Valantar
Golden Member
So I'm in the process of planning a video editing PC rig for my wife as a gift. She mostly works in Avid Media Composer, so performance in that specific application is the main focus. She'll be editing 4k video, mostly shot on Sony A7SII cameras. My budget is far from unlimited - It's not fixed (yet), but I doubt I'll be able to stomach more than $1600 (equivalent, I live in Norway, so around 15 000 NOK).
If you need price comparison sites, I use Prisguide.no and Prisjakt.no.
This won't be built until AMD Zen is out, as I understand higher core counts are always better for this kind of work, and I want to see how it compares to X99/X299.
From reading around a bit, it seems Avid does support some GPU acceleration (although what exactly is accelerated is more difficult to find documentation on), but the only "qualified" GPUs are pro-level Quadro (various wildly expensive and/or underpowered models) and FirePro GPUs (all outdated, 2014-era). AMD has just launched the Radeon Pro line, which I'd reckon will receive Avid certification soon (if they don't have it already). While the price/performance of these is far more palatable, they're still around 3x the price of consumer variations of the same cards, all while packing inferior (and probably noisy!) single-slot coolers.
I've seen guides online for modifying the approved GPU list to allow for "unsupported" Quadro GPUs, and some GeForce GPUs as well - which frankly seems almost too easy. At the same time, I'm curious as to the VRAM requirements of workloads like this. I know professional GPUs typically have around 2x the memory of consumer GPUs, but my impression is that this is mostly for various complex computational work with huge datasets. How much VRAM does video editing require? If the requirements are high, that pretty much removes any Nvidia GPU below the 1070 from the equation (although the 1060 6GB might be sufficient?). AMD cards on the other hand have more RAM, and as such I'd reckon for example an RX 470 or 480 8GB would be very decent options (very similar to the Radeon Pro WX5100 and WX7100, just higher clocks and a few more cores in the 470 v. the 5100).
On the other hand, none of these consumer cards support pro-level drivers - which I'm guessing applications like Avid might rely on?
So my questions:
-Is it possible to get this working relatively easily with a consumer card?
-If so, how much VRAM should the card have?
-If not, what kind of performance gains are we talking considering the significant outlay for a pro-level GPU? A WX7100 would consume ~half our budget alone, a WX5100 or Quadro M2000 (hah! a GTX 750!) around 1/3.
If you need price comparison sites, I use Prisguide.no and Prisjakt.no.
This won't be built until AMD Zen is out, as I understand higher core counts are always better for this kind of work, and I want to see how it compares to X99/X299.
From reading around a bit, it seems Avid does support some GPU acceleration (although what exactly is accelerated is more difficult to find documentation on), but the only "qualified" GPUs are pro-level Quadro (various wildly expensive and/or underpowered models) and FirePro GPUs (all outdated, 2014-era). AMD has just launched the Radeon Pro line, which I'd reckon will receive Avid certification soon (if they don't have it already). While the price/performance of these is far more palatable, they're still around 3x the price of consumer variations of the same cards, all while packing inferior (and probably noisy!) single-slot coolers.
I've seen guides online for modifying the approved GPU list to allow for "unsupported" Quadro GPUs, and some GeForce GPUs as well - which frankly seems almost too easy. At the same time, I'm curious as to the VRAM requirements of workloads like this. I know professional GPUs typically have around 2x the memory of consumer GPUs, but my impression is that this is mostly for various complex computational work with huge datasets. How much VRAM does video editing require? If the requirements are high, that pretty much removes any Nvidia GPU below the 1070 from the equation (although the 1060 6GB might be sufficient?). AMD cards on the other hand have more RAM, and as such I'd reckon for example an RX 470 or 480 8GB would be very decent options (very similar to the Radeon Pro WX5100 and WX7100, just higher clocks and a few more cores in the 470 v. the 5100).
On the other hand, none of these consumer cards support pro-level drivers - which I'm guessing applications like Avid might rely on?
So my questions:
-Is it possible to get this working relatively easily with a consumer card?
-If so, how much VRAM should the card have?
-If not, what kind of performance gains are we talking considering the significant outlay for a pro-level GPU? A WX7100 would consume ~half our budget alone, a WX5100 or Quadro M2000 (hah! a GTX 750!) around 1/3.
