Graphics card for use with Adobe suite

steve_

Hey guys ill be investing in the new adobe creative cloud suite soon and i was looking at getting a new graphics card for my computer. I currently have the ati 7970 card inside my machine but as far as im aware this card doesnt really come into use with programs like after effects or premier pro as its not supported. Also iv read cuda enabled cards are much more effective when it comes to using sofeware such as the adobe suite. I got the 7970 mainly for gaming but to be honest iv moved away from gaming on the pc as of late.

Hopefully someone could just clear up my confusion with regards to cuda cards, are they really much better for this kind of area? Ill be looking to sell the 7970 soon seeing as it doesnt help out at all while using these programs, seems a waste to hang onto it.

Overheal

Firepro or Quadro I would reckon for professional use. Radeon and GeForce have so much of a focus on gaming pipelines that for editing they are mostly a waste aren't they?

Tails142

Overheal wrote: »

Firepro or Quadro I would reckon for professional use. Radeon and GeForce have so much of a focus on gaming pipelines that for editing they are mostly a waste aren't they?

I know in Maya you need a professional grade card like a quadro to use certain features such as viewport 2.0, I don't know why exactly, may be an artificially created issue to drive the sales of the more expensive professional cards, or there may be a bona fide hardware reason, probably a bit of both.

Not sure if similar needs arise in Adobe creative suite programs or not.

BloodBath

Firepro or Quadro I would reckon for professional use. Radeon and GeForce have so much of a focus on gaming pipelines that for editing they are mostly a waste aren't they?

Overpriced and they perform less than a gaming graphics card for the likes of Adobe CS. I think they have memory checking like eec ram to make sure there are no errors for the likes of professional engineers ect. CS 6 supports open cl and opengl which would allow you to accelerate program performance with amd cards as well. If you don't have that then a cheap Nvidia card would do perfectly. A 650ti boost isn't far off a 680gtx in terms of the performance boost it gives.

steve_

Thanks for the replies guys. So is my card of any use at all? If noticed my ram and CPU activity shoots up while using the programs and my card doesn't bat an eyelid. So what would be an ideal card for use with the creative cloud suite? I hope to get around 250 for the 7970 so I don't mind adding 100 or so more to it for a card that will improve these programs performance

beauf

In the past the main difference in the pro nvidia cards was the professional open gl drivers written for the card. Not up-to-date with the situation these days.

beauf

which makes more of an impact the graphics card or more cores on the cpu?

BloodBath

It depends, gpus can give very significant gains in CS but they do drop off past a certain point unlike cpu gains. What cpu are you using btw op?

Here's how cpus stack up against each other.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-performance-comparison,3370-13.html

Adobe CS6, unlike previous versions of CS is supposed to support opencl making amd cards viable but I have read it still does not have this feature unlocked. You should look into it. Are you using CS5 currently?

If you you need to switch to Nvidia then the new 760gtx would be a good buy and has only slightly less game performance as your current card. Priced between €260-300.

If you aren't bothered with the game performance as much then the much cheaper 660gtx would give almost the same CS acceleration as the 760 while still having reasonable gaming performance. Priced €170-200.

Your hard drive setup will affect your overall speed as well. How many hard drives are you using. Any ssd in there? How much ram?

steve_

Currently im just using after effects and premier pro cs6 they are the only two programs i have which is why im gonna opt in for the creative cloud package. my cpu is an i7 -2600, 16gb of ram and a 128gb ssd for the OS and a separate 1tb drive for everything else.

Torqay

BloodBath wrote: »

Overpriced and they perform less than a gaming graphics card for the likes of Adobe CS. I think they have memory checking like eec ram to make sure there are no errors for the likes of professional engineers

Don't forget Maximus, that's what they really make you pay for.

Overheal

well based on some research a good chunk of it is all the certification and testing for drivers that are tuned and supported for specific programs, kind of like how gaming cards and their drivers are designed to run games. that and some comparisons between a gaming card and a workstation card on some programs shows a pretty stark contrast in quality output.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgdKuUzrogg

Its pretty jarring to watch the workstation cards do so terribly on the 3dmark benches, but they run much much better than the radeon on workstation programs.

BloodBath

He's using cs6. Nvidia gaming cards have 0 issues with cs6. Workstation cards are a complete waste of money.

Overheal

BloodBath wrote: »

He's using cs6. Nvidia gaming cards have 0 issues with cs6. Workstation cards are a complete waste of money.

With an emphasis on After Effects and Premier Pro, which workstation cards are designed to accelerate.

BloodBath

You can see here that it's not better. The performance drops off past a certain point so even cheap cards like a 650ti can offer great performance. I have read some of the gpu acceleration can only be done with 2gb cards though. That's photoshop though.

It's hard to get benchmarks for everything.

http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Photoshop-CS6-GPU-Acceleration-161/

Overheal

Fair enough. Ive been looking at comparisons in things like solidworks etc and in there the difference is night and day between one and the other