David, in your opinion is there a significant difference between the GeForce and Quadro cards from nVIDIA? I've read a fair amount about this and the most convincing information indicated that the Quadros do show fine detail in programs like Autocad more accurately, but I'm not sure how that relates to NLE performance and rendering.

We only have Quadro cards here, so I can't compare.

Hi Ben,

I run a system with four displays with CS3/4/now 5 with two Quadro cards in the system...four heads.

Now thats a setup! Wow well done!

I've tried to find relevant posts on this forum regarding GPU/CUDA benefits with CF but I am getting confused. Is there a chance we could make a sticky out of this, or if Cineform's TechBlog could put together a guide?

I understand CF never required GPU to accelerate editing and its the codec that's designed to be efficient off the CPU.

I have no plans to leave Cineform's workflow, but I do want to know if I can benefit by upgrading my video card and taking advantage of CUDA. I find when I am effecting clips with Red Giant software or Boris software that it becomes very challenging to get a preview, sometimes Premiere even seems to crash. So I know upgrades are necessary, I'm just not sure where to put them. Is it better to get more RAM (I currently have 6GB), or is it better to get a new CPU (I currently have a dual-core)? Or should I upgrade my old ATI x1800 video card?

I figured it was the video card, but I keep reading posts as a CUDA/CS5 *versus* Cineform debate, as opposed to CUDA/CS5 *with* Cineform. Already agreeing to the benefits of CS5, is a video card upgrade justified?

Quadro vs Geforce
 

There seem to be two parts to GPU utilization here:

On playback, Cineform (that has removed interframe compression) does not use the GPU and Adobe native sequences use the Mercury playback engine and the GPU to decode the heavy interframe compression in AVCHD and MPEG2.

The decider could be in output: If you have a Quadro card with the elemental accelerator it would seem there would be a big speedup in encoding for disc ouptut in Encore, right?

[In subsequent research, there may be no Elemental Accelerator software for CS5 per this post:
http://www.elementaltechnologies.com...eative-suite-5

I hope Adobe has something up its sleve because their encoding with AME/MainConcept in CS4 seems so poorly multithreaded that it won't use more than two cores on my system where Cineform HDlink uses 100% of my quad.