Can you tell me why striping drives with RED footage is asking for trouble?

Thanks,
Matt

[Don't have a Red Rocket and so can't compare. RR is specific to RED workflows whereas a NVIDIA is more generic but more broadly useful to Premiere Pro workflows outside of RED.]

you said, AME does not utilize the GPU for encoding? Are you absolutely sure about this? Because, we equiped our MacPros with Quadro 400s especially because of that (remember the accelerator cards years ago? Quadro CX featured acceleration of H.264 encoding). Apart from that, there is a whole discussion about a AME bug, that causes random freezes during encoding:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/4319167

We suffer severely from this bug when encoding H.264. Interestingly it is caused (in our case) when we export from PrPro via the Queue with the projects setting on “gpu acceleration”. With “software only” the encoding is definitely slower, but stable.

[DR - where there are GPU effects in the timeline, it will be accelerated in the decode process of the timeline in AME, but not in the encode process (making the actual final file). At least, that's my understanding of it. AME has been updated, so let me know if the bug has been addressed by the update.]

Great article! I was wondering what the performance difference is using your test system with a run of the mill 512MB graphics card like the: ZOTAC GT218IONGPU-A-E GeForce GT 218 compared to the Quadro cards you tested. Given the power of your computer system….does the GPU on these video cards really help that much?

Thanks…Victor

[DR - For Premiere Pro to really be able to utilize any GPU, we need to see at least 768MB of RAM. Your example above wouldn't add anything to Premiere Pro's performance, but if you took the same card but it had more memory, then it would.]

Nice article.

Is it still true that the Adobe approved GeForce video cards will carry out the rendering if there are up to three video layers on the timeline while the approved Quadro cards will render more layers?

Any answer would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Regis

[DR - GPU cards do not do the rendering when outputting via AME. They do the FX in the timeline. As far as Quadro vs. GeForce, it's more about memory, the design engineering (Quadro), and GPU cores. check out some of my articles on GPUs]

Intending digital video journalism which would require some quick and basic video editing on site and promptly, I bought a Thinkpad W520 with an i7 quad core CPU an nVidia 1000m GPU only to learn that Adobe Premier Pro CS5.5 does not support the 1000m GPU. I was stunned. From what I’d seen the W520 with the 1000m GPU is by far the most popular configuration of the w520. Will Adobe Premier Pro ever support this card or is it just technically impossible? Thanks again for the article. Lucien

[DR - We're pretty clear about what we officially support. There are ways around it that are available but it obviously is not officially supported. As to whether the 1000m will be officially supported in teh future, I honestly don't know. Sorry I don't have more info for you but I hope this helps just a bit.]

This is a wonderful article and I too am shocked you put yourself through the torture that is nailing down differences between any set of video cards within the PPro realm. I recently went through my own test while editing my first 3D video with motion graphics, material shot with true Left/Right eye cameras, and so on. I have been using Premiere since I can remember and have been involved with more Mac arguments than I wish to recall. So I tested my new platform (AMD 8-Core CPU, 16GB RAM, RAID array) with NVIDIA cards. After my 100th test 3D Blu-Ray DVD I thought it might behoove me to actually monitor my parallax whilst editing. I have a GeForce GTX 580 with 3GB RAM and the render times in Premiere are simply stunning on that card. I can’t, however, get 3D monitoring capability without a Quadro family card. So I opted for the Quadro 4000. First thing I noted was an instant heat up to 90 degrees – without being used. I thought it was a driver issue and tried every driver out there before I gave up and just stuck a giant fan in front of it. Cineform noted the change and gave me my second monitor in 3D which gave me precisely what I’d been looking for. When I went to render a stretch of video I’d rendered many times under the GTX580, I noted a slowdown. A slowdown of about half. So it was now taking me twice as long to render a video. That wouldn’t do.

In the end, I took the 4000 hot-plate out of the computer, put the GTX580 back in and simply hooked a 3D TV to the 580′s second port. The TV notices that the signal is a 3D signal and runs 3D on its own. The Quadro cards are great for what they’re built for, which is basically 3D Cad programs like Inventor but in the race to have the baddest-assed gaming cards, NVIDIA overbuilds the hell out of the GeForce’s – much to our benefit.

Cheers –
Matt Sutherland

Loved the article and greatly appreciate the effort you put into it.

I’m a photographer looking to get into videography and NLEs so just trying to do as much exhaustive research into the sweet-spot for price vs. performance before I build out a system.

Now I understand your reasoning behind going for the Quadro vs the GeForce, particularly with the variations on manufacturing.

What I’m curious about is the PPBM5 benchmarks (thanks for the link!) show that the majority of builds are with GeForce cards, so very low number of Quadro builds for the sake of comparison, and they didn’t seem to storm the charts in terms of benchmarks (cause naturally there were other components involved as well).

