Do I need a new graphic card?

M

Mbala

Carbonite Member
I use CS3 with a Matrox Pahelia dual monitor graphic card which I purchased 10 years ago. It does a fine job. However being 10 years old it is not a great "performance" beast. Here is the question: Am I loosing out on anything in terms of rendering speed etc. by not upgrading the graphic card? In other words, does CS3 use the graphic card processor to render? Should I upgrade? Thank you.
 
Premiere has the capability of utilizing the graphics card to help you edit in realtime, however, when you are actually rendering footage or making compressions your CPU is what's being used.

Ram and Hard drive will also affect how well you can edit in realtime but have no or little baring on rendering speed since the CPU is the limiting factor in most cases.
 
I felt it was important to revisit this posting. I just watched the Premiere pro cs5 sneak peak around the mercury playback engine. Basically this GPU enabled engine will allow you to edit a lot more footage in real time as well as export and render footage a lot faster by utilizing your graphics card while exporting. I don't know the details around it. It's possible that by exporting with the mercury engine enabled you are sacarficing some quality by that is to be determined when the software is released. I know that in the past, using the GPU preview, you aren't seeing the actual way the footage is going to look (albeit close).
 
Mercury Playback isn't a reduced resolution rendering...it is basically a different pathway for rendering. Currently it all runs through the CPU. 100% of it, all the time. With MPE in CS5, the GPU (on the specific certified cards) will offload some of the processing. The algorithms and such all remain the same, it's just a different piece of hardware that's doing the thinking.
 
I know its not a reduced resolution rendering but I thought that perhaps the algorithm might have been a less precise one... its good to know that the algorithms are all the same.

I thought that previous versions of premiere already utilized certain approved graphics cards as a playback engine (just not a rendering engine). This is the first premiere that utilizes the certain graphics cards for rendering content correct?
 
Some previous iterations would have some effects that would use OpenGL to playback, and of course there were always accelerator cards available like from Matrox.

As for rendering...CS4 would render H.264 content of certain kinds using the mega-expensive Quardro CX card. But this is the first version that allows such a thing on the more accessible cards from nVidia.
 
My thoughts are.. if you are planning on doing any upgrades, even if you are a DV-only type, go to at least a mid-range HD configuration. The cost difference is minimal compared to the potential you can realize in a pinch. You can edit DV on a P2-450mhz but not much else. I'm quite happy with my Phenom II 940 Quad, 8GB, XPx64 and ATI 2400HD-PRO. My projects are all AVCHD, usually under 5 minutes long, and I get by.

As said, the better suited the GPU is to your software/footage, the faster everything will be.
I've also tried Win7 on the same box, and the NLE performance was garbage. Something about the video card allocating system memory. A number of variables to think about.
 
WpgCameraMan said:
My thoughts are.. if you are planning on doing any upgrades, even if you are a DV-only type, go to at least a mid-range HD configuration. The cost difference is minimal compared to the potential you can realize in a pinch. You can edit DV on a P2-450mhz but not much else. I'm quite happy with my Phenom II 940 Quad, 8GB, XPx64 and ATI 2400HD-PRO. My projects are all AVCHD, usually under 5 minutes long, and I get by.

As said, the better suited the GPU is to your software/footage, the faster everything will be.
I've also tried Win7 on the same box, and the NLE performance was garbage. Something about the video card allocating system memory. A number of variables to think about.
Click to expand...

Is Win 7 crap because of it being AVCHD or in general?
I am shopping for a new desktop in the next six months for Adobe CS5 Master Edition.
 
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