Does quality of Video Card effect editing/rendering speed

[siratfus]

I'm planning just upgrade my case, cpu and ram. Probably to 3.2 gig and 1gb of ram. I was planning to just plug in my old harddrive, sound card and video card to save money. The vide card is 64mb Nvidia.

So my question is, for video editing and rendering. Does video card matter? Should I upgrade the video card too? If yes, then what am I looking for in a video card? Below is the spec for VisionTek Radeon X800 XT 8X AGP Video Card. But I don't know what I'm looking at. What should I be concern with? The core speed, the memory? What effects the speed of rendering? This video card is quite expensive and probably more for gamers. Just please advise me on what is an adequate card for someone who just likes to author dvds, rip, burn, etc. Or does video card not matter? Thanx in advance!


Chipset/Core Speed: ATI Radeon X800 XT/500MHz
Memory/Effective Speed: 256MB GDDR3/1000MHz

[thecoalman]

This was just asked in the Newbie forum... https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=256576

[rallynavvie]

You know, I got into a heated argument with some IT folks who swore up and down that a really good video card would help with video editing and such. I told them that as long as your video card could support your display needs (like say you want to run two CRTs at high res to fit more windows or have more room) that was all you needed. Most hardware MPEG decoders on consumer/gamer cards aren't made to help editing applications like Premiere, Vegas, or Avid. Video is 2D and the latest video cards are geared toward 3D acceleration, it really has no effect on your video editing performance.

However if anyone has any other points to the contrary I'd be very interested in hearing them. Perhaps there was some truth to what they were saying, but I thought it more the know-it-all attitude some of those chaps get just because they work around computers all day.

[siratfus]

Thanx guys! I'm sticking with my old card.

[gummyAvenger]

However if anyone has any other points to the contrary I'd be very interested in hearing them. Perhaps there was some truth to what they were saying, but I thought it more the know-it-all attitude some of those chaps get just because they work around computers all day.

One thing is that in After Effects 6.5 (and maybe 6.0?) you can tell it to use your video card's OpenGL chip for interactions such as scrubbing the timeline. If you want, you can also use it to render out a video quickly, but the quality isn't quite as good. It also doesn't render certain effects or shadows properly.

[ViRaL1]

What if you're rendering 3-D movies?

[rallynavvie]

Yeah, some of the effects in AE are OGL, but then AE also has some 3D effects that would take advantage of a video card's GPU as well. They were pushing crap like the X800 or 6800 for video work. I told them I did video editing with a GF3 on my first video machine and used that same GF3 in my new main workstation until the Quadro went in it and I didn't really notice a difference in Premiere, certainly not with TMPGEnc. Then they went on to tell me how Quadros are "old skool" tech and don't do crap. I'm kinda wondering why I paid $500 for a crap video card then, or why we bother spending that kind of cash for video cards in our DCC workstations at work

I finally just let them go. They filled this guy so full of garbage he probably went out and spent $2k on a machine fit for gaming when he could have spent half that on a video workstation (which was all he was looking for) that would have performed just as well, or spent the extra cash on video software or hardware. Silly...