Which graphics card to use for Premiere Pro CS5 on Mac Pro?

With the release of Premiere Pro CS5 and the news of the Mercury Playback Engine, Mac Pro users have been scrambling to find a compatible GPU to take advantage of this revolutionary new technology.

Adobe's Terry White gives us the tip of the year, you'll want to pick up the Nvidia Quadro 4000.

Check out his review here.

Here's what the Videoguys had to say about it whilst giving it the number 4 spot in their Top Ten products of 2010: "When Adobe worked with NVIDIA to create the CS5 Mercury Playback Engine, they made it more important than ever to choose the best graphics board for your NLE workstation. In the past, when manufacturers required special graphics cards, they were often extremely expensive. Now, the NVIDIA Quadro 4000 by PNY is an incredibly powerful board for under $1,000 and it's available for either PC or Mac! While the Quadro4000 Mac costs a little more than it's PC brother, it is substantially less expensive than any other Quadro board ever offered for Mac.

The Quadro 4000 is based on NVIDIA's Fermi technology, which is the next generation of their CUDA technology. This is an understatement, it's more like CUDA on steroids. The Fermi/CUDA power allows software vendors to tap directly into the GPUs many processing cores. The Quadro 4000 has a whopping 256 CUDA Parallel Processing Cores to go along with it's 2GB of GDDR5 memory. Think about that, it's like having a dedicated graphics workstation on a card. The folks at Adobe jumped on this and other software manufacturers in the content creation and encoding business are following along. When you put a Quadro 4000 in your PC or Mac workstation, you're making sure that you'll have the GPU CUDA performance to take full advantage of these new performance enhancements as they become available in more and more applications."

Enjoy.