Mercury Engine playback CPU > GPU

[Will Keir]

What's wrong with editing at 1/4 or 1/2 and rendering full?

Nothing at all. Now that I've done some comparisons with others, I'm glad I have 1/2 res, the quality playback in PPro is much better than the RXC playback, which I use at 1/8 or 1/4 if I am lucky. The differences between 1/8th playback (RCX) and 1/2 playback (CS6) is huge.

I'm happy. Thanks for the input all.

[Wes Howell]

Hi Will,

With R3D clips, the thing that slows most computers down is the decoding of the file.
GPU's do not accelerate this. Period. A Red Rocket will (as you know) but a GPU / Quadro / CUDA / OpenCL will not improve playback as it doesn't decode the file.

CUDA / OpenCL does a fabulous job of speeding up certain effects and more importantly, scaling which can lead to substantial improvements when exporting.


As many have stated - 1/4 res editing is very common and some of the very fastest machines can handle 1/2 - which can be a touch sharper (I personally like this)
However, I don't see many reasons to need full res.

I've heard many people state that the Rocket doesn't do full frame at 5k, but I am pretty sure that I have had no problems getting full 5k playback with my Rocket.

In fact, I can export with the Rocket and a CUDA card, rendering and scaling and use 3-5% of my CPU during the process.... pretty cool stuff.

The Rocket takes care of all of the decoding...and leaves your CPU's ready for other tasks. I hear your concerns about being older technology...but once you use one you won't want to be without one.

Wes

[Jim Hoffman]

Do I have to remove my ATI card from my Mac tower...something else? I have the ATI in slot 1 - Rocket in 2 - Quadro 4000 in slot 3...

Latest CUDA installed. Still no recognition from AP or AE. When running the Vidmuze fix I get a terminal message that says no GPU card support found. I do see the card in system profiler. When I look at the list of cards supported in the terminal section it already shows Quadro 4000.

OSX 10.6.8 - 32Gb Ram -


Thanks in advance - wow this is frustrating.

[Jim Hoffman]

Would love to hear from Mac guys having this issue - better yet resolving this issue.

Anybody?

[Sami Sinervä]

Like someone else mentioned, the GPU only helps with certain effects, none with playback.

Another thing good to know though is that if you run Premiere with GPU support it automatically renders at Maximum Render Quality every time you render, no matter if you check the checkbox or not. So you are actually getting a higher quality export in the end because of the GPU.