However, going though AME will allow you to batch export multiple sequences, and it will allow you to keep working in PP while the exports happen. With a Direct export, you're stuck waiting while it happens.

Decoding (converting from a compressed image to a full image for display) and encoding (creating a new image using a codec) do not use the GPU. Those tasks are done solely by the CPU. However, if a frame of video has certain accelerated effects on it, the rendering of those effects will be handled by CUDA before handing the new rendered frame off to the CPU for encoding.
 
I think that the main reason for confusion on this thread is that people are confused about the words 'rendering' and 'encoding'.

Rendering is the creation of an image from various inputs.

Encoding is the conversion of that image into a specific format---usually a format that can store lots of information with a small number of bits.

Upon export, rendering happens first, the rendered image is passed to the encoding software, and then encoding happens.

Upon preview, there is no encoding step: the uncompressed rendered image is just drawn to the screen.

So, regarding what CUDA does and doesnt accelerate in Premiere Pro:
CUDA accelerates many parts of rendering. That's done by Premiere Pro (or by a "headless" version of Premiere Pro if you are rendering to final output using Adobe Media Encoder).

CUDA does not accelerate the encoding phase. Adobe Media Encoder itself isn't CUDA-accelerated.
 
Keep it mind a lot of gurus do not fully understand MPE and CUDA.

Take a look at this post: http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-c...rt-vs-queue-great-difference-performance.html
Harm Millaard is a very knowledgeable and respected person who has helped so many, yet he was wrong regarding this matter.

Also, keep it mind that when somebody talk about encoding, he maybe or may not be including the fact that encoding requires rendering. What happens is that when you hit that export button to create a video file, Ppro first needs to render what's on timeline to encode the video. Because of that, even if Ppro(CUDA-MPE) does not use CUDA for encoding, you get boost in speed (because of CUDA being used when rendering). This is usually the root of confusion. Some people are technical so that they separate the process of encoding from rendering which makes sense. Some just think of encoding as a package deal of rendering+encoding which also makes sense. To keep it civil and simple, just think CUDA-MPE will give you significant boost in encoding speed.

Another things is that CUDA-MPE does get used when using Media Encoder as long as you turn off MRQ (explained in the link posted above.)
 
One more thing. That beefy and expensive 570 or 580 is only slightly better than cheap ($100) and weak GT 240 DDR5. If you play games, difference would be huge between those 2 cards (570,580 vs. 240,) but current state of Ppro does not require that much of GPU power. Things may change when Ppro CS6 comes along so it's better to get something better than GT 240 DDR5 to be future proof. I think GTS 460 is the best deal for that matter.
 
To keep it civil and simple, just think CUDA-MPE will give you significant boost in encoding speed.
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Oh, that's just asking for a whole lot of confusion.

I think it best if the non-technical people get technical so they can really understand what it is going on, rather than dumbing things down with a sentence that is technically inaccurate.
 
Jim Simon said:
Oh, that's just asking for a whole lot of confusion.

I think it best if the non-technical people get technical so they can really understand what it is going on, rather than dumbing things down with a sentence that is technically inaccurate.
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That's what I used to think as well and I've corrected people countless times. But, I've come to realize 99% of people do not care and they just want a simple answer, so they can use their limited time on producing works instead of learning about how things actually work.
 
It's one thing to keep it simple if the complexities are unknown and don't need to be mentioned. I do that all the time myself.

But in this case, the confusion was already present. Your statement doesn't clarify or make it simpler. It only repeats the original confusion.

Rendering and encoding are two different things. The first can be CUDA accelerated, the second will not be. That's really as simple as you can make it and still be right.
 
Yes, 'rendering and encoding' are two different things but the problem is that when one says CUDA does not get used for encoding, most of people assume CUDA won't boost their encoding speed. This creates confusion as I've witnessed in this and many other threads. Thus, I've explained how people use the term in their own ways and what's technically correct. Given that, how does my statement not clarify this issue? OP was asking if CUDA will help his encoding speed which it will but some people just had to be technical by saying it does not help encoding speed for CUDA doesn't get used in encoding process.

If one wants to be technical disregarding context, he might as well say MPE doesn't use CUDA for MPE also refers to software-only MPE. Look around, people say MPE as if MPE is the term coincide with CUDA although it's not.
 
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