New Mac Pro and CS5

[Marlin]

It appears that the new Mac Pro does not support NVIDIA graphics cards and that CS5 requires it. Can someone shed light on this issue?

 

[MisterMe]

It appears that the new Mac Pro does not support NVIDIA graphics cards and that CS5 requires it. Can someone shed light on this issue?

This is nonsense. You should read the facts. To wit, Adobe lists the following graphics requirements for CS5:

• 1024x768 display (1280x800 recommended) with qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card, 16-bit color, and 256 VRAM
• Some GPU-accelerated features require graphics support for Shader Model 3.0 and OpenGL 2.0

Nowhere does it say that NVIDIA cards are required. Apple has chosen ATI's top cards in its HD line. They meet the System Requirements set by Adobe for CS5 support. They are more than adequate for the task.

 

[LethalWolfe]

They are more than adequate for the task.

Unless you are looking forward to leveraging Adobe's Mercury Playback Engine because it relies on Nvidia's CUDA technology.

Nvidia is also the recommend card for Avid's Media Composer 5 editing software and Apple has even removed Nvidia cards as BTO options across the board for the Mac Pros. If someone were into conspiracy theories...


Lethal

 

[knello]

The new Mac Pros do indeed support Nvidia... it's just that Nvidia cards aren't available built to order machines anymore. I also think this was done to create a disincentive to switch from FCP to Premiere or Avid.

 

[Mac_Max]

I think it has more to do with Apple shuffling which vendor around so that ATI & NVidia dont stop making Mac products. They've done this year after year since NVidia came on board with Apple support.

 

[CaptainChunk]

CS5 runs fine on ATI cards. In fact, the only application that really takes advantage of a CUDA card right out of the box is Premiere's Mercury Engine. And on the Mac, only two CUDA cards are actually supported (the GTX 285 and the Quadro FX 4800). So chances are, even if the new Mac Pros DID ship with NVIDIA graphics options, the card wouldn't be an Adobe-supported one right off that bat.

Also keep in mind that the Mercury Engine even makes improvements in performance over Premiere CS4 running in "software" mode because of its superior CPU scaling and memory handling.

As for the rest of the CS5 apps (Photoshop, After Effects, etc.), they rely on OpenGL, not CUDA. The exceptions would be some aftermarket Ps/AE plugins engineered for CUDA acceleration.


The biggest so-called conspiracy with the whole CUDA thing with CS5 has been Adobe's limited support of CUDA cards. While there are dozens of CUDA-enabled graphics cards, only 5 are supported in Windows and 2 in Mac OS. The rest of them are turned off because "they haven't been tested." Adobe is starting to get a lot like Avid in this regard.

Hopefully, when Adobe enables support for Fermi-based CUDA cards as rumored, the new Quadro 4000 will be supported. That's a killer professional CUDA card for under $1,000.