Replace pc videocard

[tommykjensen]

Thanks for the advice.

I made a decision. I will put a low end graphics card into this machine and reallocate its use for internet/office since my machine for that purpose is about 6+ years old and is in desperate need for an upgrade.

I will then order a new prebuild machine for my photo and video editing.

It will be:

Motherboard: Gigabyte X79-UD3
CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-3930K 6x3.20GHz (Turbo 3.80GHz) 12MB cache
Ram: Kingston HyperX 32 GB DDR3-1600 (QuadChannel)
OS hd: OCZ 240GB SSD (Solid State Disk) (525MB/s read, 500MB/s write), Windows 7 ultimate
Graphics: nVidia GTX680 2GB GDDR5 PCI-E
Power: Raidmax 850W 80+ Gold Certified
Plus 4 extra HD's for photo and video storage. No RAID setup.


(no need for suggestions to that setup )

[tim]

Holy carp, that's some machine!

[Moppie]

Originally Posted by isoMorphic

GTX 520 is not going to cut it for someone who works with video and it's hard to believe that a professional would even consider one of the lowest of low end cards.

Photo editing puts somewhere between no and very little demand on a graphics card.
It really doesn't matter what you have as long as it is able to drive your monitors, and anything made in the last 2-3 years with dual DVI will easily drive two 30inch displays.


For video work yes you need a faster card, but a high end gaming card isn't going to do anything.

Premier Pro needs a card with CUDA support to get any real benefit.
That means spending more money, for what appears to be a lower spec card, that will actually perform better when working with video.

[isoMorphic]

Originally Posted by Moppie

It really doesn't matter what you have as long as it is able to drive your monitors, and anything made in the last 2-3 years with dual DVI will easily drive two 30inch displays.

CUDA performance is dependant on how many cores a card has and more GPU cores provides better performance even with Windows in general. Just having CUDA support on your card is not a magic bullet and Photoshop starting with CS4 also benefits in many ways as does Premiere.

More cores will better allow for more simultaneous calculations rather then offloading more complex rendering calculations to the CPU. If these tasks were handled solely by the CPU it would bottleneck everything else on the system or they would have to wait in queue. By offloading work to the GPU you now free up more CPU power for all the various system and background tasks which the GPU cannot handle. But keep in mind the GPU has to also draw the screen and bigger screens need more scaling which means even more work for the video card.

[Moppie]

Not all Nvida cards support CUDA only a small selection of work station cards, with out one of these you will not see any significant improvement in video editing using Premier Pro.
It will simply off load the render to the CPU because it can't off load to the GPU which sits working at about 1% just drawing lines on the screen.

You do NOT need a fast powerful card to draw lines on a screen.
I used to run to 21inch CRTs, thats two times 2048x1536 off of an old AGP ATi 9550.
It a massive 250mhz processor and replaced an even slower card that did the same job.

[isoMorphic]

Almost every Nvidia card made in the past 5-6 years supports CUDA including the mobile GPU's. So obviously you don't use Nvidia or understand how CPU, Ram and Graphics Processing go hand and hand. In fact you can run dual 30 inch screens on a near ancient 8800GT just fine if you turn the graphics down to the point everything looks like crap. And that's a 5 year old card with half the vRam that spanks the performance of a GTX 520 while having around 40-60% more horsepower.

http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA

So lets say you have a sailboat (represents CPU) and you need to decide which size sail (represents GPU) is going to move you across the ocean faster. It should be obvious that a 20 foot sail is not going to out perform a 40 foot sail. That is UNLESS the sailboat is simply to small to handle the lager sail in which case less may actually be better.

I honestly see no point however in someone who does photograpy or video work for a living and likely owning a $5000-8000 worth of gear, using $800-2500 of editing software and scraping the barrel for a $50-80 graphics card or trying to build a $500 system for budget editing. Personally i'd much rather spend a more on better components (toss it on a non interest card if need be) to have my machine cranked up as high as it can possibly go without glitching, crashing or having to deal with bottlenecks. In the end the quality of your work will be better and it will translate to being able to get things done faster. Where video is concerned all of the above counts even more because a beefy CPU and GPU paired properly will save a substantial amount of time.

Everyone is free to decide for themselves if you really feel a cheap budget card is just what you need then so be it. I just hope someone who wants more power and is willing to pay for it does not go out and flush money down the toilet on an entry level card. I did a little searching and managed to find a good video on the subject of video cards if anyone is interested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qdRm3KkGV8

[tim]

The reason photographers don't need a fast video card is because it does nothing to make things faster or better looking. Video, yes. Photos, no.

[Moppie]

Originally Posted by isoMorphic

So lets say you have a sailboat (represents CPU) and you need to decide which size sail (represents GPU) is going to move you across the ocean faster. It should be obvious that a 20 foot sail is not going to out perform a 40 foot sail. That is UNLESS the sailboat is simply to small to handle the lager sail in which case less may actually be better.

I honestly see no point however in someone who does photograpy or video work for a living and likely owning a $5000-8000 worth of gear, using $800-2500 of editing software and scraping the barrel for a $50-80 graphics card or trying to build a $500 system for budget editing. Personally i'd much rather spend a more on better components (toss it on a non interest card if need be) to have my machine cranked up as high as it can possibly go without glitching, crashing or having to deal with bottlenecks. In the end the quality of your work will be better and it will translate to being able to get things done faster. Where video is concerned all of the above counts even more because a beefy CPU and GPU paired properly will save a substantial amount of time.

Everyone is free to decide for themselves if you really feel a cheap budget card is just what you need then so be it. I just hope someone who wants more power and is willing to pay for it does not go out and flush money down the toilet on an entry level card. I did a little searching and managed to find a good video on the subject of video cards if anyone is interested.

That all makes good sense, if your working with video and or 3D, or gaming.
If not, then even the lowest spec video card on the market has more than enough power for anything photography related.

If you happen to be running a business then the difference between getting only what you need and the biggest and most expensive is the difference between making a profit and going broke.