We can remember quite vividly when NVIDIA first showed off some of the fruits of the relationship between itself and Adobe, at a press event that focused on the GT200 graphics architecture, and Adobe showed off a program then known as Stonehenge that later became part of Adobe's CS4 suite of products. At this early demo NVIDIA and Adobe showed off improvements to Photoshop including zooming and rotating around an image that was nearly a 1GB in file size as quickly as we are used to doing with 1KB files today. Though only a small portion of day during the GT200's unveiling, it really was one of the few parts that got me excited as a computer and technology advocate. - PC Perspective

NVIDIA Quadro CX Adobe's GPU Acceleration Review

Since then much has changed and the world of GPU computing has been dramatically shifted. Just recently we wrote about the pair of video transcoding applications from NVIDIA and AMD that used their respective GPU's to greatly decrease the time required to move between video formats when compared to even the best CPU based transcoders. Both companies are promising and promoting other 3rd party applications that will utilize the parallel processing power of the GPU to change the way we compute in our homes. And the Adobe team has spent some time looking at how the GPU can improve their software.

The Quadro line is NVIDIA's brand for professional level graphics boards for 3D and CAD designers as well as video and image editing users. Though while the underlying technology behind the GPU's on each card are basically the same between the Quadro line and the GeForce desktop based products, there are some important differences that should be noted, not the least of which is price. The Quadro CX card we are testing with today for example retails for $1999, quite a bit of an increase over even the highest priced GeForce card. What do you get for that price difference? And very important, are you willing to pay that much?

First, most Quadro cards will come with larger frame buffers than desktop cards to better situation the products for extremely large data sets. The Quadro CX has 1.5GB of on-board GDDR3 memory and some of the NVIDIA offerings go as high 4GB. Some Quadro cards will offer SDI, a super high quality and uncompressed video stream, that desktop cards never will. The 10-bit color per channel is also available on the Quadro CX while the desktop cards are running at 8-bits per channel at most, this can greatly improve the color fidelity for professionals with appropriate monitors and displays to really shows this experience.

These cards are also sold and supported directly through NVIDIA and as the level of support they bring is a large part of the cost differential we see. The Quadro CX is built in a very familiar shape and shares the underlying GT200 GPU technology as well. The Quadro CX is in fact the first 55nm GT200b chip we have tested and we should soon be seeing these smaller and more power efficient chips in the desktop markets. The GPU features 192 shader processors along with a 384-bit memory bus making it similar is specifications to the original GeForce GTX 260 and also looks as such very familiar in its design and feel indeed.

As of this writing, you can find the NVIDIA Quadro CX for sale for under $1800. The NVIDIA Quadro CX is billed as the accelerator for Adobe CS4 suite and it is in fact just that. In nearly every respect in fact, the Quadro CX is identical in features and hardware to the Quadro FX 4800 graphics card with the exception of support for SDI output in Premiere Pro and After Effects as well as the RapiHD plug-in for video encoding. Those added features are really what make the Quadro CX stand out from the crowd. When we first heard that GPU acceleration was coming to the Adobe CS4 suite of software we were really excited.

For sure this is by far the biggest name to hit the GPU compute scene since the technology's inception and Adobe's acceptance of it will likely spur the industry forward quite a bit in the coming months and year. Well the NVIDIA Quadro CX graphics card is a powerful addition to the Adobe CS4 line of software though it is only required for the use of the RapiHD video encoder plug-in for Premiere CS4. Any modern OpenGL ready graphics card will accelerate the performance of Photoshop and After Effects as we showed and described. But to that extend the Quadro CX is just made for that purpose and delivering great results.

It's really hard to not be impressed by the upgrades to Adobe's software and the work that NVIDIA and Elemental put into the RapiHD plug-in for Premiere Pro. Any professional user that depends on Adobe's suite of software for their work will see a dramatic improvement in efficiency and productivity with full GPU acceleration and video pros will definitely enjoy the double speed up in H.264 encode times provided by the Quadro CX hardware. We know for our use we'll be putting this sample to good use in our upcoming video production work!