Quadro CX
 

Is anyone running Nvidia's Quadro CX with Premiere?

Is it worth it?

It sounds interesting

PC Perspective - NVIDIA Quadro CX Review and Adobe CS4 GPU Acceleration

I have one, the card is awesome, and extremely powerful. Doesn't directly speed up Premiere unless you are rendering H264, but it accelerates AE like crazy. Still waiting for 10bit color support in software, but that is the high end card of choice for sure.

If you consider the added cost over a good video card, around $ 1.700, the benefits seem negligent. IMO it is far better to invest that money in better/faster CPU's (2 sockets), more RAM and better disk setup including a good Raid controller for that amount of money. That will benefit all tasks, not just H264 rendering. IMO it is a waste of money, unless you already have a $ 8K+ workstation that can not be improved upon and you still have money to burn. It seems the number of people in that category are rapidly diminishing due to the recent events on the NYSE.

For the money you would be better off with a Matrox RTX2 card. This does accelerate Premiere to give multiple streams of realtime performance and FX. Check out their website. Everybody makes a big deal about the New Nvidia board but really the Matrox does this and then some and they have been doing it for years. If Nvidia could do this with everyday graphics cards then it would be awesome.

The Matrox board also gives you component in and out for higher quality material and a live HDTV output. You also get this same component output from inside of Photoshop and After Effects as well as a few 3D programs. Matrox also adds many of their own custom filters and FX to Premiere that are realtime which greatly enhances what Premiere can do.

The only down side to the RTX2 is that it is limited to 1440x1080 resolution projects. If you do work with "true" 1920x1080 material such as from the SONY EX1 then you may want to bump up to their Axio product which costs a lot more. EX1 material still edits perfectly but it does so in a 1440x1080 project. If you are a 1440x1080 person which includes pretty much every other HD format out there including DVCPROHD and HDCAM then you have no worries.

If you really want to give Premiere a boost you should really check it out. The RTX2 is much cheaper and it can do so much more.

Agreed that it is expensive, but yes it is assumed that you already have a modern 8 Core workstation before you go looking for a $2K GPU. I have never paid that much for a Graphics card, since my Quadro 4600 was just included in my refurbished workstation, and I recieved the CX through other channels. Admittedly the GTX 260 is similar hardware for about $1500 cheaper, but there should be advantages to the Quadro line in regards to stability as well as OpenGL quality.
As far as the RTx2 goes, that will have a much greater impact on performance in Premiere, but only if you are editing DV, HDV, etc. I work with EX on the low end, and SR scans and Red on the high end, so it is of little use to me. I due have AXIO-LE systems at work, and they are very good for certain things. The place you will really see the CX perform is in After Effects. Admittedly, this is the Premiere thread, but AE is related. I have yet to really take advantage of the H264 encoding or the 10bit display port, but DP is the one feature that will divide the CX from all of the current cards (FX45/46/55/5600) in the future, as they become obselete. Once this is integrated within applications, the benefits of CX or any following cards will be clear.

Thomas,

I don't think we will agree on this, but for me never, never a Matrox again. I have used several Matrox cards and the best time with them ever, was when I promoted those cards to their intended use: a door stopper.

Pull them out and you will see so much improved stability you wish you had done that before.

I`m with Harm on this one. Don`t buy Matrox unless the only thing you need is to churn simple event videography as quick as possible. It WILL cause you more trouble than it`s worth. It does SO GREAT on paper, but in reality, it rarely works as advertised. It`s a real shame, because when it works, it`s awesome. But that, sadly, doesn`t happen very often. Believe me, I tried hard.

There are a lot of people and production companies that use Matrox cards with great success every day. Just because they caused problems for you doesn't mean they will for everybody else. I'm not saying they are perfect but for your two negative comments I can find 200 people who totally love them and find they can't go back to just Premiere even if they wanted to.

The problem with the Matrox cards is that they tend to be very picky when it comes to hardware. If you stick to the strict hardware needs then they are very solid. If you are somebody serious enough about video to want to buy a $1,000.00 Matrox card then it is really best to build a system based on their specs.

I understand you guys have had problems but that still doesn't change the fact that Matrox enhances Premiere way more then what the Nvidia boards will. In fact even for AE performance you would be better off getting a Matrox board and using the other $1,000 to get a slightly slower Quadro card. That way you get the best of both worlds.

A Matrox I/O card (RTx2 or AXIO) will slow AE performance always, unless you disable the card output. The benefit is that you get a video output, but the performance drops dramatically. We have extra systems at work dedicated to avoiding use of AE on an Axio system. If you need a true video output from AE, get an NVidia card that has one, but it will be expensive. The only aspect of AE that is accelerated by Matrox hardware is the decompression of certain MPEG files if you are using them in your comp. As noted before, Matrox hardware dramatically improves Premiere performance, as long as you color within the lines. Any unsupported media, or hardware, and you can expect issues.

