Adobe-friendly NVIDIA Quadro CX gets reviewed
By Donald Melanson 
posted Dec 11th 2008 4:59PM
posted Dec 11th 2008 4:59PM
At just under two grand, NVIDIA's new Quadro CX graphics card certainly isn't for everybody, but its ability to add some GPU acceleration to the apps in Adobe's Creative Suite 4 has no doubt piqued the interest of quite a few professionals out there and, according to PC Perspective, they likely won't be disappointed. On the card's big selling points, PC Perspective found that it mostly delivered as NVIDIA promised, with the stand-out result being a 2x speed increase in H.264 encoding times in Premiere CS4, something NVIDIA and Elemental eventually hope to increase to 10x with a few more updates to the RapidHD software. The card also expectedly provided a significant boost to Photoshop CS4 but, unlike with the RapidHD plug-in for Premiere, many of those performance gains can also be achieved with other OpenGL-supporting GPUs (though obviously not quite to the same degree). Hit up the link below for the complete rundown, plus a few videos that show just what the card (and a suitable system) are capable of.
[Thanks, Ryan]
[Thanks, Ryan]
No it will not play crysis.
No you cannot play other games on it.
Yes it will blend.
Did you have to ruin it for us? :(
Not even tetris?
Will it help Handbrake rip DVDs faster?
I for one welcome our Adobe friendly overlords.
Actually, the review says it can play Crysis. And Left 4 Dead...
Yes but will make Safari snappier?
you forgot to mention the iPhone.
Every Engadget post now should have two separate comments sections: one for related, actual questions and one for cliches.
But can it raise my children?
I am sure it can double as a heater for your house as well
can it pass my kidney stone?
I've killed it as of...now.
It will actually play games quite well, man. Especially those on OpenGL.
More like, will it play GTA IV ? :(
No it is not for gaming.
You would be surprised - cards like these are where the money's at since they're really just gaming cores but with a few extra hardware keys to enable developer-crucial features, namely things like a) better technical support and b) unlocking the core so that professional applications can better take advantage of the GPU. Of course, these cards will have a few hardware enhancements (see those two DisplayPort connectors?) but the point is that they still play games plenty well (come on, developers don't want to buy MORE hardware just to test their creations).
Yes, I know that Quadros are fancy GeForces, but nothing in this world can play GTA 4. Quadcore Extreme + GTX280? Sorry mate, too slow.
This CAN play GTA4 maxed out. GTA4 is NOT limited by GPU power, but is only limited by the video memory.
The 4GB version of this thing will run GTA4 maxed out with 100 draw distance.
2 grand to increase H.264 encoding times - no thanks!
2 grand to increase H.264 encoding times - thanks!
2 grand to decrease H.264 encoding times - thanks!
Really andres? Like Decoy I'd much rather have my encoding times decreased thanks. Which was my (apparently too subtly) sarcastic point. Increase encoding speed, decrease encoding times.
lol - the post's been edited now. 'speed increase' is a bit better.
Sweet! Maybe this will be able to cut Acrobat reader's startup time down to 10 seconds!
Foxit reader, learn it, live it, love it!
Looking at a NVIDIA Quadro CX Card against a GeForce GTX 295 card that has dual 55nm GT200 GPUs and 1700MB GDDR3 memories on 896-bit memory interface would probably stack up against it. and after all of this games for PC's still dont look as good compared to Xbox360 or the PS3 which have Video cards that are like 4 times less Powerful then desktop Video cards but then time there is a Refresh of Both Consoles desktop cards would will be so far ahead but still No ones wants to make games that look better on the PC.
Quadro cards are for professionals, not gamers. The difference? Cards are certified and optimised for packages- especially engineering CAD and simulation - that are used for big, big money projects. It will pay for itself in terms of the time (of projects and/or high paid users) that is saved. Some packages use DirectX, but most use OpenGL because they are ports from *nix systems. Some cards are better at one standard than the other.
PS - it's PCs, not PC's.
@ Testies*, it will only help Handbrake if it has been written to use CUDA, I believe. OpenCL ain't out yet- everyone (AMD, Nvidia, Apple, Adobe, Intel, TI plus others) 'cept MS is on the OpenCL wagon.
Which numpty rated suprxtragrav highly?
Do you have to wear a helmet when you leave the house?
I have used one of these using a CAD program called Solidworks on a a pair of 24" screens and dont get me wrong it is a very capable card and works wonderfully. But for the price I expected it to do something a little more. the guy who's computer I was using agreed with me and said that he couldn't notice much difference from a pair of Ati fireGL v7200 cards.
