Premiere Pro CS5, First Gen MacPro and CUDA?
 

Well after much research I'm thinking of upgrading CS4 to CS5 on my MacPro (10gb RAM, 3tb HD, ati x1900, 2x3ghz Xeon). We currently use AVCHD captured from a Sony NXCAM NX5U.

For a while we used the footage raw in Premiere CS4, but I noticed that at the beginning and ending of clips I'd get random corrupted frames in CS4, with some occasional crashes. The files played fine in VLC. I purchased Cineform Neoscene, which worked well enough to remove the issue of corrupt frames but I don't get real-time playback in CS4 with it. CS5 seems leaps and bounds ahead of CS4 in that it can take advantage of all my RAM.

Two questions here:

1) Is there a CUDA capable card that works with a first gen MacPro? The 285 apparently is 64-bit EFI only, something not supported in early MacPros. The GT120 doesn't have enough memory to work with CUDA, at only 512mb. If there's nothing I can do...

2) Is realtime playback supported with either the native AVCHD decode in CS5, or with Cineform? Is it fairly stable in comparison to CS4, or is something the matter with my setup if it's not stable now?

I prefer to stay on Mac, as I not only do video production (print and screen design and I find my workflow is much faster on Mac) and have a limited budget (non-profit) to support purchasing CS5 for both Mac and Windows and making the necessary hardware purchases to go along with it.

Thanks for any feedback you can offer. I'm really struggling to figure out how to attain better stability and faster playback.