Adobe Premiere CS4 + GPU H.264 Encoding

[deadrats]

ran across this article where they tested Adobe Premiere's GPU accelerated H.264 encoding capabilities and needless to say the results are fairly impressive:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=649&type=expert&pid=3

[poisondeathray]

It's great that they are developing this, but it's NOT that impressive at this stage IMO:

1) cost of a Quadro card is about $2000-$2500 ; you can by a whole new core i7 system for that price. Apparently lower end (non Quadro) GPU's cannot be used with Adobe's suite (apparently low end ATI cards can, however, waiting for reviews & tests still)

2) they didn't show image quality in that article, but if it's anything like the company's (Badaboom) other implementation you will find the quality is very poor - even worse than the "regular" Mainconcept. You can easily double the speed of h264 encoding if you use lower quality settings, so a speed comparison in absence of equivalent settings or image quality is meaningless. Furthermore, it doesn't offer AVC High profile at all. That is subpar for a professional application.