Graphics card...how much of a performance boost?

rawfa

rawfa

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I decided to buy a desktop and I'm now doing some research on all the bits and parts so that I can edit those pesky AVCHD NEX files on CS5 smoothly. Other then cpu and ram I've been reading a lot about graphics cards. I was wondering how much could I gain by using something like a GTX570 o 590...or even a more expenssive Quadro 2000 while editing AND exporting AVCHD NEX files .
 
Any "approved" card using NVIDIA has the Mercury Playback Engine advantage in Premiere.

It is seriously worth it for the editing experience. Realtime and multi layered etc. THere is a ton of stuff showing the MPE advantages on Youtube and the Adobe sites.

Card doesnt do so much for export but thats not an issue. RAM and CPU speed is for export advantages
 
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Check out the Adobe CS5 hardware forum (http://forums.adobe.com/message/3996802#3996802 for example) for lots of very good info about what is required to make CS5 perform well.

A proper video card is essential to make AVCHD editing work well in CS5. However, in addition to an officially Adobe approved cards, many other NVIDIA (only) cards will work with the "Mercury Engine Hack" (Google that) and at least 1 GB RAM on the card. Most who know say that the exta money for Quadro is not worth it for the Mercury acceleration nor do the more expensive 580 cards particularly outperform the 560. At least 12GB RAM, 3 or more 7200 disks and an i7 are needed though there seems to be a raging argument about whether the X58 based boards and CPU are better than the new "Sandy Bridge" set-ups. X58 is tried and true, though. Good luck!
 
rawfa said:
I decided to buy a desktop and I'm now doing some research on all the bits and parts so that I can edit those pesky AVCHD NEX files on CS5 smoothly. Other then cpu and ram I've been reading a lot about graphics cards. I was wondering how much could I gain by using something like a GTX570 o 590...or even a more expenssive Quadro 2000 while editing AND exporting AVCHD NEX files .
Click to expand...

Hey , Like another poster cautioned, Quadro aint all it's cracked up to be. I recently switched to CS5.5 from CS4 and that was a huge jump in simple performance. I went ahead and doubled my RAM to 24, another big jump. The Quadro I have FX3800 came with elemental accelerator, and when you could use elemental, now that thing smoked! But I only used elemental rarely. Most of my work is in After Effects, and only rarely did I find I could use the Quadro to speed up a preview. It never has made a render faster. So yeah, get a nice GTX570 or what have you and then go get some RAM. If I had room for another 24 I'd already be there or saving for it!
 
Ram is cheap, stuff as much as you can in the box. Skip the Quadro, get a big, fast Nvidia card, lay on the hack and enjoy. I'm using 5.5 with 24gb's of ram, a GTX 460 and it rocks.
 
The GPU itself won't make editing AVCHD any easier. That is pretty much CPU dependant. So if your's isn't up to snuff now, adding a new nVidia card won't help.

What the card does accelerate is certain effects, scaling, frame rate discrepancies, etc. Those things will get much easier to play back, but only if your current system can easily play back the raw media. If it stumbles on a clip placed into a matching sequence without any effects, a new GPU isn't going to help that at all.

To correct Shooter, hardware acceleration is equally effect during export as it in playback. (But again, only certain things are accelerated.)
 
Jim Simon said:
The GPU itself won't make editing AVCHD any easier. That is pretty much CPU dependant. So if your's isn't up to snuff now, adding a new nVidia card won't help.

What the card does accelerate is certain effects, scaling, frame rate discrepancies, etc. Those things will get much easier to play back, but only if your current system can easily play back the raw media. If it stumbles on a clip placed into a matching sequence without any effects, a new GPU isn't going to help that at all.

To correct Shooter, hardware acceleration is equally effect during export as it in playback. (But again, only certain things are accelerated.)
Click to expand...

Jim posts a great summary regarding mercury playback engine (MPE) gpu acceleration. You still need a fast cpu, but the gpu takes over for certain effects (fast color corrector, etc), scaling, different frame rates -- this will make exporting faster because the cpu doesn't need to handle those particular tasks.

Studio1 Productions has a great article regarding different Nvidia GPUs from $50-$500 and their effect on MPE. You don't need the highest end $500 GPU for most things.

http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm
 
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