Pr CS5 - List of supported CUDA Cards

Report · Apr 01, 2010

Adobe is working on a playback and rendering engine for Adobe Premiere Pro called the Mercury Playback Engine. This new engine is NVIDIA® GPU-accelerated, 64-bit native, and architected for the future. Native 64-bit support enables you to work more fluidly on HD and higher resolution projects, and GPU acceleration speeds effects processing and rendering.

The Mercury Playback Engine offers these benefits:

Open projects faster, refine effects-rich HD and higher resolution sequences in real time, enjoy smooth scrubbing, and play back complex projects without rendering.
See results instantly when applying multiple color corrections and effects across many video layers.
Work in real time on complex timelines and long-form projects with thousands of clips — whether your project is SD, HD, 2K, 4K, or beyond.

Ensure your system is ready to take advantage of the Mercury Playback Engine in a future version of Adobe Premiere Pro. The Mercury Playback Engine works hand-in-hand with NVIDIA® CUDA™ technology to give you amazingly fluid, real-time performance. See it in action

* PR CS5 supports the following list of CUDA cards:

	GeForce GTX 285	Windows and MAC
	Quadro FX 3800	Windows
	Quadro FX 4800	Windows and MAC
	Quadro FX 5800	Windows
	Quadro CX	Windows

More hardware details:

http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/systemreqs/

Report · Apr 14, 2010

Indeed.

While folks complain about what cards aren't supported I will happily accept an exponential performance increase with one of the cards that is. The most expensive card has about a one week payback in any busy shop. This is a huge deal.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

I think I just have to wait and see how bad my GTX260 will perform before I buy a new card. I would like to know wich card to buy, though...that´s why I am interseted in knowing the difference in performance between the supported cards. But I´ll try to patient.

About the Mercury Engine supporting CUDA - i just found this post: http://forums.adobe.com/message/2583980#2583980

It seems that the Mercury Engine was not initially build for CUDA, but just for 64-bit...that might be the answer to why all CUDA cards are not supported. But tell us the story Adobe and Nvidia!!!!

Could one of your evangelists or some one else from Adobe and/or Nvidia (no offense to all you great guys who have heard something from someone who might know etc) not enlighten us here, in this forum, before we start some kind of conspiracy theory about Adobe and Nvidia? Put the (video)cards on the table (so to speak 😉 ) and tell us:

1. What is the main reason why all NVIDIA CUDA cards are not supported? Is it techincal? A time issue? Or what? Why?

2. When will we know if older less expensive Nvidia cards like GTX 260 will also be supported? We need to know so we can see if we need to buy new cards or just stick to the old ones long eneough to get support....is this not a valid wish?

3. When will we get an overview of how the supported cards perform compared to each other in preview, rendering etc.? We need to know so we can get excact the card that meets our needs. Roight now I don´t know if I just need a GTX285 or the Quadro CX. I need to know how much more performance I will gain from buying a much more expensive card. If I get fx. a 50% performance boost buying the CX I will buy it at once. Is it only 2% I think I will buy the GTX 285...otherwise i would be a fool with my money.

These are all questions that would be nice to get answers to before the shipping of CS5 - so we can make our choices whether to buy new videocards and if - which to buy - or we would like to wait untill our existing older Nvidia cards is working with the Mercury Engine. If we continue to not get any information about these questions this could develop into be a karma-killer for both companies....And you both have good karmas with me untill now!

I very much like Adobes products - been using allmost every one of them them for years. I have also had several Nvidia Cards over the years and have only tried the ATI cards a few times with bad experiences. So i stick to Adobe and Nvidia - no matter what - have no choice either;-) But I will be a very unhappy and dissapointet customer and user, if this story ends up looking like some kind of dirty deal between two companines. But I guess there is an explanation and it has to come from your comapines directly - not from a second source.

You could avoid all this by being more open about this issue and tell us more - and no more sales-talk - we allready want your products - they are all great - but we need help to find out which and when to buy what....please!

Report · Apr 15, 2010

Now that the launch is done and this information is all public, I'm going to summarize all the bits of information that have been floating around into one distilled post:

The Mercury playback engine comprises of 3 areas (our chief weapons are surprise, surprise and fear... nevermind...):

- 64 bit support, and better memory management / frame cache management / sharing between the Adobe apps (ie Premiere and After Effects & the Media Encoder have a notion of shared memory now, and are aware of how much is being consumed by their peers);

- optimizations to multithreaded rendering, to the playback's pipeline, speed improvements with various media types, and all around general fine tuning

- CUDA acceleration of effects / transforms / pixel conversion routines.

