computer talk… video card vs cpu in editing.

[papayamon]

when you’re using editing software, why would the video card make much, if any, difference? after all, the video card would only be used if you’re displaying your video, and i would think even the lowest common video card has no trouble doing that. wouldn’t viturally all the editing performance really be the function of cpu/memory/hard drive?

this is making me jones for a cpu/motherboard upgrade with a solid state drive for my editing workspace with 16 mb ram… :). not to mention putting a serious effort into getting windows 7 64 bit functioning smoothly.

[birdcat]

Vegas Pro 11 uses the GPU & Cuda cores to make rendering faster – Your software needs to make use of this directly to see any differences.

[D0n]

papayamon…. video cards are great at doing certian, repetitive computations…

did you know…. that someone built a supercomputer dirt cheap with sony playstations networked together with software to use the video cards?

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html

As birdcat says, your software has to access the video card to take SOME of the workload of the cpu which in turn speeds up the whole process..

[papayamon]

call me skeptical, but i’d have to see it myself. give me a fast cpu, big memory, a solid state drive and 64 bit windows 7 … and a $100 video card. then swap out the video card and test with the same data with a high end graphics card.

my sniff test tells me that it wouldn’t make that much difference, although there’s no arguing with results. i was in the computer business when clinton was president, and the hardware we sold in those days made a phenomenal difference in productivity for cad people. i just think at this point the low hanging fruit has been picked, and the difference for high end isn’t that impressive, especially for the hobbyist video producer.

i could be back to eat my words, because i’m surely going to upgrade everything in my box if i need more speed. :). my last upgrade to a dual core really didn’t make that much of a difference. this is why i’ve still got a dual core and i’m running windows 32 with 512k graphics and 4 gig ram and 7200 rpm hard drives.

[pseudosafari]

This is a good question. I originally didn’t think it’d make much difference since we’re not doing CAD here. The computer is just SHOWING the video, not CREATING it. But over time I’ve come to really appreciate the video card’s importance, especially since Premiere Pro CS5.5 uses the video card for GPU accelleration to speed up rendering.The improvement isapparent to me, as I switched from CS4 to CS5.5. Only certain video cards work with it, so I had to upgrade from a BFG GTS250 to a GeForce GTX580. Other than that, the software takes over, uses it, and I can see some improvement.

There’s a great old post on this forum on this subject. I looked for five minutes and cannot find it. Anyone else? It shows a guy editing like 8 layers of AVCHD H.264 video at once and it’s eating it up. (It was an ad for GPU acceleration with CS 5.5). I do not see as much improvement as the video in that post shows, but I don’t think the rest of my specs are up to the computer they use, either. That video is worth watching, though, for inspiration if nothing else.

papayamon, overall, I see some improvement with the better card and the software that uses it like birdcat says. Not a world changer, but it sure is better. Good enough that I wouldn’t go back to working without it.

I’m sure a new processor and more RAMwould makea big difference for me, too, but I wouldn’t pair them with a cheapo video card. I used a PCI video card once (not PCI Express, but plain old PCI) and the machine would hardly edit anything. That created a bottleneck that slowed the system right down. Itwas like using an IDE hard drive on a system with otherwise great specs. Remove the bottlenecks. Assuming all your other specs are solid, get a video card that your software can utilize. That’s my two cents.

[Cville]

I went to vegas 11 and changed to a radeon hd 6570 video card with 1 gb ddr3 memory. Not a high end card but one that vegas supports.

I ran a test rendor last night and it saved me 11 seconds 4:59 vs 5:10

Trying to decide what I am going to do with all of the extra time. 🙂

I will admit there may still be some setting that I need to get into so maybe it will improve.

[papayamon]

cville, i bet you’d have picked up a lot more than 11 seconds if you had a solid state drive :). and what video card did you upgrade from?

[Cville]

@ papayamon

I upgraded from an older radeon hd 4xxx series that was not supported by vegas. It had 512 meg

Not really complaining I wasnt’ that concerned on the render time.

