NVIDIA is selling a bundle of Adobe's Premiere Pro CS4 software with its NVIDIA Quadro CX graphics card that gives buyers a 40% discount and significantly improves their ability to process H.264 high-definition video.
The Quadro CX graphics card was specifically designed by NVIDIA to optimize performance of Adobe's Premier Pro CS4 software for professional users, said Tyler Worden, market development manager at NVIDIA.
"If you look at CPU encoders today, they completely underutilize the system because the GPU will be sitting idle," he said. "With the Quadro CX we are able to significantly speed up H.264 encoding by leveraging the use of the
processors on the GPU to split up the problem. This offloads some of the work from the CPU to the GPU and you can use the CPU to do other things."
In a test video, NVIDIA found that it took almost 10 hours to encode a one-hour video to the Blu-ray format using a dual core CPU. "When you use the Quadro CX, however, we can drop it down to one quarter of that time, which is a speed-up of 4 times," Worden said.
The faster and more efficient processing also makes it much easier and faster to use a number of tools on the Adobe software, including image rotation, zooming, panning, and brush resizing, as well as faster editing of multiple HD video dreams and graphic overlays.
In a tough economic climate, Worden believes these features will be particularly important for companies looking for cost conscious ways to speed up their systems so they can be more productive and handle larger HD files. He said buying the Quadro CX card for can significantly increase productivity and processing power of a computer system for much less than cost of upgrading the CPU.
"People are looking for ways to boost productivity without spending enormous amounts of money," he said. "This gives you much better bang for the buck."
