Which video card or setups is best between these for video editing + encoding?

Faymus Media

Faymus Media

Well-known member
i have 3 options for my gpu setup, i had sli 8800GT's but one card just stopped working...

i also have a ATI 4850 XFX 512mb card too, so i tested them both out in 3dmark06...

nVidia 8800GT:

sm2.0 = 4585
hdr3.0 = 3934

ATI 4850:

sm2.0= 4262
hdr3.0 = 4623

so the nvidia has an edge on the sm2.0 and the ATI has the edge on hdr 3.0...

so here is the setups i am looking at right now...

2 x 4850 crossfire
2 x 8800GT SLI

or

1 x ATI 4870


or

1 x nVidia 275GTX
 
Unless you're using CS5, the GPU you use has negligible impact on your editing experience. With CS4 and below, you're just as well off using a $30 GPU as you would be using a $400 GPU.

With CS5, things change a bit. Some effects and processes are now accelerated by the GPU... if you use a specific GPU. You haven't listed one of the cards that gives a benefit; read about those cards here. And certainly, there is no point wasting money on an SLI setup, as Premiere does not and probably will not for some time support SLI.

If you're using CS5, my recommendation is to get a GTX285; folks are reporting terrific results, and at a decent price point.
 
Also, if using CS5, Adobe is ever so slowly going to be expanding the list of cards supported, but they'll mostly be high end gaming cards (the GTX480 is supposed to be supported by Q3) and the pro level Quadro cards. But the are ONLY supporting nVidia cards because of CUDA, so don't bother looking at ATI cards for quite a while.
 
NVIDIA all the Way, ATI Crossfire tech is underdeveloped and underutilized in non game software code in my opinion.

Historically before the AMD Acquisition of ATI, ATI had it's on philosophy about OpenGL, so what it did is translated OpenGL instructions into it's own pnemocode to send to the GPU, while nVidia supported OpenGL directly.
Though same does not hold immediately true today, whatever the nVidia puts out, will have to pass through a virtual translation layer to execute on the ATI Crossfire type chips. (e.g. Driver...)

ATI's legacy is mainly hardware video decoding chipsets, and a bit back and today ATI put out MPEG2 and MPEG4 graphics card assisted decoders for DVD playback etc.. nVidia was lacking in that dept, this is why all Scientific Atlanta cable boxes have
ATI codex chipsets inside of them. (that does not make your video workstation work faster though...) Current cpu's make MPEG-2 HD decoding a negligible task and few players refere to HWAssisted decode, only framebuffer playback, in which ATI does excell, but nVidia is not to far behind.


Also Adobe had GPU assisted rendering and processing using nVidia instructions as early as CS3. (It was just not marketed, advertised or packaged properly until the recent).
 
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