So is the caveat that PPBM5 will tell you how fast the system will roughly run with the task entailed, but won’t show reliability, or dropped frames? This goes back to your Toyota vs Mercedes example?

[DR - reliability is a subjective and difficult thing to measure in practice. Why I favor Quadros is because of the reasons I outlined and their relation to durability and reliability. That's not to say that GeForce is unreliable. Far from it!

The dropped frames count is a feature that I can access that is not a published part of the product at all and is not related to the PPBM5 tests but rather my own.

I hope to do some GeForce testing soon and expect that it will do very well in the tests. I also completely understand that people don't want to pay for Quadro cards when GeForce cards can offer much of the same performance. If you have the money though and want to protect your investment, I think the Quadro is a fine way to go.]

[DR - Stay tuned. ;-]

And: how much does HP pays you for advertising HP-Systems over and over again, huh?

[DR - Hi Thomas. What you're talking about is OpenCL which is a cross vendor open standard and specifically what Apple plans to support. This is largely a subset of CUDA as AMD/ATI did not have any similar technology. I would recommend that you read this article, where I dive into the Mac issue more specifically. Pay particular attention to the section where I point out that OpenCL wasn't even finished or ratified when we first shipped CS5.

I will restate here (as I did in the article link above) that we are actively looking at OpenCL for the future, but the current version is NVIDIA only. The bottom line is that GPU acceleration wouldn't be in the marketplace at all if we hadn't done CUDA enabled acceleration back in 2010 with CS5. I feel your pain as I use a Mac laptop as my primary computer, so I'd love to have some GPU goodness here too.

Good luck and I hope your user group (email) is doing well.]

“if you bump down to half resolution, all your problems go away.”

When using an I/O card such as AJA or Blackmagic, it’s not possible to lower the resolution to gain any performance. The cards are full resolution all the time. There is no current way around this limitation that I am aware of at this time. That’s why it would be very interesting to run all your tests again but this time, run it through your AJA card. Would love to see those results.

I just bought a new Mac Pro about a year ago, and I would hate having to purchase a new, expensive graphics card. Of course Final Cut X works great on these ATI cards, but I absolutely hate this revision and refuse to use it, after being a Final Cut user for 10 years, which is why I am switching to Premiere.

Thanks, Randall

[DR - No, there is no conspiracy theory here between Adobe and Apple. The simple reason why our GPU acceleration is CUDA and not OpenCL is simply because OpenCL wasn't ratified until after CS5 shipped whereas NVIDIA had the technology done for almost three years. We wouldn't have GPU acceleration if it weren't for CUDA which is where we stand today. We will evaluate OpenCL for the future you can be sure. ]

Thank you for a great article!

[DR - Hey Randall, Thanks for the comment. The AJA Kona card is a video I/O board and does not provide acceleration per se. On a Mac, you would look to swap out the ATI card for the NVIDIA Quadro 4000 Mac to get the kind of performance I outlined. Hope this clarifies things.]

[DR - Hi Ronald, Yes, you can make a case for turning off Hyperthreading on PC boxes. For purposes of simplicity (and my sanity), I didn't choose to include that aspect of it. However, it may make sense to try it in the future, since I have the tests all set up...]

Really nice article and clearly demonstrates the need for managing your expectations as well as having a balanced system. Well done.

I would liked to have seen the same tests done with a 1920 x 1080 ProRes HQ file. Even though Final Cut may be losing its luster, there are many different devices using that codec. Arri Alexa and the AJA KiPro just to name two. I suspect that many Final Cut users switching over to Premiere Pro are also going to be using ProRes assets for years to come. It would be important to make sure this workflow is flawless.

Secondly, I would like to see the same testing done with a AJA or Blackmagic card. Most facilities are still utilizing an HD-SDI workflow and a I/O card is needed to gain that HD-SDI signal. From my experience with both AJA and Blackmagic, this area needs vastly improved.

[DR - Hi Ray, thanks for the comments. I strongly considered using ProRes instead of DVCProHD, but chose the latter because it a) is indicative of ProRes with Intraframe handling and data rates and b) is truly cross platform and more open across the whole spectrum of editing. I can say that I have tested ProRes with Premiere Pro and had great results with the GPU. I would expect the same results as I got with DVCProHD. Give it a try yourself if you can and report back.]

This has to be the best article on GPU performance I have seen to date. I loved how you used benchmarks and your own real world tests. What Adobe has done with the Mercury Playback Engine is remarkable. Anyone and everyone needs to understand and realize this is not the Premiere you remember. Adobe has built this into a professional app, integrated tightly with After Effects, Photoshop, Encore and the rest of the Production Premium. Video Editors need to jump on the Adobe SWTCHer offer while it is still available. $849 for the full Prod Premium CS5.5 Suite is a SWEET DEAL! http://www.webvideoguys.com/AdobeCS55switch.html

Gary
Videoguys.com

[DR - Thanks Gary. Yeah, the offer ends at the end of the month (October 2011), so good point.]