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Test Drive: Nvidia Quadro CX and Adobe CS4, Part 2

Jan 26, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

           

Summary

Where does this leave us? Overall, Nvidia has done a very good job establishing that an OpenGL graphics card is a must for even casual CS4 users. However, the company hasn't shown enough hard data, or provided me with enough direction, to prove that the CX should be that card except in a few, very well-defined instances.

Photoshop users with multiple 30in. monitors and the need to juggle the maximum number of OpenGL-accelerated images will see a return on investment; otherwise, you probably can get away with a less expensive card, if not your current card. With After Effects, cartoon-heavy effects will respond dramatically; otherwise, it takes a lot of data to justify the CX.

For Premiere Pro users, several H.264-specific use cases come to mind. If you have an older computer and just need to transcode unedited video from one format to H.264, the CX could be an inexpensive way to quickly boost the performance of that system. At the other end of the spectrum, if price is no object, and you want the biggest, baddest, fastest editing and encoding H.264 for Blu-ray system on the planet, get an eight-core system such as the HP xw8600 and spring for the CX. On the other hand, if producing H.264 for Blu-ray isn't a big chunk of your job description, you almost certainly can find a much less expensive OpenGL card that performs similarly in day-to-day operation.

I hope (and challenge) Nvidia will do more to objectively show when and where the CX truly lives up to the claim that it is "the accelerator for Adobe Creative Suite 4"—and more cost-effective than cards costing a fraction of the price, even after a new bundle deal announced by Nvidia.

On the other hand, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Nvidia became my graphics vendor of choice back in the late 1990s, and in my view, no graphics-card vendor can match its performance, affordability, and most importantly, stability. I have too many computers to count in my office and home, and Nvidia happily lives in at least 95 percent of them, and 100 percent of those acquired in the last four years. There's no doubt that if I were buying a graphics card for CS4 production today, it would be an Nvidia card. It just wouldn't be the Quadro CX.