256mb or 512mb dedicated graphics for video editing in a laptop??

[nevski]

Hi

Can you help me please? I'm about to purchase a laptop (budget under £600) for surfing the net, video/photo editing & watching dvd's (not gaming!), & understand that I need dedicated graphics in order to run the video/photo editing software with ease (video software is Corel Ulead Video Studio 11.5 plus, & photo software is Corel Paintshop Pro Photo X2, both of which need 1 GB of Ram to run them). My question is, will 256mb dedicated graphics be enough to do the job well, or will I need 512mb dedicated??? Thanks

 

[AbsenceJam]

You don't need any special GPU for that, absolutely any will do unless you game as well.

 

[nevski]

Hi AbsenceJam

Thanks for your reply. I'm confused!!! I've been told by many people that I do need dedicated graphics, then others have told me that I don't! The video/photo software is quite a demanding software, are you sure I won't need dedicated graphics?

 

[Alexrose1uk]

Thing is with editing/rendering software it all depends on if they actually USE GPU accelleration, some do, which is why dedicated graphics help as it takes some of the load away from the processor; however others don't and because of this don't really help at all, as its the CPU doing all the work regardless
Perhaps see if Corel have the manuals on thier site and take a peek and see

RE: Memory and dedicated graphics, unless you're using GPU rendering for large models/diagrams you should be fine, as tbh, 512 texture RAM isnt going to be needed by most single models.

 

[Duke]

Get a laptop with lots of memory & decent CPU.

 

[Crowze]

Depends on the type and speed of the memory as well. Not sure if it applies to mobile parts, but the 8600GT with 256MB DDR3 is significantly faster than the 512MB DDR2 version for anything but the highest resolutions, where the 8600 is way out of its league anyway.

 

[reflux]

Photoshop doesn't even include GPU acceleration (yet...) so I doubt Corel does. Just get a 9600GT or similar, if possible.

 

[AbsenceJam]

Hi AbsenceJam

Thanks for your reply. I'm confused!!! I've been told by many people that I do need dedicated graphics, then others have told me that I don't! The video/photo software is quite a demanding software, are you sure I won't need dedicated graphics?

Most people tend not to know what they're talking about really. Doing image/video editing is no different to using any other application, it's all done in software by the CPU. Graphics card do have video features these days such as offloading the decoding, pulldown and deinterlacing but these are for video playback with specific codecs. There are even some encoders that use them to accelerate the encode a little, and actually a couple of NLE's even make slight use of this, but not Corel.