Do videocards affect movie/video editing/render/encoding?

qtfsniper

Weaksauce
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Jul 14, 2006
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Hey everyone,this might be a dumb question but I need to find out the answer (all the articles I'm finding are a little old). I helped configure a computer for something (they needed to go through dell for tax deduction purposes), and is mainly using it for video editing. The card I chose was an 8800gt which was the lowest possible, and advised him to not buy an 8800gtx because it doesn't effect the speed at all. I explained that it's all about raw processing power, and memory bandwidth but today he told me that he asked another friend said that I knew nothing about it, and that an 8800gtx would be better so he ordered it. I really think I'm right on this one. A higher end might have better hardware based decoders but for encoding? ... That card for him might be complete overkill. Anyone know for sure? (i'm continuing to google search right now). Thanks!

edit: forgot to add, it's not 3d rendering at all. It's all MiniDV, video footage.
 
i think it can have some effect (many plugins i have used for premiere pro and after effects do use hardware acceleration, not sure if the apps natively use it), but if he is doing SD video, it should make pretty much no difference
 
In short NO. These cards will not help out rendering or editing. The only thing they will do is help encode/decode. And mainly just decode. Plus the application has to support hardware decode/encode.

Here is a link to a chart showing all the purevideo decode/encode stuff. The chart does not show the new 8800gt, but I can only assume with a little more research you'll find out the new 8800gt does more than the gtx.


http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_43029.html
 
Are you asking would it make the box faster at encoding/decoding a vid? I think you are and from my experience..no it will not..raw horse power is what you need for this (cpu, mem, RAID if practical)
 
Not that I know but if they were doing real time rendering the card should (depending on software and such ofc) be a benefit? Doubt many do things that way but in theory at least.
 
An 8500 would do better. The 8800 GTX does not support HD hardware decoding. I don't believe any of the current 8 series (or any previous) support hardware encoding, so that's a moot point.
 
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