JoshC: I wouldn't call Solid Works the most advanced CAD package out their either. It depends on what you're doing it. Slap that thing in a CATIA machine doing complex surfaces and now you're talking.
@ Mobius_1: Two comment areas is actually a good idea: one for the standard kiddie nonsense, and one for on-topic/useful/interesting comments. Moderators and trusted users could curate.
I like the kiddie nonsense sometimes, but mostly it's just hiding pushing out the interesting/useful additions of thoughtful commenters.
Good shout. I can't believe the number of kiddies who comment on stuff without even doing a quick google check of their assumptions.
Still, we can always use theregister.co.uk for grown up reports followed by comments that are either well informed or at least genuinly funny.
Lovin Nickz for his Adobe Reader comment, though. Hate it when I miss the .pdf warning! Suprxtragrav is right about Foxit - it was only his first comment I was concerned about.
Well if you buy a card from ATi you don't need an expensive Fire Pro for getting full CS4 hardware acceleration - any Radeon fits well!
wow, with this speedup i can cut the time between crashes in half under premiere. i hope they built it into encore also, maybe it will now crash even before windows starts.
Any idea if this will help x264 encoding as well, or if it only runs for Premier? I do a ton of encoding with command line on x264 and would be in for one of these if I knew it off-loaded x264 work as well.
Somebody answer the man, that's a great question. Thanks
This will only work for Premiere Pro for now - the software includes a Plugin that is specific to the Adobe software.
If other people code their software for CUDA then we'll see other apps see these gains. But I am not sure how that adoption rate is going to be...
I imagine these types of things will become largely irrelevant once OpenCL and its ilk penetrate the market, in terms of arriving in developers' code.
The most important feature on any workstation-type computer, until then, is still the CPU, IMO.
Once you get a unified standard, though, and can use a standard graphics card (which, I don't imagine, will be called that for much longer*) for the updated, gpu-accelerated software...there's no real reason for the Quadro or Fire cards anymore.
*Parallel Processing Units? Something like that, really, should replace the current nomenclature...as proof, I point to how my 8800GTS 512 folds (4800 ppd), simulates physx, and generally runs any software written in CUDA (and now, openCL). Only about 1/2 of its work is gaming.
You are mostly correct - OpenCL will hopefully bring these types of advantages to all sorts of applications in a more universal standard. However, since the first OpenCL 1.0 revision will likely not even be available from NVIDIA and AMD (via driver implementations) until mid-2009, custom applications like this will help in the interim.
Adobe photoshop? Do you really think thats the target for this product. Try this, www.ensight.com They do high end postprocessing for CFD and FEA engineering simulations. They hold the world record for rendering speeds and they advise NVIDIA on appropriate architecture for migrating compute intensive graphic processes to GPUs and GpGpu's. Adobe photoshope . . . ha
That's interesting, I didn't know who liased with GPU manufacturers on this.
Like everything, people, it comes down to money. Big though the worlds of advertising, movies, games and other 'digital content creation' industries are, they are tiny commpared to engineering industries: military, aerospace, automotive, construction etc.
There will always be cross-overs though... gaming has surely made CAD hardware cheaper for smaller engineering firms. Military use game-style simulation environments...
I know this isn't designed for games, but how does this fare when games are played? Does it handle like a 7800 gtx or similar?
Tthe badaboom numbers had us believing a CUDA-based video encoding job went from 11.5 hours to 50 minutes. Or about a 14:1 speedup.
And AMD/ATI is claiming a 23 minute video conversion (90 minutes of 1080p MPEG-2 video converted to h.264) on a 4850 vs. a 3.0GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9650 taking 4 hours and 23 minutes. A speedup of about 11:1. Using Stream. Which was supposed to be shipping on the 4800 series cards using Avivo right now. Don't see it yet though.
And yet, here we have a shipping card for 2 grand that speeds up h.264 encoding times by 2-fold. Huh. And they've decided to roll it out rather than keep working on it, so it doesn't sound like we can EXPECT those 10-fold increases they're talking about. More of a MAYBE.
This isn't sounding as good as they made it seem.
I really want to see ATI succeed with their new FireGL and Stream cards with OpenCL. Despite nVidia constantly making noise about "CUDA", ATI's GPU accelerated H264 encoding is actually 5X FASTER than the Nvidia CUDA version. Also, while Nvidia's Quadro/stream cards are usually a bit faster in single precision GPGPU calculations, ATI's cards blow them away on double precision FP64 processing, which is required for most science and engineering applications...