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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Modified GTX 260 for Premiere Pro

H

Henry Li

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I have a quad 2010 Mac Pro (3.2 GHz) running 10.6.5 with Premiere Pro 5.0.2. I'm thinking of buying the following graphics card on ebay to speed up playback using CUDA:

http://cgi.ebay.com/New-nVidia-GTX-...333?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item1e5e21d4bd

1) Has anyone bought this before and tested it out? If so, can you please shed some light on its performance. How happy are you with the results?

2) Can someone illuminate how it compares to the GTX 285? According to the vendor, it's slightly slower. I'm interested in hearing personal experiences.

3) The modified 260 is about $200 cheaper. Any thoughts on which one I should buy?

Thanks!
 
Just make sure the GTX-260 can run the mercury playback engine. If it can't I would go the extra 200 for the 285 which I have and found it to work very well.
 
Buy the GTX285. You can find them [with flashed EFI for the Mac] on eBay for about the same price or an actual official EVGA Mac Edition for around $300. I'm not endorsing any particular vendor, but do a seller search for macvidcards and you should find a couple. There's other sellers too.
 
Thanks J.P. and Jeff. I appreciate the input.

I checked out GTX285 prices on eBay. It looks like the prices have gone up. They're now around $400 or so. Can anyone suggest other places to buy the GTX285? I know they're discontinued so the number of resellers are limited. Maybe I have to wait for a good deal on eBay or just bite the bullet.

Thanks gents.
 
Same here, flashed EVGA, about 280 Euro on Ebay.
 
Thanks everyone for the input. I just ordered the GTX285!

As a follow up, what did you guys do with the old card? Did you swap the cards? Or did you add the new GTX 285 into card slot 2 so that BOTH cards are in the Mac Pro tower?
 
For what is worth, both cards perform identically on Premiere in Windows, or if there's an advantage, I cannot see it.
 
I'm happy you bought the 285 and not the 260; I bought the 260; ppro recognizes it as a 285 and therefore mercury is working, which is fine; but: I use magic bullet looks quite often, and it won't render with the 260; the render screen comes up but rendering won't start and there is no way out but to force stop ppro. It has to do with the card because when I installed my old 8800gt everything worked fine

(btw, anyone nevertheless interested in a gtx 260, you can get it really cheap from me :)
 
Hi Hans. Thanks for the input! I was going through buyer's remorse thinking I should have saved some money and gone with the 260. I was REALLY leaning towards the 260. But when the moderator says get the 285, I think I should listen. :tongue: LOL.

Now I'm glad I got the 285 instead because Magic Bullet is something I'll probably end up using.

The 285 should arrive soon. Can't wait. :drool5:
 
I'm using the 260 in CS5. It's chews through HD footage FAST!
In order to make the 260 visible to Premiere's Mercury Playback Engine, all I had to do was add the name of the card to a text file in the program folder. That's it!
Here's a complete article that covers all the details of it:

http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

I'm not using Magic Bullet, but from what I understand unless the effect is designed to be handled by the GPU (there's an icon to indicate this once the hardware MPE is engaged) having a better graphics card won't speed up that part of your workflow.

Cheers!
 
Thanks for sharing
 
Can someone please help me.

I installed the GTX285. Turned on MPE GPU acceleration. Exported a 2m35s clip (4K) with Encoder to 1080 (h264). It took 41m42s to finish.

I turned off the MPE GPU acceleration (so now it's MPE software acceleration only). I exported the same clip with the same settings (1080, h264). It took 35m45s!!!!!

What am I missing? How is it that GPU acceleration is slower by almost 6 minutes???? All variables were the same (ie, I did NOT turn on any other apps during GPU acceleration).

I have a 2010 quad (3.2 gHz) Mac Pro with 5.0.2 PP and 10.6.5 OSX with 16 GB RAM.

Did I just waste money on a graphics card?
 
Hi Henry,
I'm very sorry to have to say this, but my experience is the same. I have no clue why this is, I thought it might be my gtx 260 posing for a 285, but I guess that's not it at all. As my card messed up magic bullet as well I concentrated on that, so I haven't done research on the slowness of it with cs5. Maybe there are some answers at the Adobe forums.
I myself switched back to the 8800gt, which seems faster than the gtx260.
good luck,
Hans
 
Henry Li said:
Can someone please help me.

I installed the GTX285. Turned on MPE GPU acceleration. Exported a 2m35s clip (4K) with Encoder to 1080 (h264). It took 41m42s to finish.

I turned off the MPE GPU acceleration (so now it's MPE software acceleration only). I exported the same clip with the same settings (1080, h264). It took 35m45s!!!!!

What am I missing? How is it that GPU acceleration is slower by almost 6 minutes???? All variables were the same (ie, I did NOT turn on any other apps during GPU acceleration).

I have a 2010 quad (3.2 gHz) Mac Pro with 5.0.2 PP and 10.6.5 OSX with 16 GB RAM.

Did I just waste money on a graphics card?
Click to expand...

From the article:

"When you are comparing the speed difference between using the software rendering mode and the GPU hardware rendering mode make sure the Maximum Render Quality mode is set the same way in each mode. Preferably to ON.

Depending on the timeline video, effects and transitions that you are using, will depend on how much rendering is done by CPU vs. the GPU. Remember, not all effects and transitions are handled by the GPU. When the CPU is involved in the rendering, the Maximum Render Quality set to On will improve the final overall quality.

If you have a mix of GPU effects/transitions and non-GPU effect/transitions in your time line and you have the Maximum Render Quality mode set to OFF, then the non-GPU effects/transitions will be at a lower quality.

Bottom line, I recommend you always set the Maximum Render Quality mode to ON."
 
Thanks Oliver. I've tried that, but the export time was almost the same (about 5 seconds difference). I've used effects that are GPU accelerated and it seems to make no difference. Is there another variable by chance? Not enough RAM? I have 16 GB of RAM.
 
Last edited:
H.264 encoding is heavy number crunching and not accelerated by CUDA. The Mercury Engine will shine when editing (in particular with FX), not that much during export.
 
Henry Li said:
Thanks Oliver. I've tried that, but the export time was almost the same (about 5 seconds difference). I've used effects that are GPU accelerated and it seems to make no difference. Is there another variable by chance? Not enough RAM? I have 16 GB of RAM.
Click to expand...

First, make sure of how much of that RAM is allocated to Premiere, in the preferences under edit. At least 12 GB should be available to Premiere. then make sure all the maximum render quality modes are clicked on, as explained above. Lastly, a trick I use is to render all the previews before exporting, and then upon exporting, on the Media Encoder I check the "use previews" box, which accelerates encoding considerably and basically eliminates the CPU out of the equation, which is the bottleneck that slows down the GPU. Otherwise, the effects would be rendered at the time of export, but in fact, it takes about 15% longer in my experience to encode an unrendered timeline, than to render it and then encode it.
 
Hi Henry,
Hm, well 16Gb should certainly be more than enough. I use only 4Gb & I noticed a DRAMATIC increase in performance once I setup my 260 exactly as the article outlines (in the areas affected as above, i.e. NOT exporting).

I'd take a look at the RAM allocation as Rudi suggests & try rendering & using the 'Use previews' option, again, as Rudi outlines above.

Good luck!
 
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