[doublehamm]

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I have a i7-980x EXTREME processor hex-core. It does not
currently get much better than this. In Vegas pro 11 64 bit with CPU
only processing a 21.5 minute ceremony took 57 minutes and 32 seconds to
render to a blu-ray compatible AVCHD file.

In Vegas Pro 11 64-bit with the new enhanced GPU and CUDA power
using my nVidia GTX 580, that SAME ceremony took 29 minutes and 42
seconds for the same ceremony to render.

This is almost 2x faster with the GPU rendering than with the CPU rendering – enough said!

Oh and YES I am using 2 SSDs in Raid0 to do this test with.

GPU video rendering is the future my man!

[doublehamm]

<p class=”post”>

And to be even more fair, the ceremony cuts had mostly 1 second dissolves and that’s when the processing hiccuped a bit. If I made that ceremony with straight cuts, it processes in faster than real time. AVCHD to AVCHD! With CPU only processing the dissolves rendering speed was much less noticeable, but that was due to the lower overall speed anyway.

Now if you are talking SD MPEG video, you are talking about 4-5x real time renders.

[papayamon]

does gpu processing use both the cpu and the gpu? and if this is so, i’d like to see it done with a 75 dollar video card vs a 500 video card. this would tell me the difference that a high end video card makes.

if you’re doing enough and it’s saving you huge time over and over again, then it’s clearly worth shelling out the extra $500 or so for high end video.

i’m looking forward to experimenting with components, and i’ll report my results here. unfortunately i’m still working on getting things up and going.

[birdcat]

I am only talking about Vegas Pro 11 here.

Obviously, the more Cuda cores available, the faster renders will go – Here is the page Sony posted about this: http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/gpuacceleration.

Whether you choose a $75 card or $2000 card is up to you (me, I’d rather take a cruise for the price difference) – All I know is that my $75 EVGA GT430 with it’s 96 Cuda cores is supported and acceleration is happening.

[doublehamm]

I had a GTX 285 when Vegas 11 was released, and it took 43 minutes and 32 seconds. When I upgraded to the GTX 580, it dropped it down to 29 minutes and 42 seconds, so yes the GPU is definitely an important factor – that alone was about a 33% increase in speed. As for render settings, there is CPU only, GPU, and automatic. Whether or not it uses both for processing, I do not know, but the GPU is definitely an important factor in your build if you use an NLE that supports it.

I actually ran a dual GTX285 in SLI, but I am pretty sure that Vegas Pro does not utilize multiple GPUs. If it did or does in the future, then I will definitely add another 580 to the mix!

[doublehamm]

Hey Birdcat, just think of how many cruises you could take while not waiting for your renders 😉 The GTX 580 I got for under $400 with rebate!

[papayamon]

heh. even my gtx 210 with 512k is supported :). i’ll try with and without acceleration and see what the diff is. i think i paid 29 dollars for those cards after rebate!

i’m with birdcat on the cruise!

[doublehamm]

If the cruise is more impotant, why choose SSDs when a standard 7200rpm drive will be just as fast when it comes to rendering?

[D0n]

http://dpnow.com/8371.html

[doublehamm]

My booting and running apps from my SSD is nice and fast, but from my tests of rendering, they are even in speed. For some reason the bottleneck just might be from other hardware?

[doublehamm]

Aright I could see maybe the SSD being faster with a SD mpeg render as that could in theory render faster than the drive speed, but with AVCHD and HD rendering, the technology is not quite there yet to render at speeds faster than a 7200 drive can handle. That being said, there is still plenty of uses for SSDs!

[papayamon]

that’s what makes computing so much fun. you buy those components, stick them in, and find out what happens :).

[Cville]

Not sure how this will change render speed but I just ordered new ram and will go from 8g to 16g. I am interested to see if this makes much of a difference.

[D0n]

anybody got any info on apples xgrid and compressor programs? Does the new FCPX do cluster computing or just compressor?

I got the chance to set up a network of 5 new intel macs with lion after Christmas..

I’m thinking cluster computing should really make a noticable difference… at least in compressor, don’t know about FCPX.

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