Check it Donnie, Nvidia just launched its Quadro CX accelerator card for Adobe's Creative Suite 4. The optimized GPU fits into your PC's PCIe slot to smooth image navigation and manipulation in Photoshop while accelerating effects in Adobe's After Effects and Premier Pro. Nvidia claims that the new GPU helps encode H.264 video at "lightning-fast speeds" when using Nvidia's
Cuda-enabled CS4 plug-in while giving professionals accurate video previews with uncompressed 30-bit color or 10-/12-bit SDI (for professional video equipment) before final output. The Quadro CX features a 1.5GB (GDDR3) frame buffer and 76.8GBps memory bandwidth with dual-DisplayPort connectors (up to 2560 x 1600 pixels) and a single dual-link DVI with support for panels up to 3,840 x 2,400 @24Hz. Look, we know this sounds all stupid-hard advanced to those of you using Photoshop to hotten-up your Facebook pic, but the pros are going to love it. $1,999 and available today -- video demonstration just beyond the read link.
[Via
InformationWeek]
posted Oct 17th 2008 4:34AM
Looks nice, I like the comparison video.
it looks like "consumer" gpus will also accelerate CS4 according to nvidia's website. So given that I would say this is over kill for most users including pros. I'm very interested in the after effects performance but history has shown that the gamer market product line evolves faster than the pro line with the trade offs being stability and more advanced features.
I've seen nothing on nvidia's website that justifies the cost of this card for a photoshop user. I work with thousands of 14bit high res files every week and the features they highlight do nothing to improve my workflow. After effects is another story. If it vastly out performs the consumer cards ($500 ones) then they have a winner.
If they want people to really buy these up they should be working with adobe to accelerate flash encoding since it is by far the dominant web format but the least efficient to encode.
now you have no excuses for shitty fakes
lol.
Is it compatible with the blurry cam plug-in?
It's... it's cheaper than Creative Suite.
Until Apple start selling it, where it will be priced somewhere between the stratosphere and the mesophere.
Apple, if they even feature this, will be selling it about 1 year later, after the PC world has already moved on to CS5 and the next iteration of the Quadro series.
Apple gets the PC's leftovers
it's the size of a netbook.
Now just buy the RED camera, and you are a movie mongol!
Wouldn't he also have to be from the region north of China?
The word is mogul, my furry little friend.
Are these line of cards any good for high frame rate games? To be specific, one with a name similar name to what you would call a traumatic or stressful change in a person's life.
Thomas Ricker, you are now my second favorite Engadget writer.
With how well your articles have been written, Chris Ziegler better watch out!
Donnie ?
Donnie Hoyle, natch:
http://www.mydamnchannel.com/Big_Fat_Brain/You_Suck_at_Photoshop/YouSuckatPhotoshop1_398.aspx
You can clearly tell nVidia is sleeping with Apple. Even their new video cards resemble a macbook!
Sure it can play doom, but how about crysis? Wait, you will need 4 of these to get a decent fps.
Thats what the other 10,000 nvidia cards are for.
This is the card for people with jobs.
Engadget writers now have no excuse when they put up a poorly Photoshopped image at the top of their articles.
Dude, three Engadget cliches in one comment?
wtf.. since when has any adobe package needed a card that powerfull?... photoshop and after effects run as smooth as butter on my 8800gts. Not a clever marketing strategy since profoessionals will know its overpowered for adobe apps... especially considering the huge lump sum in overheads it sucks up... i mean jesus christ, i had to almost slap my boss just to convince her to buy CS4.
...now if you were using anything by autodesk, this is up your alley.. otherwise a waste of money which other cards can do just fine.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 (and Adobe's After Effects and Premier Pro) are going to have the ability take advantage of the GPU's mathematical capabilities. Effects that you use in Photoshop will now be hardware accelerated if you have a supporting video card. Compared to previous iterations that were using the CPU to do the effects, consider just how much faster Photoshop will be when using your video card.
