Nvidia Quadro CX: this new board is fast, fast, fast

Post, May, 2009 by Tor Rolf Johansen

In 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 Ultimate 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 chemistry class is that too many variables lead to faulty conclusions. Well, to my surprise and delight, everything went smoothly. Let's take a look.

PROCESSING CORES

One of the biggest and most important changes to Adobe's Creative Suite of applications in CS4 is the capability to take advantage of the GPU for accelerating a wide variety of functions of video and image design and testing. To exploit this new capability Nvidia introduced the Quadro CX accelerator for CS4. Weighing in with a whopping 1.5GB of video memory, 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--providing a 400 percent increase in speed. RAM previews in AE were rendering faster than realtime, something I had never experienced 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 quarter-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 before possible, saving a bunch of time and streamlining my creative process.

DISPLAY FETISH

It's not just about speed either. To support the needs of the creative professional market where accurate color is not considered a flexible requirement, the Quadro CX provides support 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 whisper finger to lips--1.7 billion colors simultaneously! Luckily for those of us with display fetishes, more and more monitors are coming to the market like the new Hewlett-Packard DreamColor LP2480zx professional display, which supports this 30-bit color: 30-bit color support eliminates those nasty banding issues and provides unmatched color accuracy and tonal response. A single dual-link TMDS transmitter supports ultra-high-resolution panels (up to 3840x2400 @24Hz) which results in amazing image quality producing detailed photorealistic images. A true feast for the eyes.

PROFESSIONAL OUTPUT

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 digital broadcast professionals who use various applications--such as virtual sets, sports, and weather news systems--to composite live video footage onto virtual backgrounds and send the result to live video for TV broadcast. Quadro SDI solutions 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, uncompressed 8-, 10-or 12-bit SDI from programmable graphics, enabling a direct connection to broadcast monitors, switchers, tape decks or SDI projectors.

GRAPHICS PLUS

The advanced capabilities in encoding and image processing are achieved by harnessing the power of the GPU to allow supercomputer-level computation on the desktop enabled by Nvidia's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology. It's kinda like Nvidia's GPUs are delivering "Graphics Plus" by using a dual-personality parallel processing engine able to deliver both amazing graphics capabilities and rockin' floating-point computation. In addition 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 support for authoring the latest 3D entertainment 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 consumerish GeForce line either--this plug-in is exclusive to the Quadro CX.