GTX 480 has no "official" MPE support
 

After a quick conversation with Adobe, I learned that there is no "official" MPE support, but I've not tested the cuda_supported_cards.txt file hack that most are using. I'm sure that it would, but I'd rather go with a supported card that has been tested, like the Quadro 4000.

With the newest Fermi tech and the price drop on these card (from past Quardo products) I believe that this is the best bang for the buck that doesn't require a hack for the performance.

Also, did you know that TapeWorks Texas (a sponsor of DVinfo - sell nVidia products?)

The same applies to the GTX 470. I was surprised that Adobe "officially" supports the 470 but not the 480.

And the two lower-level Quadros actually have lesser hardware specs than the GTX 470 (other than the amount of graphics RAM). Specifically, the Quadro 5000 has only 352 CUDA cores compared to the GTX 470's 448 CUDA cores although both GPUs use 320-bit GDDR5 memory. (The Quadro 6000, which is currently not on Adobe's "officially" supported list, has 448 CUDA cores like the "Adobe-certified" GTX 470 but with a 384-bit GDDR5 memory bus like the GTX 480.)

By the way, the Quadro 4000 has the fewest CUDA cores of any of the Fermi-derived GPUs thus far: It has only 256 CUDA cores. Even the GeForce GTX 460 has 336 CUDA cores.

NVIDIA card compairsons, and MPE support
 

Randall, your right - I really don't get why the GTX 470 is but not the 480, or for that matter why the 4000 and 5000 Quadro cards are, but not the 6000. It may be political between Adobe & NVIDIA, (but I'll try to keep my aluminum head gear and conspiracies to a minimum).

In looking deeper at the specs the 470 does out pace the Quadro 4000, but it lacks the Quadro Drivers (and you may be able to soft mod the 470 to allow for Quardo drivers, but then we're back to using hacks). The Quadro 4000 does have nearly double the amount of DDR5 Ram on board - even though it lacks in Cuda core or clock speed.

What I'd really love to see (or even put together here at TapeWorks Texas) would be a side by side benchmark of these cards and what performance each put out with real world results!

Brad, send me one of each and I'll be happy to A/B 'em against the 4800 that's currently in my 980X system!
;-)

But seriously, if you guys have both cards available you can easily run PPBM5 that Bill Gerhke and Harm Millaard developed, which AFAIK is the only apples-to-apples tool available in the wild.

ROFL - I wish that I could! I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to do the testing here, but if I can get enough of you guys lining up to buy the better card I'm sure that I could ask my Sales Manager - Scott Cantrell if we could!!! :)

I already posted my new 5.0.2 result on the PPBM5 site (look for my first name in the Benchmark Results table, but you must use a browser other than IE in order to view it). It is significantly improved over what I had previously achieved with 5.0.1; however, part of the improvement was due to the replacement of my OS drive (which used to be a 1TB WD Black that had all sorts of compatibility issues, but is now a Samsung 1TB F3 drive). I have three other results posted - all in 5.0.1 with the old WD drive. I had never gotten less than 321 seconds total time with the old drive/5.0.1 combination. However, my latest result with 5.0.2 and the Samsung OS drive is the 260 seconds total time result (including 7 seconds for the MPE CPU/GPU result and a high 14.0x MPE improvement over software-only mode with that same setup).

Unfortunately, I cannot do a comparison because the Quadro 4000 costs about $800 - more than double that of the GTX 470 - by itself. And with my current financial situation, I can't bring myself to buy a super-expensive (by consumer standards) card at this time.

GeForce 470 vs Quadro 4000
 

Randall,
Not speaking as someone who sells the gear, but just as me personally - my pocket book says 470 too!
Also, I've just listed the GTX 470 on our site by the way, but in my next NLE build (that I'm putting together in a few weeks) I'll be using the 470 (unless a large bundle of cash shows up).

It's not the workstation card that I've used in the past, but it is dang quick for the buck!

Randall, sorry to go off-topic but could you please specify what kind of compatibility issues 1TB WD Black had? I have just ordered a system with 2TB WD Black for OS, which I just might be able to change to something else if needed. If you feel these details are of no general interest, please email me - thank you in advance!

Actually, I cannot speak for all 1TB Blacks (or for all WD Blacks, for that matter). But my particular Black, with firmware revision 05.00K05, ate up far more system resources than expected even with the drive merely idling. And that same drive did not work properly on a slightly older system: The motherboard BIOS recognized the drive, but then Windows 7 Setup failed to detect it due to an undocumented compatibility issue between the drive's firmware and the BIOS of that motherboard. Version 05.00K05 is one of the newer firmware revisions that seriously cripple the performance of that drive, especially in a simple RAID array. Its TLER is permanently disabled; therefore, the drive will keep spinning down after just eight seconds and cannot be changed at all. (Have you ever run a pair of WD Blacks with such a newer firmware revision in RAID 0 or RAID 1? The RAID controller will report the drives as "degraded" or "failed" even though they are both still "good"!) That same spin-down also affects the overall system performance, especially in the PPBM5 benchmark test (where the MPEG-2 DVD encodes are a lot slower than the processor speed and memory amount should have indicated). This is because the firmware of that drive consumes so much CPU power just for spinning up and down repeatedly. Unfortunately, there are no firmware updates available from WD at all for this series of drives, and there will be none available for the foreseeable future.

Thank you Randall for the details. My OS disk will not be a RAID disk so hopefully I'll be all right. My RAID 0 disks will be WD Re4's - they should be up to the job.

regarding that black Flash...
 

> Anyone else having this problem after updating to 5.02: as soon as I open a
> project within Premiere, the screen flashes a few times and goes to non-Aero.
> I then disabled Aero and the screen still flashes. This is happening on my work
> drive where I only have MC CS5 installed. I also then updated the FX3800 driver
> thru HP's website and this flashing still happens. Also, when moving windows
> around, there is something like a motion blur (its hard to describe).


Here's a response from one of our engineers:

"This sounds most likely to be the NVIDIA driver switching to 10-bit mode, caused by our addition of 10-bit support in 5.0.2. By default the driver is in an 8-bit mode and only when an application tries to do something in 10-bit will it switch to 10-bit causing an unfortunate black flash. Fixing this requires quite a bit of coordination between NVIDIA and Microsoft so it will likely be this way for a while. This will only happen on the higher end Quadro cards as GeForces do not support 10-bit output. We decided that if the user spent this much money on hardware, having higher quality output is more important than suffering this flash. If they disagree there is an option in the NVIDIA control panel to disable 10-bit support. Entering 10-bit mode also forces Aero off and this is likely the cause of the described behavior moving windows around. We have an open feature request against Windows 8 with Microsoft to support 10-bit when Aero is on."

Off topic a bit but I was curious. I bought an iMac from a guy who had CS5 installed on it. Great software and I'm having a blast creating the best films I ever have. However I found that he never loaded the "Functional Content" dvd....apparently a library of around 13 gig that has menu options and such. How would I go about getting that. He won't return calls and/or e-mail of course.

library content / functional content
 

See this page:
Library content missing in Encore CS5

I never purchased the software from Adobe. It was on the machine when I bought it used. I'm sure it's registered to the guys company that he works for. So I have no idea how to get the missing content without him.

Then you don't own that license and aren't legally entitled to use the software.