I was very dissapointed to find that Premeire Pro CS5.5 (5.5.2) doesn't support that many GPUs for CUDA, and I found a quick hack to change the GPU list to include mine.
I read up a bit about it on the Adobe website, and it reasoned with the shortage of GPUs with the fact that they don't want people to use a GPU which isn't good enough, for reasons of which I can't remember (This was a while ago).
I have the 2012 iMac running OSX 10.8.3:
- GeForce 650M 512MB
- 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM
- 3.1GHz i7
Not a lot of VRAM, but good processor and RAM. The Nvidia website states that this card is a CUDA card.
Since Premiere Pro doesn't support CUDA for this card, is this just going to make performance and video quality lower?
I tested it by rendering a sequence, which included 1080p clips and lower res but scaled clips, and exported (At the same frame ofc) a PNG on both CUDA and software-only. On the scaled clips, CUDA appears to be a bit sharper, yet has colour banding; software-only is a bit more blurry, but doesn't have colour banding. I can't find any differences in the 1080p frames.
So, is it good or bad that I used this hack? On CUDA, I feel like the timeline is a little slower at responding, but I'd rather trade timeline speed for better scaling...I'm not sure if I'd prefer a sharper image or less colour banding.
I'll provide the frames if anyone asks. I'm not sure what the codecs or containers were, I'll provide that along with the frames.
Edit: Also I'm using a LaCie Little Big Disk 240GB Thunderbolt SSD RAID; I doubt that's causing problems with the timeline latency.