Advice needed: Nvida GTX 470 or just i7 970 processor for HD rendering?

H

Heath

New member
Hi

I'm about to have a new PC built for me. It will be a multimedia machine used for both video and music production. The tech guys building it, Millennium PCs in England, are actually specialists in music PCs, but have a good working knowledge of video matters. They have said that it may not be necessary to install an Nvidia card (the GTX 470 or higher) to render HD for high-end NLEs like Premiere because the i7 970 processor (6 core I think) plus 12gb of ram, will be able to handle the task with comparable speed. They said it might not be worth the extra expense just to gain a few seconds of render speed and that I could stick with the standard Ati Radeon card, or buy a cheaper Nvidia card.

Now, I don't have Premiere yet. I want to get it, so frankly it would be helpful if I could save some cash. Do I really need that Nvidia card at all? Could I manage with a cheaper Cuda enabled card? If so which one? They also said that the fan cooler for the Nvidia card would be pretty noisy and that extra costs for its power supply should be considered.

This is fairly critical for me because I am producing fairly advanced, time/delivery critical corporate videos and music productions. Yes, speed is vital, but I have to keep the costs manageable.

Advice would be greatly welcomed. Thanks.
 
The GTX470 is already considered yesterday's technology. It generates a lot of heat and the fan can get unbearable under load.


Having said that, PP does not render using the GPU. The Mercury Playback Engine is only useful for certain effects in your timeline; it does not affect rendering. Save the money and get 16GB RAM.
 
I'd disagree with Phil on this one. The nVidia processing can indeed speed up your exports by a considerable amount, depending.

Phil is right in that the CPU handles the actual transcoding during export, but a frame must be 'rendered' before it's gets trancoded. CUDA can speed up that rendering by a factor of 10x or more according to benchmarks (the highest gain was 24x faster using CUDA), depending on the effects used. You may also see a quality improvement using CUDA. Downscaling, for example, uses superior algorithms using hardware acceleration, so you actually get a better image.

If you're building a new machine, I'd definitely include a CUDA card. Just make sure to get one with DDR5 memory, as that has a significant impact on performance. Get the card with the most cores and the most memory that you can afford.
 
I should have clarified.

It will accelerate rendering effects which are compatible with MPE. MPE-compatible effects have a specific icon and if you're using those effects, then yes the GPU will assist in the rendering....But it will not affect non MPE-compatible effects.
 
Keep in mind that When you render h.264 or vc-1 video, that process is still all CPU.

In fact, the GPU won't be used at all if you have Premiere Pro running, and you lay off the render to the background using Adobe Media Encoder, since only once instance of MPE can be running at a time.

The only time MPE will speed up encoding, is if you are doing a direct encode from Premiere Pro, on clips that have an MPE effect applied, and MPE makes rendering those frames back, faster than CPU alone does, and you're not disk I/O limited, and other varying hardware factors.

It's not a huge performance increase for laying out your video to any deliverable file, but it is a small one.
 
Your GPU won't make a difference. Adobe has stated that rendering is still all CPU. As others have said -- adding effects won't require as much rendering, but that's about it.
 
It seems as though the big increase in rendering w/ a CUDA card is when you are up or down scaling your render.

You can leave 'maximum render quality' off w/ a CUDA card, since the hardware MPE uses a quality resize algorithm by defaul.

Whereas, to get the same quality through a software render, you have to turn 'maximum render quality' on, which will you slow down your render by a factor of 2 or 3.
 
Just want to ad that I have changed the fan of my GTX470 and it is now running smoothly on 44-55 Celsius
I would recommend to by the zalman gtx470 fan with the gtx470.

Its a good card
 
Definitely go for the CUDA card. I just upgraded my Quadro 560 which had only 128MB ram to a GTX 460 with a 1GB, and the improvement is dramatic, especially when utilizing GPU based effects and scaling. I would have gone for a 5XX series card, but I duel boot Mac and WIndows, and 5XX series are not yet supported on the Mac.

A lot of commonly used effects are GPU based, and Adobe is increasing the programs ability to utilize the CUDA processing more and more with each update. Here is list from Adobe's site which list what is currently supported, and has some links at the bottom to learn more about the Mercury Engine.

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/premier...ml#WSd79b3ca3b623cac9-e423b201260b3b62c9-8000
 
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