This card here, though expensive, can be used to accelerate the calculations of those effects. No lowly graphics designer on a low budget will be able to afford this, but those in the desktop publishing field, professional photographers, digital artists, and movie editors will definitely be interested in this card when it comes out.
Hell! If I had $1999, I'd buy this card since I use Photoshop almost daily in my work.
LOL!
1 you sound upset even though there has been a considerably big improvement in commercial computing.
but that stands nothing to the next one imo.
2. you bought Photoshop?
@Octoberasian: Yes, PS CS4 now utilizes the GPU for processing. However, does anybody know for a fact whether there are huge degrees of benefits for those with much better graphics cards? I mean, just because this video card may be probably 2x faster than an Nvidia 9400 or whatever, doesn't mean that all Photoshop processes will be accelerated by this much. Maybe the difference between cards isn't as big in Photoshop as it is when you're playing.....oh.....Crysis (or somthing).
Unless your AE comps are 2 flat colour layers, interactive feedback in AE is terrible, hence endless ram previews, half-res offline quicktimes, proxy footage etc... if this card can alleviate those problems, then we're now approaching flame levels of interactivity and speed, in a desktop app, for 1/500th the cost.
I'll believe it when I see it of course, but nice to see Adobe are looking to the future, and Nvidia finding real world uses for their technology apart from games and pie-in-sky science GPU computation.
Any new NVIDA card can run CUDA drivers (anything 8000 series +) we have tested even a low-end 9500GS card, and it will encode video *WAY* faster than without CUDA.... we are talking 50% or less time. And on a 4 hour render - that's a killer performance gain. And that's the low end one. With faster cards we were doing down to about 10% our original time on some renders. CUDA rendering rocks!
You are right of course - your 8800 gts is perfectly fine for your holiday photo editing. Even for your photomanipulation attempts you won't notice any big problems. The thing is (as your post clearly demonstrates) that you do not use Photoshop the way many professionals do.
You have to think much bigger, like professional image compositing in the print media industry. Have you ever worked on a 500 MB photoshop file? Maybe you had a look at some art from digital artists - imagine painting canvases often larger than 5.000 pixels (for A3 printing) with hundreds of layers. I wonder just how well your 8800 gts would fare then. I worked on some 10.000 to 30.000 pixel wide illustrations myself, and I think this card is good news indeed.
But that's not all the card is supposed to do - it also helps in AfterEffects and Premiere with video encoding, and on that point you can kiss your 8800 gts goodbye right away... IMHO you really should have put your brain into gear before posting.
@Ian
Is that a joke? "2x faster than an Nvidia 9400"? The nVidia 9400M has 16 Stream processors, and this has 192.
Will it play Crysis ??
Will you play Crysis... instead of making tired posts about Crysis?
I think we need to see some bench marks first. I doubt the creative suite will get huge gains mostly marketing spin. Haven't quadro's always been overpriced stock cards with different drivers?
Hotten is a word? Hmm, I suppose it works in this context.
As an effects artist I can say some thing like this will come in very useful, but currently there is no way i can rationalise the price as a freelance artist.
But it would be helpful, Ive had many after effects projects that where so complex i had to wait over 10 minutes just for a 1 second preview of a scene to see how well its animated. And im not any old rig ether... quad core + 8800gts + 4gb ram.
While this would be really useful I just cant rationalise the price as a freelancer.
And no it probably wont play crysis. This isnt a gaming card. Its built for pure number crunching to run super high poly counts in cad max maya LW. it has shader support but probably not to the degree for high end gaming.
uhh, that's what your 1099s are for...
forgive me if this sounds ignorant... is this like hardware opencl?
I would like too see the benchmark of this card compared to GTX280 in Tri-SLI ($1350).
It wouldn't be any faster than a single GTX280. My bet, even slower. These cards are geared for accuracy. Overpriced, yes, but definitely more accurate.
Im a motion designer... AE is my main tool and I really dont think that beast will help much... still I wish im on for a surprise!
