New nVidia cards to be supported

Question

At the road show event yesterday, I spoke with one of the vendors and also one of the Adobe guys (I won't name him for his sake, but trust me, he's one who would know all about this development). He mentioned two cards that have forthcoming official support. One is the GTX 470 and the other is the Quadro 3800M (the mobile version of the 3800). I asked about the GTX 480 and he just said that basically it's not being tested in the labs right now, but the 470 is everywhere and is a pretty safe bet.
As for the mobile chipset, they said that there are not any current plans to support other mobile chipsets...not that it won't happen, but it's not within their current focus.
Use that information however you choose.

Answer 1

I agree with Mr. McIntyre, and have been planning to add this thought for about 3 weeks.
Seemingly, a number of CUDA capable cards will technically enable the MPE, but how well and with what unknown side effects? There are tens of millions of G92 cards in the channel, along with newer GT 240's, GTS 250's, etc. From the feedback on the hack, the MPE kicks in on all of 'em.
The last thing Adobe wants, needs, or could afford is to have a platoon of tech service people trying to troubleshoot hardware problems in anemic computers running consumer AVCHD files on 3 year old dual-core systems with low end CUDA video cards. It would be impossible to make these older systems edit AVCHD, and the only thing this legion of pissed off consumers would remember is that expensive Adobe software couldn't work on what they figured was a really nice computer.
I have no idea if the hack was foreseen, but it certainly serves to give Adobe valuable feedback. We all want to see Adobe establish the lowest bar for certifying CS5 goodness, but it would be suicide for them to do so on a too-cheap card.
Heck, it's entirely likely that the card will not prove to be the hold-up on certification, but rather Adobe's difficult decision on what the rest of the computer comprises. In my month or so browsing this forum, I have learned that many consumer camcorders and DSLR's use a compression engine (AVCHD) that really socks it to the computer. There are apparently ways around the issue, transcoding to a more CPU friendly format, but how many regular Joe's are going to do this? They'll call Adobe and want them to fix it over the phone. It can't be done, and all that'll happen is that Adobe will waste money on tech support and end up with angry customers.
I'm one of those weirdos who researches tech purchases for a month before pulling the trigger and still was caught flat-footed on the AVCHD gremlin. Now I know, thanks mainly to this forum and a few others, that my Canon T2i is going to be hard on my AMD quad-core computer. I'm now researching solutions, and calling Adobe to complain isn't on the slate, nor will it be.
Adobe has seemingly done a bang-up job with the MPE and thorough 64 bit utilization. There are a buzzillion older CUDA cards "out there" which will get the green button to light up, but the rest of the computer is far below snuff for editing video. Adobe simply can't do anything about it.
The hack is a nice compromise - we tech heads get a chance to enable cheaper cards we already have in possession and Adobe gets good feedback on where the bottom might lie vis-a-vis usability. In the end, I suspect that the company will certify only the expensive cards, simply because they are likely to be surrounded by other components that can handle the stringent needs of video editing. And until Adobe gets a lot of numbers crunched, there's no way they are going to open the floodgates to lower and middle level systems owned by confused, angry consumers.
I don't know the sales figures, but ya gotta guess that for every GTX 470 or 480 sold, there are 100 GTS 250's sold, let alone GT 240's. It would be pointless for Adobe to render itself hostage through warranty tech service to owners of Core 2 dual cores and 8800 GT cards, hoping to get the MPE up and running with stutterless playback. There are tens of millions of students eligible to buy Adobe at huge discount who have such systems.
Nope, nope, nope. If I were Adobe, I'd sit on the high end cards until I could appropriately assess my exposure. I'd bet that 95% of the computer systems held by consumers can't edit or play back AVCHD well, regardless of whether the video card can enable the MPE. It won't be the video card specs that determine certification, it'll be the projected tidal wave of phone calls coming into tech support. By certifying only the $300 plus cards, Adobe will cut out millions of well-meaning, hopeful customers from warranty service on PrePro - and appropriately so. Their computers simply can't handle the footage and no one can do anything at all about that, save buying another computer.
Of course, I know nothing of the company and maybe Adobe will patiently take every call they get.
In the meantime, those of us who can figure it out and are willing to do the legwork have access to the MPE features at reduced cost. Win-win!