Does more ram help video encoding?

[ponyo]

Will adding another 512mb of ram help with Divx and DVD encoding speed? Will I notice the speed increase? Or is it better for me to just use that money to switch to P4?

 

[ForceCalibur]

no

 

[elkinm]

Yes, while it won't actually give you faster encodes, it will me your system run much better. XP Pro eats through 512 MB instantly even with the simplest encoding task which slows down everything with 1 GB everything is fine.

A P4 would be nice and would be a little faster but all around I would take the ram first.

 

[batmanuel]

Hopefully, if they get the driver support for the feature working soon and it performs as promised, the hardware-accelerated video encoder on the new GeForce cards should be able to give a pretty big boost to video encoding speeds. Of course right now you'll have to pay a pretty big premium to get it, but I've got my fingers crossed that the feature will carry over into the value line of the new cards when they are relased later in the year. A sub-$100 GeForce 6200 that can chew through MPEG-2 encodes way faster than a top of the line P4 would be super sweet.

 

[Gurck]

512 is enough, cpu is the bottleneck.

 

[ponyo]

Thx for the info. Guess I'll stick with 512mb.

 

[fsstrike]

At school we have p4 2.4 and 256mb of ram, and its virtually impossible to run encore and premiere. It usually only uses about 350- 450mb of RAM so your 512 SHOULD be okay... But a p4 3.4 800mhz FSB and HT, with a Gig of DDR400 ram will be awesome for that kind of stuff.