Don't have a supported CUDA board? You still get two out of three. Might not seem as sexy on the cover, but CS5 is still a massive improvement over CS4 even without the hardware acceleration.

(Conversely: let me dispel the myth that you can drop in a CUDA supported board into any box and you magically get umpteen layers of RED 4K in realtime. All that CUDA does is free the CPU from the tasks of doing image processing - video footage however still needs to be decoded by the CPU. If you're looking to do high end 4K, do yourself a favor and don't shortchange yourself on a cruddy box. Get an i7, for cryin' out loud... but I digress)

Now, why the limited card selection?

One of the biggest themes was to improve stability and making Premiere truly earn the Pro moniker. To quote another engineer, "This was a decision about being Pro." By limiting the selection of cards, you have a guarantee that the product will do what it's supposed to, that your rendering accuracy will be as good as in software, and that these cards will play nice with 3rd party I/O vendors.

What's the difference between the level of functionality I get with the GTX 285 vs the Quadro boards?

The GTX is limited to 3 streams of realtime. Also, the Quadros come with more memory, so this helps if you're looking to do hi-res (eg RED) editing. Lastly, as a gaming card set, the GTX cards will downclock themselves if they're overheating, so your performance might drop if your cooling isn't the best. The Quadros OTOH have a fixed clock rate, assumingly they have better heat tolerance levels.

When will that selection expand?

TBD. All I will say is that we are looking at some of the next-gen Fermi cards, but they're still undergoing evaluation. Let's put it this way - the beta users group is still running so that they can help test the new card support going forward. Keep your ear to the ground, I'm sure there will be plenty of noise made when they're announced.

Can you add me to the beta list?

Nope. Not my domain, I'm afraid.

What's the scoop with ATI cards, and openCL? Why nVidia / CUDA only?

When the acceleration work began over a year & a half ago, openCL wasn't even a finalized specification. CUDA was a more mature technology, so that's what we went with. For the future? It'll be evaluated for CS 6.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

"All I will say is that we are looking at some of the next-gen Fermi cards, but they're still undergoing evaluation. Let's put it this way - the beta users group is still running so that they can help test the new card support going forward."

Do you think the GTX 470 will be supported? It is only second to the GTX 480 and should trounce the GTX 285 that is already on the list for the SAME PRICE.

Can't imagine why they would ignor this card but what do I know.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

Please re-read Will's post (#62). Nothing has changed in the last 20 minutes.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

Well, that's what they told me and I just ordered a $4k laptop based on that, so if its not ture I'm going to call my lawyer. If these mobile cards are not supported it would be a huge mistake, the market for editing mobile workstation is huge and it would be a huge mistake not to support these.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

I also call my lawyer quite often. He just happens to be one of my best friends.

Your claim there is a huge market for editing mobile workstations is just your opinion and I tend to disagree with that statement. But that is not relevant here. Adobe made a choice as Wil quite clearly explained. You just don't like the choice. Well, that is your prerogative or problem.

Good luck with your lawyer in suing nVidia.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

My father is my lawyer.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

I did contact Adobe, I wrote here on this forum, and did not get an answer, so went directly to them, and ask three times, again and again, to make sure. They said YES, it supports Mercury. I was very clear. So when I got an answer, I went and ordered the laptop.

Anyway, I got a i7-980X Extreme Edition and on that laptop the graphics card is user changeable so...

Report · Apr 15, 2010

Mike Brent wrote:
I did contact Adobe, I wrote here on this forum, and did not get an answer, so went directly to them, and ask three times, again and again, to make sure. They said YES, it supports Mercury. I was very clear. So when I got an answer, I went and ordered the laptop.
Anyway, I got a i7-980X Extreme Edition and on that laptop the graphics card is user changeable so...

Please clarify. Earlier you said that nVidia told you the mobile version was supported. In the quote above, you imply that *Adobe* told you the mobile version is supported. Which is it, please?

