Actually there was a recent thread that went over which nvidia card is better, just search for  "Benchmarking AE CUDA". Turns out the 5xx series is probably the better cards, or at least, no worse than the 6xx series. Thanks to Teddy Gage for doing that initial testing.

On the PC, our two top cards that we test are the 7950 and the 570. It's for testing Beauty Box which is all OpenCL, so the CUDA stuff doesn't matter for us. The 7950 edges out the 570 in AE, but not by much (and again, we're just testing a 2D plugin, not using ray tracing). I assume if you had a 580 or 590 they'd be comparable or faster. In Premiere the 570 smokes the 7950. We may be using OpenCL but of course Premiere really uses CUDA and it makes a big difference having the nvidia card.

Cheers,

Jim

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Jim Tierney

President

Digital Anarchy

http://www.digitalanarchy.com

I'm about to purchase a custom-build PC and am trying to decide on a graphics card. I want something that works well for AE and Cinema 4D. It seems that both these apps rely primarily on the CPU, and very little on the GPU. All things being equal, I thought I would go with the Nvidia card because it supports the CS6 raytracing. But a guy on a forum is -quite- emphatic that I should get this Radeon card. Can explain to me why he's wrong?

our conversation went as follows:
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RALPH: Buddy. The 670 is not a good card for workstations. NVidia basically crippled the cuda performance on the 6xx line to make it better for gaming. Get a 7970 instead, it has way more compute power.

ME: I want to go with the Nvidia because Radeon isn't fully supported by this program I use (After Effects.) Also, someone pointed out to me that most of my concern should be the wait time on software rendering, so in my case it's more about the CPU. Anyhow it was helpful to know about the difference between the GTX 6xx so I'll probably get a 5xx model.

RALPH: That's only mostly untrue. From Adobe's system requirements page, it says only that AMD cards don't support GPU acceleration, an unnecessary function. Past that, you will get more power out of the 7970 as the CUDA cores are nearly non-existant on the 6xx line, and the compute power on the 5xx line isn't close to the 7970's.
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