video card

M

Motherboard

Well-known member
hey guys I have a question
I have a Nvidia Ti 4200, Athlon 2100, 512 DDR, XP pro.
and it takes an age to render, literally
so what type of card should I get
do I really need a $3000 open GL card?
to render a lil' paint on a 20 sec clip????
 
Re: video card

Sorry unix ... I had to throw that in there.
  I was in the same boat with my old pc and now I'm floating down MAC river pretty quickly.

Do you have any other pc's in the house/office ?

There is that X-factor render engine where you can render using other computers to double or even triple your render speed.
I think it might only work with the 6.5 professional version but I'm not sure.  
It's free ...
   www.gridironxfactor.com/download
 
Re: video card

Double or triple your render times? ;) That doesn't sound very efficient.

(I'm just kidding; I know what you meant)
 
Re: video card

It's my understanding that AE's use of OpenGL for fast preview only applies to previewing the timeline, not to final rendering. So a "better" video card won't help you (from what I understand, at least). What will help is doubling your system memory and increasing the hard disk cache available to AE (settings available in AE, which I don't have installed on this laptop, so I can't give you the specific location).
 
Re: video card

Let us know how that works. Also, now that I'm at my desktop, I can see that the disk cache settings are located at Edit -> Preferences -> Memory and Cache. Here you can set memory allocation and disk cache size (as well as disk cache folder location)
 
Re: video card

[quote author=unix link=board=AE;num=1107847230;start=0#0 date=02/07/05 at 23:20:30]hey guys I have a question
I have a Nvidia Ti 4200, Athlon 2100, 512 DDR, XP pro.
and it takes an age to render, literally
so what type of card should I get
do I really need a $3000 open GL card?
to render a lil' paint on a 20 sec clip????[/quote]

Not sure if you have access to another comparable machine running AE, (even a machine a bit faster) but if you do... see if you can notice a significant speed improvement before you upgrade ram and other things. True, more ram is never bad but I have a 2400 XP (512mb ram) machine and a 3ghz HT machine (1gb ram) and in all honesty working on my AMD 2400 is actually just as snappy as my 3ghz machine. (both cheap video cards) Rendering output speed and serious complex picture in picture comps is a different story between the 2 machines (obviously 1gb ram and more speed helps) but for basic comps, working and previewing in the app, my AMD XP2400+ feels as snappy (if not snappier) than my 3ghz machine pimped out... (and at a faction of the cost I might add)...

Conclusion... make sure the pecent of speed increase makes sense when coverted to dollah bill$. If it don't make dollah'z, it doesn't make $en$e.
 
Re: video card


i only do pretty basic stuff as i'm still learning after effects, but i have a dual xeon machine and the cpu's aren't even at half usage. i think after effects is a lot more memory dependent than cpu.

i'm going to try that gridiron software on another dual xeon machine that i put together out of spare parts and have that run just as a render slave and see how that helps.

matthew
 
Re: video card

Also, it can help if you do a "purge all" before you set it to render. This will clear the memory of all the ram previews etc that may be taking up valuable space for your final render.
 
Re: video card

I run both a Pentium M 1.4Ghz w/ 512 and a Athlon XP 2600+ w/ 1GB and the 2600+ flies. I think RAM is key, and AMD doesn't hurt either. :)


(I'm an AMD enthusiast)
 
Re: video card


you know if you think about it a videocard and amonitor are just OUTPUT devices, so it could draw your screen quicker but it could never change the render because it can't send back to the core application.

now that would be nice if i could do a portion of the workload and share its work with the program.

matthew
 
Might want to switch to an ATI Card, i've heard more problems on nVidia's cards than anything (even on Macs :p). Also don't forget to update your drivers.
 
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