-Jeff

Report · Apr 15, 2010

Out of curiosity, do you have a link to the laptop? I'm curious what laptop allows you to swap out its GPU... other than bust-your-warrantee home DYI jobs, I've never heard of any that support this.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

Wil,

C'mon....Answer this

Are the GTX 470 and/or GTX 480 safe bets for Mercury compatbility this year?

Report · Apr 15, 2010

I do not think this is a realistic question. Correction, the question is realistic, but you can't at this moment expect a realistic answer, from Wil or anybody else. One thing we can expect is that the Fermi cards will be popular and Adobe intends to support them. There have been mentions from Adobe that the intention is to support the 480 in Q3. The 470 has not been mentioned, AFAIK.

My personal GUESS is that the 480 is pretty safe, but no garantee's.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

"Are the GTX 470 and/or GTX 480 safe bets for Mercury compatbility this year?"

Maybe..?

Any card isn't certified until it is. Until they're validated by QE, your speculation is as good as mine - and both are equally worthless if we guess wrong.

Keep in mind that it's not just whether the GPU supports CUDA adequately & has the horse power, but whether the current drivers are available & work correctly (for instance, on mac, we require 10.6.3 for CUDA support, as there are some intrinsic driver bug fixes in that update); whether the product is available on mac & windows is obviously preferable (from what I hear the GTX 480, while being the better card, won't fit into the mac pro chassis), etc; and lastly, how much bandwidth QE has to certify the board(s) so that we're comfortable with having them on the validated list.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

Thanks Wil!

I appreciate your honesty and insight.

Wil Renczes wrote:
"Are the GTX 470 and/or GTX 480 safe bets for Mercury compatbility this year?"
Maybe..?
Any card isn't certified until it is. Until they're validated by QE, your speculation is as good as mine - and both are equally worthless if we guess wrong.
Keep in mind that it's not just whether the GPU supports CUDA adequately & has the horse power, but whether the current drivers are available & work correctly (for instance, on mac, we require 10.6.3 for CUDA support, as there are some intrinsic driver bug fixes in that update); whether the product is available on mac & windows is obviously preferable (from what I hear the GTX 480, while being the better card, won't fit into the mac pro chassis), etc; and lastly, how much bandwidth QE has to certify the board(s) so that we're comfortable with having them on the validated list.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

I will not call you a liar, but your statement leaves me in doubt.

Anyway, I got a i7-980X Extreme Edition and on that laptop the graphics card is user changeable so...

I have never seen or heard about a notebook with an i7-980X and exchangeable video cards. Add three hard disks @ 7200 RPM and battery life can't be more than 10 minutes. Thickness of the notebook would probable be around 8" to accomodate the CPU cooler, or does it have liquid nitrogen cooling as well?

Like Wil, I would like to see who supplies these kind of notebooks and what configuration you chose.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

http://www.eurocom.com/

These are 980x laptops that you can upgrade. All the GPUs are mobile models though.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

You won't call me a lier, ha? This is what I have to do with my time, go around forums and make up stories about laptops... yes?

Products
------------------------------

------------------------
1 x Sager NP9280 (Built on Clevo D900F) Ultimate Custom Laptop () = $4,284.01
Display 17" WUXGA "Glare Type" Super Clear Ultra Bright Glossy Screen (1920x1200)
Dead Pixel Policy Standard Dead Pixel Policy
Processor Intel® Core™ i7-980X Extreme Edition (3.33-3.60GHz) 12MB Intel® Smart Cache - 6 Cores/12Threads
Thermal Compound - IC Diamond Thermal Compound - CPU + GPU
Graphics Video Card nVidia GeForce GTX 285M 1,024MB PCI-Express GDDR3 DX10 (User Upgradeable)
External Graphics Card No External Graphics Card
External Monitor Video Adapter No Video Adapter
Ram ~ 12,288MB DDR3 1333MHz Memory (3 SODIMMS) (w/ i7 975/980 CPU Only)
Exterior Finish Standard Finish
Optical Drive ~ 4X Blue-Ray Read/8X DVDRW Super Multi Combo Drive
Primary Hard Drive ~ 160GB Intel X25-M Solid State Drive (SSD2 Serial-ATA II)
Second Hard Drive ~ 500GB 7200RPM (Serial-ATA II 300 - 16MB Cache)~
Third Hard Drive ~ 500GB 7200RPM (Serial-ATA II 300 - 16MB Cache)~
Raid Raid 0 Stripe Enabled (Requires 2 or 3 Hard Drives. Combines Hard Drives for performance)
External Hard Drive (Back Up) No Back Up Hard Drive
Floppy Drive No Floppy Drive
Memory Card Reader Internal 7-in-1 Card Reader (MS/MS Pro/MS Duo/MS Pro Duo/SD/Mini-SD/MMC/RS)
Bluetooth Internal Bluetooth + EDR
Wireless Network Intel® Ultimate-N 6300 - 802.11A/B/G/N Wireless LAN Module
Wireless Network Accessories No Network Accessory
Camera Integrated Digital Video Camera
TV Tuner No TV Tuner
Sound Card Sound Blaster Compatible 3D Audio - Included
Case Basic Black Business Case - Included
Battery Smart Li-ion Battery (12 Cell)
Spare AC Adapter None Standard*
Port Replicator / Dock / Adapters No Dock/Hub/Adapter
Fingerprint Reader No Fingerprint Reader
Mouse / Keyboard Accessories No External Keyboard or Mouse