The whole industry of "professional" graphics pisses me off with how overpriced everything is. Tell me how this is different (component for component) than a GTX280. I'd rather see professional driver sets that shift gamer cards to perform at higher quality than overpriced hardware. Can't you talk to your lawyer contributor and figure out if this is industry price fixing?
It's overpriced because good designers can make over $5000 a month. True, it's difficult to get into the job, but once there buying this stuff for your business is trivial.
Some people have no idea how development and production costs work. It costs the same, most likely more, to develop this card as it does the obviously beloved 8800. These production costs, plus the materials cost of each manufactured card, have to be spread across sales in order for Nvidia to break even or make a profit. Unfortunately, there are fewer professionals who need this than there are Crysis junkies/chub tugging pr0n watchers who want a gaming card. If sales ever reach a profitable level (above what it took to to actually produce the card) then the price will drop accordingly.
In other words, its not "price fixing". Price fixing means that either the manufacturer and a dealer, or multiple dealers, get together and agree to sell a product at a predetermined price. Setting a high (or low for that matter) MSRP is in no way price fixing, idiot!
Photoshop accelerators? There's a blast from the past.
This isnt even anywhere close to expensive business wise. Look at the other quadro cards or their workstations... this is really relatively cheap
Depending on the environment, and if it really does what it purports, you could probably make back/save $2000 the card costs in about a week and a half.
Designing is so right brain that usu. anything that buggers that energy at all costs you productivity and quality. Happy Designers + Less Frustration + More 'Flow' == better work.
-Of course, your Project Manager will still be an A*****e when you get in at 9.
Dual DisplayPorts look delicious.
Is it good for geomodeling and reservoir simulation visualization?
First I'd have to get my company to fork over the dough for CS4. I asked for CS3 Premium, they looked at the price and bought me standard. Didn't really care that I actually needed premium and it took them two years to get me CS3. Asking for a $2000 graphics card would probably give accounting a heart attack.
I just hope CS4 doesn't have any Vista related garbage. CS3 runs better on XP64 with 8GB ram than it ever will on Vista.
I think a lot of designers would buy cards like this themselves if they were cheaper. Companies spend $10k on a golf outing every other weekend, but ask for better computers and they bite your head off.
uuuh..., too bad, im Gimp user, so then i can't buy it.
but i can't do Liquid Rescale, S.I.O.X. or movies in photoshop, sucks.
$1,999 pfft ill stick to buying a GTX280 and flashing it to be this card.
DROOOOLLLLLL
I know you can go much cheaper and still get speedy performance, but I'm too much of an After Effects slut to ignore a product geared specifically towards my favorite software
/DROOOOLLLLL
It sounds like most people here think GPU offload is going to help with Photoshop CS4: it does not! At least not in the sense that compute-intensive filters, adjustment layers, layer composition, etc. will be accelerated. That is still all handled by the main CPU. What it does help in is with screen redraw tasks, like giving you smoothly animated zooming, rotating the display (*not* the canvas!) for tablet work, displaying the pixel grid at high magnifications, etc.
Read the article carefully. "Nvidia just launched its Quadro CX accelerator card for Adobe's Creative Suite 4"... it does not specifically say "Photoshop CS4". "The optimized GPU fits into your PC's PCIe slot to smooth image navigation and manipulation in Photoshop while accelerating effects in Adobe's After Effects and Premier Pro"... again, it only speeds up "image navigation" in Photoshop. Accelerated effects are only available in AE and Premier.
Anyone who drops $2K on this Quadro thinking it will give them instant blur effects or super-fast raw image conversion in Photoshop will be sorely disappointed.
Uh, you missed the part where it said "manipulation" ("Image navigation and manipulation"). I'm skeptical, like you, as to how much this particular card will speed up Photoshop, but I have no doubt that this will speed up a whole lot of the important "manipulation" (working with filters, adjustments, painting, etc.).
Anyone know if this would push Maya 8.5 a little better? They mentioned the GPU helping with Calculations. TIA