Post Magazine

I n a happy marriage between software and hardware, now legally recognized in all states, Adobe Creative Suite 4 has bonded with Nvidia's new Quadro CX graphics board to create a visual designer's dream come true. Admittedly, I set myself up for a nearly- guaranteed disaster of a review. Having just installed the new CS4 applications on top of a newly-installed beta 64-bit Windows 7 Ul- timate OS, you'd think that the last thing I would need is a new high-end graphics card in there, with freshly downloaded drivers. I was never a science/math kinda guy, but one thing I remember from experiments back in my high school chemistr y class is that too many variables lead to faulty conclusions. Well, to my surprise and delight, everything went smoothly. Let's take a look. P R O C E S S I N G C O R E S One of the biggest and most impor tant changes to Adobe's Creative Suite of applica- tions in CS4 is the capability to take advantage of the GPU for accelerating a wide variety of functions of video and image design and test- ing.To exploit this new capability Nvidia intro- duced the Quadro CX accelerator for CS4. Weighing in with a whopping 1.5GB of video memor y, 192 lightning fast CUDA processing cores and an x16 bus speed, the Quadro CX is anything but sluggish. I spend a good portion of my day in After Effects and Photoshop, as well as Adobe's Media Encoder, and the CX dramatically sped up my workflow, in some cases — pro- viding a 400 percent increase in speed. RAM previews in AE were rendering faster than realtime, something I had never experi- enced before while working with complex 3D files and algorithms. HD frames were loading into preview at a faster fps than what my comp required. I've found over the years, the only way I can work creatively in media is with WYSIWYG interactivity. I don't do quar ter-rez comps, I don't reduce my frame rate or quality levels. The CX board allows me to work more fluidly and interactively with my comps than ever be- fore possible, saving a bunch of time and streamlining my creative process. D I S P L AY F E T I S H It's not just about speed either.To support the needs of the creative professional mar- ket where accurate color is not considered a flexible requirement, the Quadro CX pro- vides suppor t for 10-bit color output per component. With integrated support for 30- bit color (10-bit color per color channel) over DisplayPort, the CX board offers a truly intense level of color fidelity. Instead of the traditional 16.7 million discrete colors, which are supported by 24-bit color monitors, the CX can take advantage of 30-bit display monitors to display — picture Dr. Evil whis- per finger to lips — 1.7 billion colors simulta- neously! Luckily for those of us with display fetishes, more and more monitors are com- ing to the market like the new Hewlett- Packard DreamColor LP2480zx professional display, which suppor ts this 30-bit color. 30- bit color suppor t eliminates those nasty banding issues and provides unmatched color accuracy and tonal response. A single dual-link TMDS transmitter suppor ts ultra- high-resolution panels (up to 3840x2400 @24Hz) which results in amazing image quality producing detailed photorealistic im- ages. A true feast for the eyes. P R O F E S S I O N A L O U T P U T The Quadro CX can be combined with an SDI card to allow output to SDI-capable displays when using Premiere Pro and After Effects, through the use of the application plug-ins provided with the Quadro CX. With the addition of an SDI interface card, the Quadro CX is an ideal solution for dig- ital broadcast professionals who use vari- ous applications — such as vir tual sets, spor ts, and weather news systems — to composite live video footage onto vir tual backgrounds and send the result to live video for TV broadcast. Quadro SDI solu- tions also allow film production, post and finishing pros to preview the results of 3D compositing, editing and color grading in realtime on HD broadcast monitors. All in gorgeous, uncompromised, uncom- pressed 8-, 10- or 12-bit SDI from pro- grammable graphics, enabling a direct connection to broadcast monitors, switchers, tape decks or SDI projectors. G R A P H I C S P L U S The advanced capabilities in encoding and image processing are achieved by har- nessing the power of the GPU to allow su- percomputer-level computation on the desktop enabled by Nvidia's CUDA (Com- pute Unified Device Architecture) technol- ogy. It's kinda like Nvidia's GPUs are deliver- ing "Graphics Plus" by using a dual-personal- ity parallel processing engine able to deliver both amazing graphics capabilities and rockin' floating-point computation. In addi- tion to its superior function with Adobe CS4 suite of apps, the new Quadro CX board is ideally suited for a wide range of professional graphics apps, including Native DirectX 10/Shader Model 4.0 and OpenGL 2.1 suppor t for authoring the latest 3D en- ter tainment content. If you do a lot of H.264 output like I do, this card will save you oodles of downtime. With the RapiHD plug-in from Elemental Technologies the CX board rivals dedicated H.264 hardware encoders and offers enhanced speeds of up to 4x the encode speed of a typical CPU. And you won't find this feature on the more con- sumerish GeForce line either — this plug-in is exclusive to the Quadro CX. F I N A L T H O U G H T S While currently only available on the PC, and a bit pricey for the average media hob- byist, the Quadro CX is an indispensible tool for the pro media designer, which allows a significant cost savings on processing time of your high-end imagery. 54 Post www.postmagazine.com By TOR ROLF JOHANSEN Director/Producer Los Angeles tor@torphoto.com V I T A L S T AT S R E V I E W Nvidia Quadro CX PRODUCT: Nvidia's Quadro CX WEBSITE: www.nvidia.com PRICE: $1,729.95 (B&H) · Support for professional SDI output · 4x H.264 encoding with RapiHD accelerator · 30-bit color support · 1.5GB frame buffer This new board is fast, fast, fast.

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