Question on graphics card ratings and CUDA

[tjodork]

So i JUST bought a Dell XPS8300 with a AMD Radeon HD 6770 (has a Passmark rating of 1749) LAST NIGHT ! There was no inexpensive Nvidia options offered.
Today they are offering the same system with a GeForce GT 530 (Passmark rating of 726) or option to upgrade to GeForce GT545 (Passmark rating of 1200) for $40.
I would save $10 even if I went with the better GeForce GT545.

From what I've read these are not "supported cards for GPU acceleration" but I think they could use some hack that was mentioned......anyone know ?

Not sure I could cancel and reorder....but if I could ...should I ? Note the system I ordered doesnt have CUDA but has a much larger rating (1749 vs 726 or 1200).

I have CS4 and Lightroom would the CUDA gpu acceleration help me a lot ?

Thanks for any advice !

[George Tyndall]

Not sure I could cancel and reorder....

If you purchased new products directly from Dell, you have 7 days after receiving your order to return or exchange the equipment for credit or a refund of the purchase price paid, less shipping and handling and applicable restocking fees.

Unless the product is defective or the return is a direct result of a Dell error, a restocking fee of 15% may be charged.

For more information on the General Terms and Conditions of Sale or the Return Policy, please navigate to the following link: General Terms and Conditions of Sale.

If you have additional questions, please contact Dell Customer Service. --http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/kcs/document?c=us&docid=118332&doclang=en&l=en&s=gen&cs=

P.S. HP allows up to 21 days for exchange and will even have FedEx pick up the unit at no charge--plus, you get credited as soon as FedEx scans it upon pickup, and there is no restocking fee.

I don't know the answer to your other questions, but someone will likely come along who does.

[Bob]

CS4 and LightRoom don't use CUDA. So, CUDA doesn't matter for those products. In general, most gpu accellerated products use OpenGL and the NVIDIA cards and the Radeon cards both support OpenGL. Premiere Pro CS5 uses CUDA for excelleration with the Mercury Playback Engine, so that may be a future consideration.

CUDA is only available with NVIDIA cards. The hack you mentioned is to enable NVIDIA cards that are not in the list of officially supported CUDA cards for Premiere Pro CS5/5.5. You'll need a minimum of 1GB graphics memory on the card. The GT545 only has 144 cuda cores. That's not a lot of cores. I'm not sure how much that will help. Maybe, someone who has tried other CUDA cards can comment. For comparison, the lowest offically supported CUDA Card, the GTX285, has 240 cores and the supported GTX470 has 448 cores.

[jackfalbey]

Like Bob said, if you don't plan on upgrading to Premiere Pro CS5 or higher anytime soon, you'll be just fine with the Radeon HD 6770 you ordered. If you do plan on upgrading your Adobe software sometime down the road, you can always upgrade your video card at that time. Currently the GTX 285 (if you can still find one) goes for around $250 and the GTX 470 is around $350, but by this time next year we could have CS6 and a bunch of newer Mercury Playback Engine-approved cards too.

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

I tried the hack on my system but it caused massive instability so I disabled it.

As I am still with tape based HD and my system is reasonably powerful I don't think the Mercury engine would have been of significant benefit.

Now if I was using AVCHD....I'd probably get an approved card.

[tjodork]

Thanks for the feedback ! I can't really afford to upgrade CS4 so thanks for pointing that out...... based on that I will stick with what I have.
Sadly, the ship date is over 3 weeks away...so the flooding in Thailand has to be making an impact.

[George Tyndall]

I tried the hack on my system but it caused massive instability so I disabled it.

Was the crash due to the hack or to preliminarily updating to the latest NVIDIA driver?

In my case, I never got as far as the hack, because my GTX 260 ceased to function with the latest NVIDIA-recommended driver installed.

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

Mine is a GTS250, George.