Tom’s Hardware preliminary CS5 benchmarks

Tom’s Hardware is designing "tests using Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, complementing our threaded Photoshop benchmark. As you’ll see in the charts below, though, Jon’s CS4-based tests exposed some very interesting results moving from 12 threads to 16 and then to 24. So, I quickly adapted all of Jon’s tests to run in each respective app’s CS5 version to cross-check the results. What we came away with simply blew me away…

With all of that said, we have a story in the works dedicated to testing Adobe’s newest Creative Suite, where we’ll explore the effects of 64-bit operating environments, the Mercury Playback Engine, and GPU acceleration with Nvidia’s few supported graphics cards. For now, it’s fairly safe to say that professionals with multi-socket, multi-core machines will be well-served by an upgrade to CS5."

...see the rest at Benchmark Results: CS4 And Introducing Adobe’s CS5 Suite.

Update: @flockofpixels is reporting that upgrading a "8core Macpro to 24gigs ram. #Aftereffects CS5 render before upgrade - 34mins. After upgrade -11mins."