John, I'm not Harm, but judging by the PPBM5 list your 979-second overall result makes it the second slowest of all of the systems that have MPE-enabled configurations (and the slowest of all of the MPE-enabled systems running 5.0.2 by far). The only MPE-enabled system that's slower than your system (and only nine seconds slower, at that) is a laptop with a GT 330M running 5.0.1.

And though your MPE result is 11.4x faster than with MPE off, it is still slower than what the majority of systems with that same GPU typically achieve.

With such slow times, it's no wonder why your CPU utilisation is maxed out while your GPU utilisation barely touches 10%. Plus, your system's motherboard uses an nForce chipset (which is very buggy) instead of an Intel chipset. That makes overclocking stability iffy with that system. Besides turning off or disabling some background processes there's not much that you can do short of a complete CPU/motherboard/RAM upgrade, in this particular case (especially since an upgraded LGA 775 CPU would cost too much money for such modest performance gains and might not be even supported at all by your motherboard even with a BIOS update). And forget about a second GPU in SLI because MPE currently supports only one GPU.

John,

I saw your results and will incorporate them in the results list, unless you first want to try some optimizations on your system. Just let me know.

One thing is not clear from your results: the two disk project disk, is that configured as raid0 or raid1?

I wonder if you have tuned your system, for instance by turning off compression and indexing on all your disks? How many processes are running in the background? If that number is over 50 it is time to clean up.

Although this article says Vista, it also applies to Win 7: Adobe Forums: Guide for installing and tuning a Vista.... It may help to fine tune your system and get your results in the 700 seconds range.

Harm,

I read John's original post. The two-disk project volume is configured as RAID 0.

Thanks Randall.

Todd, great to have an Adobe voice here, thanks!

Yeah, I've had occasion recently to have to rotate and scale some AVCHD and in doing so it became obvious that the Fixed Effects (Motion, Opacity, etc in the Effects Panel) must be accelerated. Didn't know about de-interlacing. Would you be able to tell us what additional functions use GPU acceleration? Could be very helpful for some folks' workflows to know.

BTW, despite my reluctance to even try it, I was quite amazed that the final AME output of aforementioned AVCHD footage with a 1 degree rotation scaled to 103% was absolutely indistinguishable from footage that wasn't rotated and scaled, both on a computer monitor and a Big Screen (106" 1080p home theater projector). I expected visual degradation but couldn't see any. Kudos to the team!

As you may have noticed, I've been around for a few years, mostly lurking.

I just wrote an article about the details of the scaling done on the GPU (plus some other details of CUDA processing).

And, of course, there are the GPU-accelerated effects.

As I mentioned, deinterlacing is GPU-accelerated.

Also, blending modes are GPU-accelerated.

I might be missing something, but I think that's about it.

Todd,

This is exactly what I noticed. Creating a downconverted standard-definition video clip from a high-definition original does use the GPU for the deinterlacing, reinterlacing and downscaling. I noticed the GPU's fan ramp up during this process.

On the other hand, simply creating a 1080i AVC Blu-ray copy of a 1080i Cineform AVI source clip uses mostly the CPU.

Do you have a link, please?

Peter, here you are: Adobe Forums: MPE and GTX 470

I was very shocked myself when I found out the the mercury playback engine wasn't going to be as good as I thought but every little power helps and that's why I'm getting a GTX470 card for my computer.
This is what I have on order.
Micro Center - Galaxy KFA2 GeForce GTX 470 Galaxy-clocked 1280MB PCIe 2.0 x16 Video Card 70XKH3HS3CUB
Not a bad card for Premiere CS5 editing, right? I have to say that building a new computer is really giving me a very big headache. I though the amount of money I'm spending on it was already torture. I'll probably feel much better on the first day editing on it.

I also found it shocking editing native TM700 files on my college's Mac Pro computers with a couple of quad-core processors, 4 gigs of RAM and an ATI card. Premiere CS5 ran flawless with those files. It's still always best to play it safe and get a compatible NVidia card in case a lot of certain effects are used.

Thanks for the link, Harm.

It's understandable that the CPU does some of the legwork... :)

I think it's still safe to say that you don't need a GTX 470 to get the full benefits of MPE. A GTS 450 should be plenty for Premiere's current usage of the GPU. It's guesstimated that it only uses around 100 cores so even a GT 240 may suffice for lower end systems.

Wow I never felt so bad about my system til I started talking to you guys.

But seriously I have an upgrade planned, it just hasn't happened yet.

I'm not saying my system or the processing in Premiere is slow by any means, just wasn't what I expected with the new GPU.

And yes I am running a quad core.
And yes right this second there are 58 processes running on my system.

I have never compressed any of my drives before and I have completely turned off Indexing.

And yes the two disk drive is Raid 0. I needed the speed.

Oh and I haven't done any overclocking at all to my system.
Never wanted to risk it.