NVIDIA Launches Adobe Quadro Card

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Huh?  Adobe is a software company knucklehead!  Indeed, they are.  NVIDIA has just announced the Quadro CX graphics card.  The latest addition to the Quadro series has been specifically optimized for Adobe’s Creative Suite 4.  It features the latest in NVIDIA GPU silicon, all 192 thread processors [now called “CUDA Parallel Processor Cores”] and 1.5GB of DDR3 memory on a 384-bit memory interface.

A few more features…

  • Adobe Photoshop® CS4 uses NVIDIA Quadro CX GPU to bring unprecedented fluidity to image navigation. The GPU enables real-time image rotation, zooming, and panning, and makes changes to the view instantaneous and smooth. Adobe Photoshop CS4 also taps the GPU for on-screen compositing of both 2D and 3D content, ensuring smoothly anti-aliased results regardless of zoom level. Brush resizing and brushstroke preview, 3D movement, high-dynamic-range tone mapping, and colour conversion are also accelerated by the GPU.
  • Adobe After Effects® CS4 now has added optimisation features to accelerate a variety of creative effects, making it easier than ever to add graphics and visual effects to video, which allows the artist to quickly move from concept to final product and speeds up the workflow. Effects accelerated include depth of field, bilateral blur effects, turbulent noise such as flowing water or waving flags, and cartoon effects. NVIDIA Quadro CX takes advantages of these workflow enhancements.
  • Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 can take advantage of Quadro CX to accelerate high-quality video effects such as motion, opacity, colour, and image distortion. Quadro CX also enables faster editing of multiple high-definition video streams and graphic overlays and provides a variety of video output choices for high-quality preview, including DisplayPort, component TV, or uncompressed 10-bit or 12-bit SDI.

Neat!  Of course, this partnership also means that Adobe has been optimizing small compute kernels in After Effects and Premier Pro with a few very specific CUDA routines.  From an HPC perspective, none of this is terribly interesting.  However, it is interesting to see the marriage of large hardware manufacturer and large software developer.

For more info on the new card, read the full article here.

Comments

  1. Adobe CS4 also works with other graphics cards, including NVidia’s rival AMD (formerly known as ATI).

    The Quadro CX card is nothing more than an older NVidia 260 (192 vertex shaders a.k.a. “CUDA Parallel Processor Cores”) while the memory has been increased from 896 MB on the original 260 to 1.5 GB. The newer NVidia 260 has 216 vertex shaders. It would have been nice to see them use the newer chip. I see this as nothing more than a way to sell, to the unwary, more of the “older” 260 chips, or perhaps get increased yields on the “new” 260 chips.

    I would prefer to use the NVidia 280 which has 240 vertex shaders and 1 GB of memory, or one of the newer units NVidia is set to release in the next few weeks.

  2. John Leidel says

    Great info Paul! Thanks for the comment.