So which would be better for Premiere and Bluray encoding. A Core i7 with a Quadro CX or Dual Quad core Xenons with a lower end card?

Is there that much benefit going from 4 to 8 cores?

I have also looked curiously at these cards. I've already pretty much made up my mind I want to migrate to the panny hmc-150 avchd camcorder. I now own a dvx100b. Computer processing power is catching up, but I'd still love to see an accelerator card to process avchd beautifully in premiere. I am currently editing with a canopus dv storm and premiere 1.5, but they have long abandoned premiere and so I will have to say goodbye to canopus ahem grass valley. I suspect though that since Matrox is so thoroughly attached to premiere these days that Matrox will either come out with a new card or update the current cards for avchd cameras. But I haven't heard anything. They are supposed to have an update to support premiere cs4 soon, in which premiere supports avchd. So we'll see I guess.

For AVCHD editing, you should at least take a look at Cineform's solution. Their ProspectHD software would probably suit your needs. Matrox has yet to support AVCHD, and they claim that the RT-X2 is hardware limited to 1440x1080. (I suspect someday you may see a software update that unlocks full 1920 frame sizes. They did the same thing with 10bit color on the AXIO-LE card) Regardless, I hear that a Core i7 system is loosely comparable to an 8 core Xeon system. I would not be surprised if Core i7s beat the Xeons on single threaded apps. I invested in an 8-Core Xeon system last week, but only because I found a great deal, and because HPs are certified hardware solutions for my apps.

RTX2 is (should be anyway) great for quick turnaround event videography, local news editing, church video and such - simple cuts editing, possibly with several streams of HD (this is really awesome if you need it) with simple CC. Oh, and the awesome HD monitoring.

But! As soon as you need more advanced compositing, CC, interoperability with other apps, advantages diminish to near zero and incompatibility and issues start to pop everywhere. Matrox HD files are incompatible with many apps, you cannot even play them on a system without the card (Matrox says you can play them with their software codec but forgets to say that works for SD only). No thumbnails in Bridge (or, you need to uninstall Quicktime, which is unacceptable). No 720p 24 print to tape. NO export acceleration (original RTX2 ads say otherwise!) - only to its own, largely incompatible Matrox AVI format. Issues with controlling JVC camcorders. Lags and crashes. Analog inputs not working correctly half the time, and usually limited to 1080i, which is stated in a sole sentence in Readme (ads state that all HD formats are supported). And incompetent support, with "thread solved and locked" on issues with no apparent solution.

And all that with Matrox-certified turnkey workstation. Take a peek into their support forums. Too bad they won`t let you to troubleshooting areas until purchase. There is a reason for that.

I really like the feed back I am getting about the Matrox card from you guys. I am used to Avid where we have lots of realtime layers but to be totally honest I'm not really sure if that is important anymore. For example Avid Liquid can beat the pants off of Premiere on it's own in terms of how much it can do in realtime. Export will kill you however. I used to work in an environment where did a lot of TV shows with multiple layers and streams and it had to play in RT to dump back to Beta SP. I now see those days are starting to slip away more and more. Now I am finding that Premiere on it's own does in RT most of what I actually need it to do for most of my editing. I no longer dump to tape so it doesn't really matter if my system can play 4 streams of HD in RT. I mean its cool that I can do it in Avid but honestly I will never afford a HD-SDI based deck so that pretty much just leaves it as cool. Where my main core is now is making data based products such as flash video, WMV, DVD and Blu-ray. Premeire totally smokes Liquid in this aspect so I can actually get jobs done faster. The only problem I have is that CS4 just will not play back very well on my new system while CS3 works perfectly. I really need CS4 for some of the workflow features so hopefully it can get fixed soon. I have decided not to get a Matrox card because I just don't need it for what I am doing. I will save the money and just get a Decklink Intensity for preview to my HDTV through HDMI. Even that feature isn't as important as it used to be. I would consider Cineform but I just don't see the point in converting to another format which defeats the whole point to tapeless. So far native EX1 material plays 2 streams no problem at all in CS3 and it can kind of push 3 with a few dropped frames.

Just to add a little extra about the Matrox card. I just read the readme for the new CS4 drivers for the card and I couldn't believe that amount of problems the thing has and how they put dumb work arounds in the readme as if it was normal behavior. I really wanted the Matrox to be a good product but I just don't see it as that anymore.

I still think Cuda is a bit overrated however. It would be an awesome feature if it was on every Nvidia card but it just isn't worth the price for what you actually get out of it. My whole point about the Matrox card is that tapping the GPU isn't new at all. Both Matrox and Avid have been doing it for years. Of course their ways may be buggy or limited but right now so is Cuda.