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do gfx cards help with rendering?

paradisiac

paradisiac

paradisiac

Soldato
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just a quickie, do graphics cards help with video editing/rendering or is it mostly down to the ram and cpu?
the reason i ask is dad has just had my old AM3 mobo with my Athlon cpu and DDR3 ram, but stuck with his 8400GS, should he look at uprading this soon?
 
With 3D stuff I find that although they do help with viewport rendering (realtime previews) they don't help with the final renders themselves as very few renders make use of the parallel processing power of GFX cards.

That may be different with video rendering however, so I'm not sure.
 
Seraph said:
graphics is just realtime previews, rendering muscle is solely based on Cpu and ram ;) more = better
Click to expand...

thats what i thought, but wanted to double check. unfortunatly he only had a 32bit licence so he can only run 4GB (3.5GB usable) which is a shame. money would be better spent on win7 64bit and another 4GB ram.
 
yes most serious graphic design people have 64 bit OS, working with large files and rendering images takes some serious power so minimum quad core machine, with at least 4Gb ram, some people prefer 6-8Gb depending on how large images are etc etc
 
he is just converting all his old camcorder video to dvd and sharpening them up and all, nothing intense, just he was using a skt775 2GHz DC thing before, so the AM3 upgrade seemed like a good idea for a bases.
he spent quite a bit on software, he uses videostudio, pincale HD suite or something and some other random programs, and they were ok on his old setup, just the rendering took an age, and for editing he could only work on 10-15min clips at a time.
 
The gfx card can help if the application supports CUDA, OpenCL or Direct Compute acceleration afaik.
 
CUDA is great when it works, however I've come across very very few renderers that support it yet (VRay does but it was buggy when I last tried it). Hopefully more will be written that can tap the power of GPUs processing power.
 
pinnacle said:
Minimum System Requirements* Windows® 7, Windows Vista® (SP2), or Windows XP (SP3) Intel® Pentium® or AMD Athlon™ 1.8 GHz (2.4 GHz or higher recommended)
-Intel Core™ 2 Duo 2.4 GHz required for AVCHD*
-Intel Core™ 2 Quad 2.66 GHz or Intel Core i7 required for
AVCHD* 1920 1 GB system memory recommended, 2 GB required for AVCHD* DirectX® 9 or 10 compatible graphics card with 64 MB (128 MB or higher recommended)
-Red Giant Magic Bullet Looks plug-in: ATI or NVIDIA graphics card with
128 MB of RAM (or more) recommended
-256 MB required for HD and AVCHD* DirectX 9 (or higher) compatible sound card 5.7 GB of disk space DVD-ROM drive to install software



* Requires free product activation via the Internet.
Click to expand...

the thing that threw me was some aspects require dx9/10 cards. the 8400GS is only dx9 from memory, so it wont do everything in the app? why is this if the gfx card isnt important?
 
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