Santa Clara (CA) – Nvidia announced what it describes as “the accelerator for Adobe Creative Suite 4” – a graphics card that is marketed to users that primarily use Adobe applications that support GPGPU acceleration, such as Photoshop and Premiere CS4. The privilege of owning is “accelerator” isn’t cheap and, at least according to Adobe, any graphics card with at least 256 MB will accelerate its most recent software.    

Both Nvidia and AMD are waiting for compelling GPGPU applications, software than takes advantage of their GPU architectures to achieve visible levels of acceleration through multi-threading. Photoshop and Premiere are the first widely used non-industrial and non-scientific applications that integrate such capability and we recently confirmed that graphics cards in fact do provide impressive performance improvements in Photoshop CS4.

So it is not really surprising that Nvidia follows up with a dedicated product to support these claims. The company just announced the Quadro CX, a workstation-class graphics card that promises “the best performance for the new GPU-optimized features of Adobe Creative Suite 4.”

Nvidia said it “specifically designed and optimized the Quadro CX to enhance the performance of Adobe Creative Suite 4 product line and meet the unique needs of the Creative Suite 4 professional. (…) With Nvidia Quadro CX users can encode H.264 videos at lightning-fast speeds with the Nvidia CUDA enabled plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, RapiHD from Elemental Technologies; accelerate rendering time for advanced effects; and accurately preview what deliverables will look like with 30-bit color or uncompressed 10-bit/12-bit SDI before final output.”

Nvidia did not release many tech specs of the Quadro CX, but its specifications are very similar to those of the Quadro FX 5600, a high-end workstation card that was released in July 2007. The CX shares the FX’s 384-bit memory interface and 1.5 GB of frame buffer (while the more recent GT200 series of cards uses a 448-bit interface), but runs on 192 active stream processors vs. 128 on the FX. The CX is now available for pre-order for $1999, which is a bargain when compared to the $2500 the FX is currently going for at online stores.

But it is expensive for a graphics card by any measure, especially since the GPGPU acceleration is limited to a handful of features in Photoshop and Premiere – and not across the entire software. So, if you do not use Premiere and the CUDA plug-ins and do not rotate 1 GB pictures in Photoshop all day long, the value of the CX may be very limited at this time. Any other recent graphics card (both ATI and Nvidia) actually support Photoshop GPGPU acceleration and you may be just fine with a 256 MB or 512 MB desktop graphics card.