Video card for rendering not gaming

[Bright Knight]

I own a hp media center pc with an athlox xp 4200 dual core processor and would like to upgrade the graphics with a PCI Express card. The TV tuner that comes with the computer works very well but no stand alone video card - integrated ati xpress 200 graphics.

I don't play games on my pc but I do a lot of video rendering with menus, etc. For example, last night I made a dvd of four half-hour tv shows with a menu and it took nearly two hours to transcode/render. Does the video card affect the speed of the rendering? I used Nero Vision and plan on using programs like Premiere elements or possibly Pinnacle for video/photo productions so I'm wondering what type of video card specs I should look for. For example, does it have to be GDDR3?

Any help is greatly appreciated - thanks.

[rallynavvie]

A video card doesn't really help with software encoding speeds at all. The only negligable difference it may make is if your onboard controller can't keep up with the video preview while rendering (if you even have it enabled) but you'd have to have a really old video card not to be able to keep up with 2D display like that.

The only time a video card will really help your rendering speeds is when you're using a combination of a good workstation card (like a Fire or Quadro) and an application that takes advantage of its hardware such as CAD and 3D applications. I had a Quadro FX1100 for a while and noticed it could handle very very complicated artwork in Illustrator because it had hardware on the card to handle vector graphics, something which is also used with CAD applications. Feasably, and I didn't get to test this while I had the card in, a workstation card may help if you use a lot of vector or 3D effects within your videos, but I don't think you'd see that much of a difference just because of how the data is rasterized as it is going into the final video.

Is Nero Vision SMP-aware? When you're encoding pull up the task manager and see if both cores are being pushed to 100%. If not then you should find a different encoder like TMPGEnc. Premiere Elements may be SMP-aware like it's big brother but I don't know for sure. 1:1 for encoding isn't bad depending on the output settings.

[Bright Knight]

Thanks a lot for your feedback. I don't enable video preview when I'm encoding so that's not an issue and I suspect that Nero was not using both cores. I had no lag when I did a quick internet scan when it first started encoding - with old machines I couldn't do anything else but let it encode.

I guess the next question is does the video card have any influence on the quality of video output on a nero or premiere product? I would say not but Im still trying to determine what card to buy - will something in the $100-115 range fit my needs? One thing I definitely want is one with a quiet fan - the last one I had was downright obnoxious.

Thanks again for any help.

[BJ_M]

it makes no diff. in the quality of the output

[Morse2]

Hi Bright Knight;

>>>...One thing I definitely want is one with a quiet fan - the last one I had was downright obnoxious...<<<

Why get a fan on your video card at all? I've recently put an ASUS EN6600 256MB "silencer" (fanless card) on my media server and a Gigabyte GV-NX66L128DP Geforce 6600LE 128MB fanless video card on another PC. Both are dead silent and I've had no overheating issues with either (both are media pc's - maybe with gaming overheating would be an issue). Once $$ allows, I'll get another ASUS EN6600 "silencer" for my workstation, too....

All the best,
Morse

[Bright Knight]

Thanks all and Morse, checked out those video cards - they look pretty promising - appreciate it.

If anyone can offer another clarification - "heavy" programs like premiere and sony vegas - what is more important on making them running smoothly - system ram or processor?

Thanks for all the great input

[mats.hogberg]

Processor.

/Mats

[rallynavvie]

Well it's trickier with professional apps like those when it comes to hardware. The processor will help when simply encoding your projects but memory helps allow you to handle multiple effects and transitions. Also with the Adobe video products the preview can be loaded up into memory to make for a clean preview of the project so for that having more memory is good. Sounds like you're mostly converting video so the processor is the important part and you've already got a decent one. You may want to try for 2GB of memory if either of those apps really eat up your existing physical RAM.