Subject:RE: Mercury Engine - why the hooha?

Posted by: busterkeaton

Date:10/30/2010 10:41:25 AM

Also remember that comparison was to Vegas Pro 9.

Subject:RE: Mercury Engine - why the hooha?

Reply by: JohnnyRoy

Date:10/30/2010 1:21:06 PM

I had to laugh when I read:

> Premiere Pro CS5 managed 10 simultaneous 1080i AVCHD streams – an extremely demanding format to decode.

and

> Apple Final Cut Pro managed 14 streams after transcoding to a friendlier format.

Excuse me but if you convert it to a friendlier format then it isn't AVCHD anymore and the test is NULL and VOID! lol I'm sure Vegas Pro could handle 14 streams of CineForm if we want to play the friendly format game. ;-)

> Selecting full resolution meant both Adobe and Sony’s editors only managed four AVCHD streams...

Given that statement I would tend to reiterate the subject's question: Why the hooha? It should also be noted that there was no definition of "simultaneous streams" and if what they meant was to use the GPU accelerated Opacity then your performance may vary greatly if you use an un-GPU accelerated FX.

~jr

Subject:RE: Mercury Engine - why the hooha?

Reply by: Rory Cooper

Date:11/1/2010 2:12:42 AM

it’s a bit expensive for an AVCHD previewer.

Subject:RE: Mercury Engine - You sold me!

Reply by: farss

Date:11/1/2010 3:51:07 AM

You do realise those tests were without any GPU acceleration?

Reading further than you quoted:

However, fitting our test PC with a suitable nVidia graphics card gave a dramatic boost to effects performance. The software uses Nvidia’s CUDA architecture to access the graphics processor, which has lots of parallel cores that are well suited to video-editing tasks.

We had a chance to try the £1,500 Quadro FX 4800, which managed 14 instances of the demanding Three-Way Color Corrector effect at the full 1080p resolution.

The FX 4800 is quite old and expensive nVidia technology, the newer Fermi based Quadro 4000 is half the price and faster.

Overall the review is a bit of a bust and hardly "expert". They mention they managed to crash Ppro but they were only running beta code. The review is dated 1 November 2010 and the release version of CS5 has been out for months.

Bob.

Subject:RE: Mercury Engine - You sold me!

Reply by: RRA

Date:11/1/2010 9:19:58 AM

Hi,

Could anybody compare Fermi Quadro 4000 with Fermi Quadro 2000 (new one, price two times lower) ?

Is it only question of two times smaller memory on Fermi 2000 ?

Best regards,

Subject:RE: Mercury Engine - why the hooha?

Reply by: Andreas S.

Date:11/1/2010 12:15:59 PM

The fanciest thing about the Mercury engine...is the name. It is nice in that, when I'm forced to use PPro, it renders faster than it used to. Of course, it still takes a month of planning and several hours of precision execution to butt two clips into a crossfade, but the Mercury engine...yeah, it's swell.

(hyperbole and sarcasm are mine)

Subject:RE: Mercury Engine - You sold me!

Reply by: farss

Date:11/1/2010 12:49:10 PM

Looking at the specs the 2000 has half the memory and half the memory bandwidth. The memory interface is 128bit compared to 256bit. Also on the 2000 only two of the three outputs can be used at once and max power consumption is less than half.

You also loose buffered 3D display and nVidia's "Digital Video Pipeline" on the 2000. So basically I'd say the 4000 and 5000 target the serious video production market. The 2000 targets the mid level graphics market.

Bob.

Subject:RE: Mercury Engine - You sold me!

Reply by: megabit

Date:11/2/2010 4:45:16 AM

Here is an eye opener:

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/NVIDIA-Unleashes-Quadro-6000-and-5000-Series-Workstation-GPUs-Review/?page=1

The GTX480 looks very good for our applications - even when compared with the highest end 5000/6000, and leaves the FX 4800 in the dust...

Piotr