CS5 & CUDA reports: Tom's Hardware + more

Several review or reports on CS5 & CUDA have emerged recently, including:

• Driving the Engine: As Adobe updates the capabilities of its new Mercury Playback Engine, Premiere Pro editors are rethinking theirs from Millimeter

• The Quadro FX 4800 for Mac + Premiere Pro CS5 = fast: Beyond CS5 there’s other reasons you might want a 4800. Like DaVinci Resolve for Mac at PVC

• The Mercury Engine That Could: nVIDIA CUDA Acceleration - Quadro 4800 Mac at LAFCPUG.

The latest out is a Tom's Hardware report on Adobe CS5: 64-bit, CUDA-Accelerated, And Threaded Performance. Undigested here, it's not clear immediately how closely the testing followed Adobe guidance, like given by Todd Kopriva in Please try recommended memory settings for After Effects CS5 and give feedback. The report asks:

"Assume you have CS4 and are considering CS5 as a way to become more productive through getting the same tasks done more quickly. We’re going to examine three possible vectors that could be responsible for this performance increase:

1. Upgrading from CS4 to CS5. This gives you the benefits of shifting from 32- to 64-bit code and addressing extra memory above the 4 GB threshold.
2. Increasing CPU threads. This could be through the addition of cores as well as from leveraging Intel’s Hyper-Threading (HT) feature.
3. Employing CUDA. At this early stage of the industry’s adoption of general purpose GPU acceleration, Adobe has started to weave in support for Nvidia’s CUDA platform. We hope that OpenCL and/or DirectCompute support follows soon, but for now we have to examine CUDA as a case study in what exists today and a harbinger of what will come.

Could it be that stepping up from CS4 to CS5 alone could yield enough benefit to make a hardware upgrade unnecessary? Or will an upgrade to CS5 plus bringing CUDA into play make a $500 processor overhaul mandatory? Let’s try to find out."