@zcream Funny thing is GPUZ doesn't report my GTX460's memory controllers load as ever higher than 1%, and the GPU load is rarely above 10%. Wouldn't the memory controller be involved in transfer over the PCIe lane?

Newest Nvidia cards have a quite good energy management (AMD cards reportedly not that much and still buggy) and the Kepler design is more energy effiecient than older designs. AFAIK, for apps such as DaVinci, amount of GPU's RAM comes in very handy.

With 1344 cuda cores you could cook a Pizza on it!

@DrDave Yeah, it seems that in PPro the problem is either getting the software to utilise all the available cores (or some other bottleneck, perhaps memory bandwidth).

According to Studio1's benchmarks (http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm) there's hardly any difference in timeline rendering speeds across the various cards, there's lot more variance in DVD encoding.

I took their listed results for CUDA rendering on CS5.5 and compared them to the GT-240. The figures below are seconds and a ratio compared to the GT-240.

Benchmark One: AMD X4 @ 3.2 GHz / 8GB

Video Card    Time Line Render    Export to MPEG-2 DVD
None          373.0 / 10.91       387 / 1.38
GT-240         34.2 /  1.00       281 / 1.00
GT-440         33.3 /  0.97       275 / 0.98
GTX-470        31.6 /  0.92       230 / 0.82
GTX-545        32.8 /  0.96       258 / 0.92
GTX-550 Ti     31.9 /  0.93       246 / 0.88
GTX-570        31.5 /  0.92       193 / 0.69
GTX-680        30.0 /  0.88       184 / 0.65
Quadro 2000    32.5 /  0.95       257 / 0.91
Quadro 4000    31.6 /  0.92       242 / 0.86

Benchmark One: i7-920 @ 3.05 GHz / 16GB

Video Card    Time Line Render    Export to MPEG-2 DVD
None          114.0 / 9.91        176 / 0.97
GT-240         11.5 / 1.00        181 / 1.00
GT-440         11.5 / 1.00        180 / 0.99
GTX-470        10.0 / 0.87         98 / 0.54
GTX-545        11.0 / 0.96        168 / 0.93
GTX-550 Ti     11.0 / 0.96        159 / 0.88
GTX-570        10.0 / 0.87         97 / 0.54
GTX-680         9.0 / 0.78         86 / 0.48
Quadro 2000    11.5 / 1.00        166 / 0.92
Quadro 4000    11.0 / 0.96        155 / 0.86

Benchmark Two: AMD X4 @ 3.2 GHz / 8GB

Video Card      Time Line Render
GT-240          341 / 1.00
GT-440          337 / 0.99
GTX-470         334 / 0.98
GTX-545         337 / 0.99
GTX-550 Ti      335 / 0.98
GTX-570         329 / 0.96
GTX-680         316 / 0.93

Studio1 also had this to say about H.264: "The difference between a 96 cuda core video card and a 480 cuda core video card was 7 seconds when exporting in the MPE GPU mode."

So today, unless you're doing MPEG-2 encoding there doesn't seem to be a great reason to upgrade from the GT-240.

EDIT Fixed benchmark two's ratios.

@vas907 Thanks for the info--are you running the standard DPX files or mov files? The DPX files are the ones that play slow on my system. @Vitaliy agreed. Even a GT 240 is only using 30-40 percent of the GPU for premiere pro.

@stip

This thing is mostly useless marketing shit. They want to sell Quadro :-) Just most people do not want to buy it.

@tinbeo

It is topic about desktop graphic cards :-)

@DrDave Didn't have to do anything special when I was running the GTX 460, and I was running 301.42

Speedgrade runs like a turtle on my GT 240. I have read that it works with a GT 240, so maybe it is a driver issue. @vas907 did you do anything special to get speedgrade running with the GTX 460? And what version driver did you use?

@vas907

OK. Almost the same as in first post.

Being able to run 3 monitors (2 dvis 1 Display Port) was also a plus.

Do you have a link to exact card you use, as most GT 640 seem to have 2xDCI, HDMI and VGA.

Radeon 7970 looks like an excellent contender.

Issue is that both CS6 and DaVinci do not support AMD cards :-)

So, if you need card today, NVidia is the only way.