With Adobe’s newly launched Creative Suite 4, the game changes completely, and there are some pretty interesting repercussions because of this change. Many applications in Adobe’s new CS4 suite, specifically Photoshop, After Effects, Acrobat, Premiere, and Bridge, are now supporting GPU acceleration. Now, adding GPU acceleration to the mix is not a cure-all for performance, and suddenly doesn’t throw all of the graphics processing on to the GPU. These applications, as system intensive as they are, are still programs which work and live in a 2D world; there is very little true 3D interaction in these programs, which is typically where GPUs thrive. However, through the use of OpenGL, Adobe can effectively use your system’s GPU to accelerate some 2D drawings on-screen.
Nvidia is betting that there is a market for Adobe CS accelerators, and their first foray into this area is what we’re looking at today, the Quadro CX. This is not a daughterboard which works with your standard graphics card, this is a full-on, pro workstation graphics card which just happens to have a link with the Adobe CS suite through software for accelerating specific content types, similar to the QuadroFX for 3D content creation software. It’s a new product segment which the rest of the market is still somewhat confused as to how to address, but Nvidia is taking their first step towards getting Adobe software running through their GPUs in order to run them faster. Let’s see if it’s paid off…
The QuadroCX card is a double-slot card from a height perspective, and a full-length card from a width perspective. The card will extend beyond the length of a standard ATX motherboard, so it’s best suited in an Extended ATX class chassis, although one isn’t specifically required. The card utilizes a PCI Express 2.0 interface and requires a single 6-pin PCI Express power connector.
The cooling system relies on a single cooling fan which sits on the right side of the board, sucking in chassis air, running it over the GPU and memory, and exhausting it out the left side of the board. The card is equipped with an airflow shroud which helps move this cool air in the proper direction, letting it breath out by the edge of the chassis. The cooling system is very quiet by default, even under heavy loads. During the majority of our testing, the fan on the Quadro CX was spinning at under 1,500 RPM, which made it nearly inaudible, which is definitely a positive for the workstation-environment.
We do appreciate that Nvidia is trying to tackle a new market with Adobe CS acceleration though, and we definitely feel that there will be more value in a product like this once Adobe offloads more of their processing onto the GPU. Adobe is just scratching the surface of what the GPU can do with image and video related tasks, and we feel once CS5 or perhaps CS6 come around, there will likely be some killer features that make a higher-end GPU a necessity due to the significant performance benefits offered over any CPU. Today though, CS4 really isn’t tapping the massive amount of horsepower offered by the Quadro CX most of the time.
