Adobe CS5: 64-bit, CUDA-Accelerated, And Threaded Performance
Table of contents
- 1. How Should You Accelerate Adobe?
- 2. The Mercury Playback Engine
- 3. Hacking CS5 For Cheaper Acceleration
- 4. Test Configuration
- 5. After Effects CS4
- 6. After Effects CS5
Any knowledgeable PC user understands that there are many ways to skin a cat, including when that cat happens to be Adobe’s Creative Suite. Tools like Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and After Effects continue to be favorites for millions of professionals and prosumers. When time is money, the performance levels realized in Creative Suite can mean the difference between making or losing money on jobs. Even if you’re just a home video enthusiast who’s taken to Premiere and After Effects, would you rather spend minutes or hours on a task?
Potentially, this is no overstatement. With Adobe starting to build GPU acceleration into various facets of Creative Suite and better leveraging CPU multi-threading, a system running CS5 today could realize performance an order of magnitude or more better than, say, a five-year-old system running Creative Suite 2 (CS2). We’re not going to state the ridiculously obvious and benchmark just how much faster a new CS5 rig would be compared to CS2. Instead, we want to approach Adobe’s new CS5 from a hardware perspective and examine if and when it makes sense to upgrade from CS4.
After all, the move from the last-generation suite to CS5 is one of the most significant in Adobe's history. Beyond the feature expansion in each app, the company finally embraced 64-bit support, dramatically improving performance in workloads able to take advantage of extra memory. Additionally, there's a good bit of GPU acceleration in play--something we've not seen enough of from other media- and productivity-oriented titles.
So, here’s our scenario. Assume you have CS4 and are considering CS5 as a way to become more productive through getting the same tasks done more quickly. We’re going to examine three possible vectors that could be responsible for this performance increase:
- Upgrading from CS4 to CS5. This gives you the benefits of shifting from 32- to 64-bit code and addressing extra memory above the 4 GB threshold.
- Increasing CPU threads. This could be through the addition of cores as well as from leveraging Intel’s Hyper-Threading (HT) feature.
- Employing CUDA. At this early stage of the industry’s adoption of general purpose GPU acceleration, Adobe has started to weave in support for Nvidia’s CUDA platform. We hope that OpenCL and/or DirectCompute support follows soon, but for now we have to examine CUDA as a case study in what exists today and a harbinger of what will come.
Could it be that stepping up from CS4 to CS5 alone could yield enough benefit to make a hardware upgrade unnecessary? Or will an upgrade to CS5 plus bringing CUDA into play make a $500 processor overhaul mandatory? Let’s try to find out.
- 1 / 5
- Next
-
Latest Software News
Latest Software reviews
-
Latest Intel News
- Intel Picks UK for Research Institute on Sustainable Cities
- Specs for Dell's Windows 8 Clover Trail Tablet Leaked
- Thunderbolt Will Become Key Motherboard Spec in 2H 2012
- AMD Backing Out of CPU Speed Wars Against Intel
- Intel Hopes New Batteries Can Reduce Ultrabook Cost
-
Latest Intel reviews
- Overclocking Core i7-3770K: Learning To Live With Compromise
- Core i5-3570K, -3550, -3550S, And -3570T: Ivy Bridge Efficiency
- Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: May 2012
- Intel SSD 330 Review: 60, 120, And 180 GB Models Benchmarked
- Core i7-3720QM: Ivy Bridge Makes Its Mark On Mobility
Fermi exceeds at something finally!
What if I am an ATI user?.
And Iam an ATI user !!!.
What if I am an ATI user?.And Iam an ATI user !!!.
You still get gpu acceleration just not as much =p and it would be a ATI listed on their site just like nvidia it's a limited pool.
Please increase the size of the legend. It is easy to figure out in this review since it's only two colors, however, if it is more than 2, it is hard to figure out which bar is referring to which score.
Please consider changing the page drop-down menu to the old school drop-down menus like the other tech blogs like Anandtech and Arstech, etc.
The interface is a little clumsy and seems to be poorly timed when I try to scroll down the drop-down menu. It often closes when I am trying to scroll to another page. Sometimes, when the page loads, it is hidden by a pop-up word ad.
However, the article content was strong.
I have an ATI card and still I have no problem using photoshop CS4 and premiere CS4. The thing with CS5 is that if you can't wait at all, but it is not that really long.
why cuda and not open-cl?!!
amazing performance increase !!!!!
Surely they mean the 2GB memory limit (for Win32 processes)?
Which is one reason why the Apple Mac version is so popular (Unix/BSD can handle more per process).
Why CUDA? Simply 'cause it's a mature technology.
why cuda and not open-cl?!!
CUDA preceded Open-Cl. Dev cycles are long and tedious. If you're going to implement something, it'll take time to show up. I honestly hope more developers decide to code for Open Cl.
Fermi exceeds at something finally!
buddy, FERMI is far more superior than AMD/ATI
buddy, FERMI is far more superior than AMD/ATI
As a space heater...
buddy, FERMI is far more superior than AMD/ATI
As a space heater...
Heat = power you tree humping noob.
As a space heater...
Obviously, I mean nothing is as great as when they thumbs up their own comment before posting...
We don't need fanboys of ither side on here, including you Ares. Don't make mouse have a long ranting argument with you!
Obviously, I mean nothing is as great as when they thumbs up their own comment before posting...We don't need fanboys of ither side on here, including you Ares. Don't make mouse have a long ranting argument with you!
Not a fanboy? Just pointing out, someone blind enough to say something is far superior to something else that, well, really isnt superior by much, or at all, should be corrected. Calm down. Your not a mod just yet
Not a fanboy? Just pointing out, someone blind enough to say something is far superior to something else that, well, really isnt superior by much, or at all, should be corrected. Calm down. Your not a mod just yet
That was an AMD fanboy reply to an Nvidia fanboy statement. The fact that I pointed this out and you want to complain that it wasn't a fanboy opinion shows how you can't take criticism. You could have easily ignored him, and thumbed him down where he would be marked as spam/hidden message. Because you know mouse will randomly come in here and explain why he thinks your statement is wrong, and you know he will based on past occurences.
You never corrected him in the first place, but randomly said "as a space heater." [Appropriate emoticon that I can't find]
You REALLY need to calm down.
actually if you look at it, AMD squeezes more performance out of less transistors. their main downfall is their drivers.
Fermi is power wasting technology that cost Nvidia the market share because no one bought it.
ati gave up on stream.