Shootouts

CUDA for Professionals - NVIDIA's Newest Quadro GPUs

By Vincent Chang - 30 Jan 2009

The Adobe Connection - Quadro CX

The Adobe Connection - Quadro CX

Now that we have seen the new Quadro FX GPUs, let's turn to the odd one out of the bunch, the Quadro CX. What exactly is the Quadro CX? Well, it's actually identical to the Quadro FX 4800, from the choice of rear outputs to the GTX 260 GPU hidden underneath. Memory bandwidth and frame buffer size are also similar. And they will both set you back by US$1999.

We too were initially confounded by the CX until we spoke to NVIDIA and found out that the Quadro CX is the only Quadro card presently that supports and comes bundled with the CUDA-enabled RapiHD plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. And that is basically the main difference. In short, it's a marketing (and application) distinction; there's no new or special hardware involved since CUDA is supported on all the Quadro cards seen here today.

Besides the CX branded on the card, the Quadro CX looks similar to the other two Quadro FX cards.

Just a 6-pin connector is required, as expected from a card similar to the GTX 260 and the Quadro FX 4800.

The rear outputs on the Quadro CX are identical to those found on the FX 4800.

Instead, what's new are the marketing efforts by NVIDIA to make the Quadro CX, the graphics card for Adobe's latest Creative Suite 4 (CS4) which includes popular applications like Photoshop, Premiere Pro and Dreamweaver. Both companies have recently teamed up to bring GPU acceleration to Adobe and this is the result. As NVIDIA states, the CX is 'built for Adobe professionals' and it is this particular user segment that it is targeting. The company has a dedicated website for this "Built for Adobe" message, with the Quadro CX billed as the best GPU for Adobe users. This naturally brings us to the question of what are these features that are meant to improve Adobe?

It appears that these new features are found mainly in three of the many applications in Adobe CS4. The first is the familiar Adobe Photoshop, where the GPU is harnessed to enable effects like real-time rotation of the images, zooming and panning without any lag. Other 3D accelerated features include brush resizing and preview, 2D and 3D compositing, high-quality anti-aliasing, HDR tone mapping, and color conversion.

You don't really need a Quadro-class card to take advantage of the new hardware accelerated features in Adobe Photoshop CS4. All you need is an OpenGL 2.0 compatible GPU with Shader Model 3.0 and 128MB of memory. For instance, the GeForce 8800 GT card here.

Our own trial with Adobe Photoshop CS4 showed that these additional GPU accelerated effects appear to be done with OpenGL so there's no need to get a Quadro CX if you're just looking to improve Photoshop performance. In fact, according to Adobe , any modern OpenGL 2.0 capable GPU with 128MB of memory should have the prerequisites. To confirm this, we tried it with an ATI Radeon 4670 and a GeForce 8800 GT and the OpenGL acceleration was working just fine.

Another application which benefits similarly from the new GPU acceleration is Adobe After Effects, which now gets a more responsive and faster working environment with complex effects like depth of field, bilateral blur effects, turbulent noise such as flowing water or waving flags, and cartoon effects animated in a shorter time span thanks to the GPU.

What the Quadro CX really does bring to the table is access to the RapiHD plug-in for Adobe Media Encoder by Elemental Technologies. This is the same company that released the CUDA-enabled Badaboom Media Converter that does video transcoding using the GPU. RapiHD is the full encoding plug-in for Adobe using the same technology and promises to bring about drastic speedups when it comes to media encoding.

Elemental Technologies' RapiHD plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 only appears as a selection once you get to the encoding phase. It's also only present if you have installed the plugin and have a Quadro CX card in your system.

We'll be showing you the results of our little encoding test later on but let's run through how the plug-in works. Basically, those who have bought a Quadro CX will be able to download the plug-in from the vendor. You'll need to install it and it should work once the Adobe Media Encoding starts.

What we did was to create a project in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and do the various edits that we needed. Once we selected the Export to Media option, Adobe Media Encoder will start up to handle this task and once there, you can select and change the default H.264 Blu-ray option to RapiHD. You may have to check your settings again to make sure that they are what you require, like the video resolution, variable bitrate, etc. But that's about it, there are no extra steps after this and the video encoding will proceed with RapiHD taking full advantage of your CUDA-enabled Quadro CX. The plug-in only works with the Quadro CX and is hence the main draw of the CX, especially since that you now know that it is identical to the Quadro FX 4800.

In case you're wondering, you can't obtain this plug-in separately by any other means nor would it work with any other Quadro graphics card. Special keys and registration process are in place to ensure that you can only obtain the plug-in via purchasing and registering the Quadro CX. As mentioned, this is a special bundle between NVIDIA and Adobe for which Elemental Technologies designed the plug-in for them. Read on for our testing results to see if CUDA and the plug-in deliver what they promise.

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