The more proper question would be, whether your editing is actually so heavy that you need Mercury playback in Premiere? Seriously, unless you can tell us that you are working on heavy multitrack projects with 2k or even 4k footage, you're worrying over nothing. For everything else the "normal" OpenGL acceleration is no doubt sufficient and if you don't plan on upgrading your software, it's a moot point, anyway. You could have a certified graphics card, yet CS4 might still not be able to work as smoothly as you would like it. just as much as hardware has evolved, so have the programs' routines for decoding stuff on the fly and rendering effects in realtime. CS5.5 is far more advanced already than CS4 ever was and no doubt CS6 is gonna push the envelope even more. You need to see both sides or else you might throw out a lot of money for nothing. And if you stick with CS4, what card you have is ultimately completely irrelevant for PS and AE, too. Their use of OpenGL is minor and not at all critical.

Mylenium

Well, you're seeing the signs but interpreting them all in the wrong ways.

• Lag in PS usually means you are running out of memory and your harddrives are not fast enough to compensate with the swap file.
• Loading projects similarly is merely a matter of disk speed. Lots of footage take longer to load than jsut a short clip and this is compounded by Adobe tools using the media cache for compressed media and audio files, which needs to be laoded in addition.
• Long rendering could have any number of causes from again slow drives to complex processing on compressed footage. if you don't know what's causing it, then there is no point attributing it to the graphics card. True, on supported cards some of that may be faster and it would even support applying certain effects in realtime, but you can break it at any point by using a non-accelerated footage type or an effect that forces everything to revert to conventional CPU mode.

So ultimatlely you may be looking for a simple solution that does not exist. All of these issues get compounded when you are using multiple apps at the same time and cause Windows own hibernation and disk swapping to kick in and the apps generally battle it out for memory and other resources. In summary, IMO the graphics card is the least of your worries. You might achieve much more benefit with getting a RAID disk setup and ramping up your RAM if possible. And that would still be true, even if you already had a qualified card.

Mylenium