Adobe CS5: 64-bit, CUDA-Accelerated, And Threaded Performance

Premiere Pro CS5 (Render)

With Premiere Pro CS5, which is really the centerpiece of this story, we have to delve a little deeper. Here we finally have the ability to assess Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine and see it handling 64-bit code, many threads, and CUDA acceleration all at once.

First, let’s compare render times between the two application versions. You’ll recall that with Hyper-Threading, CS4 scored times of 10:17, 5:21, and 3:33 with four, eight, and twelve threads, respectively. In a strange fit of coincidence, these are almost the exact times we saw under CS5 with HT disabled.

Re-enabling HT under CS5 again gives us that 10% to 20% boost. Thus, we can infer that the move from the earlier to the present Premiere Pro will only net you about a 15% improvement, give or take depending on your core count.

Now, when we turn on the Mercury Playback Engine, it’s like hitting a rocket’s launch button. Adobe’s 10x claim turns out to be spot on. With only two physical threads, Mercury and our GeForce GTX 480 are able to blast through our test in 1:36—less than half the time of our best score with 12 threads under CS4.  With all threads and Mercury in play, CS5 sizzles to completion in just 29 seconds.

We didn’t record CPU utilization for this set because the usage patterns would have been meaningless. Most of the time, utilization hovered in the 98% to 100% range, but every so often there would be a downward spike into the teens or single digits. Noting the range would not have given an accurate representation of average resource use.

  • reprotected
    Fermi exceeds at something finally!
    Reply
  • MAGPC
    What if I am an ATI user?.
    And Iam an ATI user !!!.
    Reply
  • IzzyCraft
    magpcWhat 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.
    Reply
  • bunnyblaster
    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.
    Reply
  • dEAne
    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.
    Reply
  • adiomari
    why cuda and not open-cl?!!
    Reply
  • shaun_shaun
    amazing performance increase !!!!!
    Reply
  • Scott2010au
    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).
    Reply
  • Why CUDA? Simply 'cause it's a mature technology.
    Reply
  • amdfangirl
    adiomariwhy 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.
    Reply