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Cheap H.264 GPU

A

akashi

n00b
Joined
Jan 8, 2008
Messages
22
Hi,

I am looking to buy a cheap graphics card to power my 27" 2560x1440 monitor. I will not be playing any games but will be watching H.264 1080P movies as well as using Sony Las Vegas 11 for video editing.

I heard Nvidia cards are good for watching movies and also accelerating video editing with CUDA.

I tried searching but there are too many availble and I will really like to hear from you guys what my options are.

Will a GeForce G100 be sufficient for my requirements or do I need more faster?

Thanks in advance.
 
Anything from the Radeon HD 3x00 family or GeForce 200 series or newer will work.
 
Thanks for your response.

I don't think the older generation ATi 3x00 family support hardware acceleration for Sony Las Vegas or Photoshop.
 
Thank you for your input. So the question now is which card do I get? Something within the price range of £30/$50
 
In that price range, you have two choices. In the AMD camp, you have the Radeon HD 6450. It will be the more powerful gaming choice (AKA, not relevant to you), but I'm not sure which card is the most powerful compute choice.

On the Nvidia side, you have the GT 430/520/610, which are all essentially the same damn card (lower clocks on the 430 typically). Get the 520 or 610, whichever is cheaper. Again, they're the same damn card rebranded. Not quite as powerful (gaming) as the HD 6450, but again, I don't know what the differences are on the compute side.
 
G100 should be fine for h.264 playback. Its up to you if you want to get something more powerful for video editing.

Edit:
Here are the Vegas GPU requirements
NVIDIA
Requires a CUDA-enabled GPU and driver 270.xx or later. GeForce GPUs:
GeForce GTX 4xx Series or higher (or GeForce GT 2xx Series or higher with driver 285.62 or later).
Quadro GPUs: Quadro 600 or higher (or Quadro FX 1700 or higher with driver 285.62 or later).
NVIDIA recommends NVIDIA Quadro for professional applications and recommends use of the latest boards based on the Fermi architecture.

AMD/ATI
Requires an OpenCL-enabled GPU and Catalyst driver 11.7 or later with a Radeon HD 57xx or higher GPU. If using a FirePro GPU, FirePro unified driver 8.85 or later is required.
 
Last edited:
Will you make a new build?

Sandy's and Ivy's integrated VGAs (HD3000 - HD4000) are splendid for the work!

Or you can go with an APU tho
 
Thank you all for your input.

I recently upgraded my monitor to a Dell U2711. I was using a old 26" 1280x768 monitor before which my ATI Radeon HD 3650 was able to handle fine.

The problem I have now is when I play my movies (1080P) in fullscreen with Hardware Acceleration (DXVA) the video is choppy. The video plays fine in native resolution. I don't think my GPU is able to upscale the videos to 2560x1440.

I tested this theory with both Media Player Classic Home Cinema and VLC. The video is very choppy with DXVA enabled in fullscreen mode. Disabling the DXVA enables the video to play smoothly via CPU decoding even in fullscreen.

The prices for the HD 6450 and GT 520 look good. On Nvidia's site it lists the "Compute Capability" of the GT 520 as 2.1 http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus

Does anyone know if the score of 2.1 on the GT 520 is any good? If I am able to playback my movies upscaled to 1440P smoothly, I will be happy.
 
It's not a score, it's the version of CUDA it supports. Higher is always better.
 
Seems like the AMD/Firepro/Radeons are better at Open CL from them benchmarks in SV 11.
 
6570, not much more than a 6450 in terms of price, but faster in all aspects. Some of the cheaper 6670's are in the 60 dollar region as well. I run a sapphire 6570 right now, and despite the small fan it's no louder than anything else in my system at idle and when doing video playback, which means it's practically inaudible from 3 feet away.
 
I downloaded AMD System Monitor and as I suspected the GPU usage is very high when playing 1080p movies upscaled to 1440p.

I am thinking of ordering the Radeon HD 6450, but before I do, can someone please confirm if this will be able to upscale 1080p movies to 1440p without any problems?

Thanks everyone for your help, much appreciated.
 
akashi said:
I downloaded AMD System Monitor and as I suspected the GPU usage is very high when playing 1080p movies upscaled to 1440p.

I am thinking of ordering the Radeon HD 6450, but before I do, can someone please confirm if this will be able to upscale 1080p movies to 1440p without any problems?

Thanks everyone for your help, much appreciated.
Click to expand...

It won't have any issues.
 
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