Fastest Videocard for editing?

[Madigan Boys]

Hi Guys,

Hoping you might have some insight into what videocard I should purchase to speed up my rendering times.

Understand that fast bus, ram and processor would make a major difference, but also understand that some of the processing work is offloaded onto the videocard.

Any suggestions?

This is a great site/forum.

Adam

[ROF]

Are you editing on a laptop? Do you have an AGP Port? Is PCI express available to you? SLI? Crossfire?

[greymalkin]

you need a monster cpu, a good chunk of memory (1gb is good), and at least 2 big hard drives. Your video card only displays the video, it has nothing to do with rendering times.

[jagabo]

Your video card only displays the video, it has nothing to do with rendering times.

Although ATI has been showing an encoder that uses their 3D hardware to encode video. Tests run by xtremetech.com

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1880668,00.asp

indicated that it was 5 times faster than an AMD X2 4800+ running Divx. No real indication of quality, encoder settings, etc, or when it will be available.

[greymalkin]

i do recall hearing something about tapping into the power of your GPU's processing power a while back. Currently It's still in the early phases, however, so you still have to depend solely on your regular old CPU. It's good to hear they are moving forward with the technology, though...I can't wait to utilize ALL of my pc's processing power on video encoding

..and it should encode 5x faster, the latest video cards cost 5x as much as cpu's!

[ktnwin]

This is in fact good news. A lot of people do video encoding with their PC now aday. CPU speed does increase but upgrading is not always straightforward and simple (e.g. upgrading a PC from 1.2MHz to 3Hhz does not mean just swapping the CPU). However, swapping a graphic card is quite simple task.
Initially, the graphic card with extra processing power may have a high cost but if the demand grows, then its price will fall as with any new products (e.g. DVD players, DVD writers, etc...). On otp of that, GPU are designed to handle graphic specifically so they must be a lot more efficient doing this task.

[Richard_G]

However, swapping a graphic card is quite simple task.

It is, but your existing motherboard will probably be AGP and this technology almost certainly will require Crossfire. So it won't simply be a case of swapping a video card it will be a case of replacing the motherboard, processor (and probably the memory too) to allow you to use your new graphics card.

[ROF]

..and it should encode 5x faster, the latest video cards cost 5x as much as cpu's!

I got a good laugh at this. Yesterday evening I purchased a system for someone. The graphics card cost $500, the CPU cost $200 and the Monitor(19"LCD) cost $300. Amazing that the graphics card cost as much as the CPU and monitor combined. That wouldn't have been my choice but I do as the customer demands.

[dphirschler]

It's easier for me to change a CPU (smear on the grease, attach heatsink/fan, set jumpers or BIOS) than to install a new graphics card (install card, install drivers, tweak video modes, re-calibrate monitor).


Darryl