New video card

[Randy Johnson]

I am in the market for a new video card.I currently have a GT-545 I am looking at the GTX-650 line. What Aspects should I be looking for for MPE and CS6? amount of CUDA cores? Amount of memory? or speed of the memory? I currently have a 545 which I think has a gig of GDDR-5.

Thanks

[James Kuhn]

Randy...I built a work station specifically for editing video. I used "The Video Guys" recommendations for a 'hot-rod' machine. I learned a great deal during the 'process'. For instance, I thought the best video card for my new system would be a high-end gaming card. It only seemed natural that a card 'built' for gaming graphics would be ideal for editing video. Au contrair, mon ami! Apparently, gaming cards are designed and built to deal with 'rendered' video, while a true graphic artist video card like an NVIDIA Quadro 4000, for example, is designed and built for all of the graphic arts requirements. It has to do with the math that the card is programmed with. In truth, a 'gaming card' works, it's just not as efficient. I ended up buying a NVIDIA Quadro 4000 for my workstation and have never looked back. My system is very fast to render, but some of that has to do with the 24 Gig of matched RAM on-board. My first step would be to go to the Video Guys website and see what they have to say.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

J.

[Jason Garrett]

Hope it’s not frowned upon to share a link? I found this site helpful in referencing card specs:

Adobe Premiere CS5, CS5.5 and CS6 Video Cards with CUDA Acceleration Mercury Playback Unlock Enable MPE Hack Mod Tip David Knarr

[Trevor Dennis]

Or if you check out the results tables for Harm and Bill's PPBM5 you'll get an idea of which cards have the most impact. Hopefully Harm might be along to clarify things a bit, but try to compare systems that are similar in all respects other than graphics card, (a really fast card on an otherwise mediocre system, is going show a big improvement).

Benchmark Results

Then perhaps check out the Adobe Premiere Pro Hardware forum

Adobe Community: Forum: Hardware Forum

A well balanced system is the thing to aim at. I notice that my system still stands in 17th place in the above chart, and it is well over a year old now.

[Harm Millaard]

Randy, you posed a difficult question, because it depends on a lot of factors:

1. Budget available.
2. The CPU you use and the clock speed.
3. The amount of memory installed.
4. Do you need 10 bit output to a 10 bit monitor?

As a general rule of thumb, and assuming - initially - that you don't need 10 bit output - I would say that you only want to look at nVidia CUDA capable cards with the highest memory bandwidth possible. Cores are less important.

CUDA cards are extremely powerful, but you don't want to spend a huge amount of money on a video card, if the rest of the system can not handle the data from the video card in a similar high speed fashion. Then the power of the video card is only used partially.

If memory is limited to less than 16 GB, there is no sense in going further than a GT 650 max.
If memory is 16 GB or more and the CPU is an i7 quad core with HT, the cards to look at would be GTX 650 Ti Boost, GTX 660 or GTX 660 Ti, the latter mainly if the CPU is overclocked.

If the CPU is a hexa core with HT and memory is 24 GB or more, then the GTX 670 and GTX 680 come into the picture.

The GTX Titan is only suitable on heavily over-clocked i7 hexa cores with 64 GB memory and a powerful raid configuration or on dual Xeon octo cores, like the E5-2687W or E5-4650, equally with 64+ GB memory and very fast raid configurations.

You can see some performance differences amongst video cards here: Latest News and scroll down till you see the Video Card Performance graph.

A previous poster made some complimentary remarks about Quadro cards. Well, IMO they are all overpriced and under-performing and the only reason to get a Quadro is 10 bit output. Even the much touted Maximus solution with a Quadro 6000 and a Tesla C2075 performs way slower than a single GTX 680, despite being around 10 times as expensive. If you need 10 bit output, don't consider a very old Quadro 4000, which performs less than a GTX 560 Ti for a multiple of the price. Only consider Quadro K5000 or better and accept that even for that price, you get a card that can not measure up to a GTX 670, let alone a Titan. As you can see here, http://ppbm7.com/index.php/results/mpe-performance the Quadro 4000 is the worst performer in this line-up.

On a balanced system, where there is not a specific bottleneck, the cost of the video card is usually around 10 - 12% of the total cost, so that may help you pinpoint the cards to look at.

[Tim Kolb]

I think a piece of the decision when you choose a display card is what software you use across the board. I know that Premiere Pro has been the center of discussion because of the GPU augmetation, but SpeedGrade uses OpenGL...and even though Premiere Pro CS6 will only utilize one CUDA card no matter how many you install, there are facilities where a Q6000/Tesla 2075 are appropriate and are beneficial for heavy-lift 3D or color work or something like CinnaFilm's Dark Energy, etc.

It's a matter of getting what makes sense for how you work, but everyone works differently so there are a range of options.

[James Kuhn]

I knew there'd be someone a lot smarter popping out of the 'woodwork' to anser your question. : )

J.

[Trevor Dennis]

It might be worth having a look at the 'Silent But Deadly' build Toms hardware did recently. They used a passively cooled GTX650.

Silent, But Deadly: Build Your Own Gaming-Ready 0 dB PC : Case: SilverStone Temjin TJ08-E

Looks like a lot of hassle, but a quiet running NLE system is no bad thing.

[Randy Johnson]

Thanks for all the expertise, I went for the GTX-660 I have a Sandy bridge 2600K and 16 gigs of ram. It all my budget let me get.

Randy

[Randall Leong]

Good choice, Randy. Had you waited for a higher-end card, you would have ended up spending a lot more money than the improvement in CUDA performance would have justified unless you overclock that i7-2600K significantly. (Simply put, you would have ended up spending an additional $100 or more over what you paid for the GTX 660 just to gain a few seconds' worth of MPE performance. At that point that $100+ is money that would be better spent on additional disks for your system.)

[Randy Johnson]

One more question not a MPE question. What are the specs for a video card to get good performance in Encore? Does the video card matter for previewing HD video while authoring?

[Tim Kolb]

Encore will run fine on any card that Premiere Pro likes. Your GTX660 shouldn't need any special tweaks that I'm aware of...

Encore doesn't "lean on" a display card as hard as Premiere Pro or even After Effects or Photoshop do.