NVIDIA's $2,000
Quadro CX Pro GPU actually does more than just improve one's Creative Suite 4 experience, but for whatever reason, the aforementioned firm has decided to market the card's mastery of Adobe over all else. The hardcore benchmarkers over at
HotHardware decided to pop this in and give it a critical look, and while they definitely appreciated the speed gains in Premiere Pro and its performance overall, they never could quite swallow that admittedly huge MSRP. In fact, they reckoned that
NVIDIA would've been better off offering this up with a slower clock speed and a smaller sticker, particularly when you consider that CS4 isn't really engineered to fully take advantage of all this horsepower. Reviewers did note that something like this may be entirely more beneficial once CS5 or CS6 emerges, but for now, the card's just a bit ahead of its time (and priced accordingly). Hit the read link for the full spill -- trust us, it's worth the read if you're teetering on dropping two large.
posted March 20th 2009 8:27AM
I am sure this is for corporate people, but i think Nvidia should know that the most important corporate software is Excel not Adobe.
if by corporate you mean multimedia studios, then yes totally corporate
Ughh...repeat?
http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/11/adobe-friendly-nvidia-quadro-cx-gets-reviewed/
I have Adobe Acrobat Professional, will this card make opening PDFs a lot faster ?
god forbid adobe try to make it's code more efficient, society as we know might be splashed.
The latest readers are pretty darn good. Then again, my Preview scrolls PDFs like no other reader.
Better to invest in more RAM, better cpu, faster drives and a 64bit system.
Or invest in a awesome system and have change for a PS3. And possibly a HDTV.
Can it play crysis? (Or whatever is the FPS benchmark du jour...)
Probably, yes.
You'll need the corresponding drivers of the non-Quadro version of the card though (Something like the GTX280).
And you'll also need to get a motherboard, CPU, some RAM and several other components around it.
Serious answer is serious.
Why is it that Apple don't put quadros in their mac pros?
They prefer the cheap (60$) rebranded 9500GT. Its ideal for make a 1000% profit margin!
No kidding, your 3299$ Mac pro come with a 60$ card. Here it is;
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127419
Its not really a pro computer. Better go for some real workstation from Boxx or even Dell.
Moreover, The MBP is having over-heating problems as is... a better GPU could only make matters worse.
they wont put it in there cuz thall increase the $$ tag $3000 more!!!
@Boards of Canada
You mock Apple at being overpriced and tout Boxx as being some sort of value!?! Have fun paying 50% more for your hardware!
@Ken
Boxx has these expensive Quadros to justify cost, but Mac Pros doesnt.
Plus, if we don't like Boxx, Window guys have this thing called CHOICE to choose other vendor or build our own.
Because then their profit margins go down and they couldn't sucker as much money out of people by actually giving them value for their dollar.
As it stands, Boards is absolutely right, Mac Pro's for the $3000 price tag and the "Pro" moniker are anything but that.
The cards they come with can't even handle 3D half as well as most Dell's for half the price.
It's truly pathetic.
My Adobe CS4 Suite and Final Cut Studio run very well with my ATI Radeon HD 3870. Cost of card: $186.
I doubt seriously my performance would improve enough with the Nvidia card to justify the extra $1824. Wake up Nvidia.
Ah the professionals are speaking and they ofcourse know what´s best :P
Wake up these highly specialized cards are ussually capable to run those filters by hardware instead of software meaning that a lot of effects can be done way faster. Also these cards are ment for the professional market where time does matter. If this card can speedup my work by as little as 5% over the whole year, basically this card has already paid itself back.
That said its rather interesting that Nvidia knows what the future releases of Adobe will bring, not only 1 but even 2 versions ahead so they can prepare their current hardware already for it. If somebody only knew what those new versions would bring from the outside world ...
When you have multiple multimedia projects to finish on a deadline and clients coming in to see them (not to mention clients coming in on the process) it really helps to have more power (arf arf arf). I'm sure your sub-$200 card works fine for you, but when $Ks are on the line, you may want to splurge just a bit more to have something that will make you more productive. It doesn't hurt if it also makes to future ready, too.
I'd love to see the benchmarks on this. True, if this card can increase productivity by 5% then it may well be worth it, depending on your needs.
My needs aren't that great, so my sub $200 does serve me well.
As an aside, when I was researching the purchase for my company, Apple did offer a $2k Nvidia card (can't remember the model). The ATI blew it out of the water though, as far as performance for Final Cut Studio, and specifically Motion. The Nvidia card would probably dominate on Carerra or some other 3D modeling program.
It looks like a tape deck.
It seems like the people who would pay that amount of money for something like this aren't the sort of people who would use Adobe Premiere for their projects.
Hark! Is that TWO HDMI ports I see?
The only problem with this GPU is CS4.
OpenGL needs to die. Times have changed and the "Professional Industry" is still clung to 1996 ideals. Someone needs to come up with a real open graphics API that doesn't force hardware vendors to write elaborate drivers bringing hardware AND software costs sky high.
@Ken
Do you even understand what you are talking about? OpenGL, for its name sake, is OPEN and it's loyalty free. The Khronos Group is responsible to finalize the standard (next to be 3.0).
I think cs4 will run better with a sub-$1000 SSD raid instead to buy this ultra expensive card.
I'll take two please. I use Catia all day for automotive part designs and my models are getting ridiculously complex. My old Quadro FX1300 just can't take it anymore.
How about some of you rattle on about how Adobe constantly FAILS at writing software that can actually take full advantage of your platform of choice, much less multiple processors? Really, how long have these initiatives been in place by majors like apple, ati, and nvidia?
Waiting for cs5/cs6? shouldn't even be a mention.
WOW.
Adobe needs some competition, badly.
Most people don't understand what the Quadro cards are all about. It's about the drivers.
I've run both quadro and 'standard' siblings of their cards, and when it comes down to Computer Aided Design (CAD) the quadro cards and their certified drivers are vastly superior a standard card when it comes to CAD rendering performance. The quadro drivers get completely destroyed on modern video games however, so no, it doesn't make any sense using one to try to run Crysis.
I know that on some cards, you can hack the quadro drivers to run, but you really are shortchanging the company. Coming out with certified drivers for numerous revisions of CAD software is not cheap. Especially when talking about Autodesk products, which frequently range in the $4,000 to 6,000 range per license. Most billable hours for CAD designers is ~$80 an hour. Getting cheap on the cards only increases your operational costs and decreases your efficiency. Their little video is does a good job at showing the performance differences.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/builtforprofessionals.html
As for the Quadro and Adobe suite, their base quadro can do most of the advanced features in Photoshop. The only benefit would be to Premiere users who are offloading their rendering to the GPU. I have yet to play with this, so I can't comment as to its effectiveness.
Now that capitalism has failed is there really room for such hijinx in capitalism 2.0? Or during this changeover period, pulling stunts like asking 8 grand for software and then using that as an excuse to also overprice hardware is so outdated really.
$2K professional graphics cards are nothing new, I have a couple of old now worthless but originally very expensive high end pro cards on my shelf of interesting stuff. I don't know how relevant they are these days given the power available in even low end stuff, but for those who need every bit of horsepower they can get, there may still be a market.
Once DX11 generation cards come out all the mainstream GPU's will probably have double precision float full IEEE math compliance and you don't need to spend more to speed up the new CS's, or even CS4 since you got the power and the capabilities, at least that's what I expect.