SLI graphics cards with After Effects - worth it?
 

Hi,

I'm building a new editing machine.

Just wondering if anyone has any experience using an SLI graphics card setup with After Effects.

I use a Canopus DVStorm2 with Premiere Pro 1.5 for all my real-time editing needs but am starting to get into some higher end After Effects work. My main goal is to reduce rendering times.

I was thinking of lashing out and getting dual nVidia 7800GTX cards - or should I look at a Quadro instead? Or something different altogether?

Thanks,

Matthew.

if you're really serious about editing, quadros would be the way to go, although i'm not sure if they are SLI-able. So you'll have to look that one up. As far as rendering goes, i believe processor is one of the most crucial aspects at that phase. So invest in multiple cores if possible, more than an SLI setup, would be my recommendation.

Yeah you are not going to get much of an increase vs spending that money on another core or chip. I didn't see much of a performance increase at all with SLI only and ended up dumping the second card for a dual-core, now, HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY

Like Marco said.. After Effects is processor intensive for rendering. AFAIK it's not GPU intensive but CPU.. But Nivida released the GTX7800 512MB PCI-E cards this week.. :)

I can tell you from experience infact right now I am rendering one of my AE projects.. That system is a Dual Core 3.0Ghz with a Matrox P650 video card. My other system is a 3.2 Ghz pentium 4 with a AGP GeForce 6800 and the dual core beats it.. :)

Cool. Thanks for the replies - I ended up going with a 3.2Ghz Dual Core + 2 GTX 7800 graphics cards.

Just picked the system up yesterday in fact. Once I get it up and running I'll be able to do some comparisons between the new one and my old 3.2Ghz single core with geForce 5750.

Thanks again,

Matthew.

your right; most of the time AE is just memory and processor intensive. However it seems AE plugins are now utilising GFX cards onboard GPU, which I was unaware of until recent.

Check out Magic Bullet V2.0 http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/mbe2whatsnew.html

You will see if you have a 7800GTX you can render in realtime now at 30fps, whereas without the card you are down to 6fps.

If Magic Bullet is anything to go by then you can probably see more and more effects using the GPU to perform calculations. I don't think dual SLI will make any difference though.