Adobe Mercury

[Cope This 719]

I am contemplating a new computer part of which involves the use of Adobe Premier Pro. Now I understand that the Mercury Engine may not support graphics cards from ATI Raedon such as the 6950 2 GB card. MY predicament is do I use the onboard graphics of an Asrock Z68 Extreme 4 or shell out for an expensive Quadro FX 3800M or similar card. I am not sure how good the onboard graphics will be or how good a video card ( either from Nvidia or ATI) will be.

Help needed Thanking you all in advance
John

[Paul LS]

Why not go for one of the low end approved cards... I have the GTX 470, it is very affordable and gives a huge improvement in playback from the timeline and rendering speed. If you do not intend to use GPU acceleration then save your self money and go with the onboard graphics.

[Bob]

The Mercury Engine uses CUDA for hardware accelleration. That is only available on NVIDIA graphics cards. If you go with the ATI card, you will still be able to use the Mercury Engine, but it will not be hardware accellerated. See this link for more information as to how CUDA is used in Premiere Pro: http://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2011/02/cuda-mercury-playback-engine-and-adobe-premiere-pro.html

The Quick Sync feature on the Sandy Bridge CPUs provides accellerated transcoding -- not video frame rendering which is cpu intensive. Quick Sync supports hardware decoding of MPEG-2, VC-1 and AVC(H.264), and encoding of MPEG-2 and AVC. Other codecs are not accelerated. Quick Sync is fast, but the application has to be written specifically to use it. It's not automatic. Premiere is not written to use Quick Sync.

In my opinion, if you are going to be using Premiere Pro and want GPU acceleration, you're better off with an NVIDIA graphics card. You don't need to buy a Quadro FX card.

[Cope This 719]

Does the GTX 470 support 2 or more monitors

Regards John

[Bob]

Yes.