------------------------------------------------------
Sub-Total: $4,284.01

Have a nice day

Report · Apr 15, 2010

Thanks for the info. I was not aware that Sager did have configurations with the i7-980X. Useful to know.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the GTX 285M is not the sames as the Desktop 285 specs wise.

Not compatible with Mercury Engine from where I stand.

Mike Brent wrote:

Graphics Video Card nVidia GeForce GTX 285M 1,024MB PCI-Express GDDR3 DX10 (User Upgradeable)

Report · Apr 15, 2010

I went to nVidia website and spoke with someone on the live chat. I asked him if the M model is supported. He said he will check with someone and then after 8-10 minutes he came back and said yes. I asked again, if he is 100% certain. He said yes. I asked again, he again said he is sure. I asked him if he is certain that he understand my question, about the card supporting Mercury for PP CS5, he said YES.

Thats the story...

Report · Apr 15, 2010

Mike Brent wrote:
I went to nVidia website and spoke with someone on the live chat. I asked him if the M model is supported. He said he will check with someone and then after 8-10 minutes he came back and said yes. I asked again, if he is 100% certain. He said yes. I asked again, he again said he is sure. I asked him if he is certain that he understand my question, about the card supporting Mercury for PP CS5, he said YES.
Thats the story...

I dont think you are lying but perhaps the RT performace will be very poor.

It sound as though Adobe will give us much more information in a few more weeks. Who knows maybe even the GT 240 will be support to work with AVCHD but not the Red One codec. They may have to print dissclaimers for the lower end cards and mobile cards.

Report · Apr 15, 2010

Mike Brent

That sounds like one Helluva Laptop bro!

Its cost & specs are comparable to an HP Z workstation.

(I wonder how well its cooling is... don't burn your lap)

I see it as leading the way and hopefully other Laptops will follow its direction by giving us the strength of a Desktop in a Laptop.

Some complain about the size of a 17" or larger laptop but for me, as long as it will Clamshell close (which is what makes it portable in my book) I would like to have a 24"+ laptop. - It's the BIG Tower + Monitor + Keyboard + Mouse that keeps desktops from being portable.

For me, I'm still sitting w/my Z400 & 2 FX1800's that my fingers are crossed in hopes of having both Hardware & Software acceleration for... and now I'm drooling over this laptop.

Boy, do I hate my addictions.

----------------------------------------------

-- Rude People Suck!

Report · Apr 15, 2010

My problem with HP is that they REFUSE to tell you which brand /model of SSD they are going to use... they might push you some junk driver from a year ago and then by the time you find out about it, its too late. I tried getting and answer from them but they simply refused to tell me what they will be using, which was not a good sign...

I DO STILL HOPE my GPU card will be supported somehow !!!

Report · Apr 19, 2010

Hey Wil -

I was looking at teh same laptop myself!! Funny how some people never heard of them (Sager) so they immediately assume that it doesn't exist and that you are telling a fib!!

The only bummer part is that it has a glossy screen and is non-LED. But other than that, it's a beast...especially with the 6 core!!

Have fun with it and I hope that you will be able to utilize the MPE to it's full extent.

Pr CS5 - List of supported CUDA Cards

1 Correct answer