More CUDA Memory Leveraged by CS5.5?

[Stivan Widick]

Does the amount of memory on the CUDA graphics card have much of a bearing on the performance one gets out of the Mercury engine in Premiere Pro CS5.5 and Production Premium when working with R3D files?

I've read that it has a definite impact when working in Resolve. I'm wondering if a 2GB GTX 680 for the GUI and a 4GB GTX 680 secondary card will be enough to make Adobe and Resolve both happy, or if I should plan for two 4GB cards when they come out.

Thanks,
Stivan

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

GTX 680 CUDA performance is currently atrocious. I would wait to see what NVidia does in the next couple months.

Also be careful. It's RAM per *GPU* Lots of 4GB cards are actually 2x 2GB GPUs on one PCI-E board.

 

[Les C.]

GTX 680 CUDA performance is currently atrocious. I would wait to see what NVidia does in the next couple months.

Also be careful. It's RAM per *GPU* Lots of 4GB cards are actually 2x 2GB GPUs on one PCI-E board.

Where did you read that about CUDA performance? Is it lower than the GTX-580's?

I hope nVidia is not dumbing down CUDA now, like they did with opengl (nVidia throttled many open gl calls so that a GTX-285 will run 10 times faster than a GTX-580 as they want to keep the monopoly of selling the profitable but less powerful Quadro - which they don't license to other vendors. I wouldn't be surprised if they throttle every graphic program that is not a game now).

I know exactly what you're talking about with the VRAM, I had to return a GTX-590 when I figured out I was actually getting LESS VRAM with 3GB than on my old GTX-285 with 2GB. I have yet to be able to install any recent drivers with my GTX-580, dealing with nVidia has been a very bad experience as of late).

Edit: I'll have to read further, but it looks like if it's gaming you want, the 680 is cool. If you want computing (CUDA or DirectX), as needed for Premiere/AD, it flops. My 580 is way faster:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-gtx-680-review/17

But, interested if there are any benchmarks you've come across for Premiere/AE?

 

[Subhadip Sen]

GTX 680 CUDA performance is currently atrocious. I would wait to see what NVidia does in the next couple months.

Also be careful. It's RAM per *GPU* Lots of 4GB cards are actually 2x 2GB GPUs on one PCI-E board.

Yes, but we should wait for benchmarks anyway. GTX 680's FP32 / single-precision performance is way up, nearly double over GTX 580. I don't know what kind of computation Premiere Pro's MPE requires, but my guess is it being heavily single-precision. Not sure if there are any double-precision 64-bit FP operations, those are the ones that are massively crippled and used for many of the CUDA/OpenCL/DirectCompute benchmarks we have seen thus far.

The good news is that GTX 580s are dropping in price drastically, 1.5 GB is available at $350, 3GB can be had for ~$450. It's a tried and tested solution and with it your bottlenecks are most likely going to lie elsewhere - for R3D work the bottleneck is certainly in the CPU decompression / debayer.

Memory becomes crucial as your resolution increases. If your timeline and footage is 4K+, 2GB could be a bottleneck.

 

[Todd Kopriva]

See this post (especially the part toward the end) for details about how CUDA processing is related to VRAM and frame size:
http://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2010/07/maximum_dimensions_in_premiere.html