CS6 Requirements: Video Card and Hard Drive Speed?

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CS6 Requirements: Video Card and Hard Drive Speed?
by Joesph Armstrong on Apr 29, 2012 at 1:12:27 am

To the Admin: If this is posted in the wrong section please move it to the appropriate one. Please don't delete!

I am a freelance editor and film student who is looking into purchasing the new student edition of CS6 Production Premium (whenever it is released).
However, first I want to make sure my system will allow me to run the new creative suite. I checked the tech spec. requirements for CS6 Production Premium on the Adobe website and I meet all the specs with the exception of not having...

- a 7200 RPM hard drive (Mine is 5400 RPM, Model: Hitachi HTS545050B9A302)
- any of the listed Nvidia graphics cards on the adobe spec. page.

I do have an AMD Radeon HD 6490M but it is not listed among the AMD cards that are supported.

My question is: Despite not having these two things will CS6 still be usable?

I would mainly be using After Effects, Photoshop, and Premiere. I don't do much in the way of time-sensitive tasks but if there are any recommendations for increasing speed I would appreciate it.

I would be running the suite on my 2Ghz Intel Core i7 Macbook Pro with 4GB of memory. I currently have OSX Snow-Leopard 10.6.8 installed but I have a free OSX Lion download from Apple that I have been holding off on installing.
The reason my Mac didn't ship with the standard 7200 RPM Hard Drive and AMD Radeon HD 6750M/6770M Card was because it was bought from Apple's refurbished store.

If you could provide me with any other advice on products you recommend upgrade my system with I would appreciate it.

Thanks,
- Joe A.

Machines:
- Macbook Pro Intel Core i7, 2 Ghz with 4GB ram, Snow-Leopard 10.6.8
- Power Mac G5, 1.8 GHz with 3GB ram running Leopard

Software:
- Final Cut Studio 2 (Final Cut Pro, Motion 3, Color 1.0)

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Re: CS6 Requirements: Video Card and Hard Drive Speed?
by Roland R. Kahlenberg on Apr 29, 2012 at 3:17:30 pm

Firstly, I'm unsure why you're posting your Q in the AE forum when your workflow is more defined within PPro.

Anyways, you need to know more about the Mercury Engine, an Adobe creation/development. The Mercury Engine allows Adobe applications to harness the processing speed of GPU for smoother/faster playback of PPro as well as to allow for faster AND better processing of a number of effects, in PPro.

Prior to CS6, the Mercury Engine was used by PPro to achieve the stuff I mentioned earlier. With CS6, other Adobe applications have started to leverage on the Mercury Engine.

AE CS6 has not leveraged on the Mercury Engine. Instead it's hardware accelerated offering for CS6 involves its new Ray-traycing Engine which works within nVidia's Optix ray-tracing technology.

More info on AE CS6 (which relates to PPro even if its not stated explicitly) here
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/cs6-creative-cloud-feature-tour-for-video/how-to-...

More on Optix here -> http://www.nvidia.com/object/optix.html

Info on nVidia cards that work best with PPro (decent-to-good info but not great cos they left out the Quadro cards) -> http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

In a nutshell, you will need a faster hard-drive than your existing 5400RPM make. You'll want a GPU that allows Adobe's CS6 products to leverage on its Mercury Engine. Your RAM stipulation also needs a boost. Ideally, you will want each of your CPU cores to have access to 2GB of RAM. You can of course limit the number of CPU cores and RAM that are accessible to CS6 apps.

HTH
RoRK

Intensive AE & Mocha Training in Singapore and Malaysia
Adobe ACE/ACI (version 7) & Imagineer Systems Inc Approved Mocha Trainer

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