Video card for image processing / video editing

[piowoc]

Hi guys,

what I currently have is SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7970 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102961)
and I was thinking about upgrading my rig in order to get more processing power for image processing / video editing. I mostly use Adobe software like Lightroom, Photoshop, Adobe Premiere.
My system other specs: Asus P9X79 PRO m/b, i7 3930K, 32GB RAM,

First I tried to justify upgrading to Z170 m/b and i7 6700K, but after consulting it on one of the forums I realized that it won't give me any substantial gain in terms of speed.

So, somebody advised me to look into upgrading the video card to either AMD Fire, or NVidia Quadro, but when I looked at the specs of my card (3GB GDDR5, 384-Bit memory interface, 2048 Stream Processors) I would probably need to go for at least Quadro M4000 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814132051) to see any improvement.

Can anybody comment on my way of reasoning? Should I just stick to what I currently have?

Your replies will be appreciated.
Thanks!

 

[jillybean420]

I don't think I would advise going with NVidia. They reaaallly gouge the prices of their cards, no matter what tier. And from what I've researched AMD's cards always have faster RAM and better bus-width. NVidia has kind of stagnated, they lag behind on quality and speed of their drivers and products. :sneaky:

 

[ShintaiDK]

If you need video decode, specially in newer formats you may find AMD lacking severely. No VP9, No HEVC Main10. Only Carrizo, Tonga and Fiji supports 8bit HEVC.

 

[VirtualLarry]

If you need video decode, specially in newer formats you may find AMD lacking severely. No VP9, No HEVC Main10. Only Carrizo, Tonga and Fiji supports 8bit HEVC.

Pretty sure that Intel doesn't support those in hardware either... just in the drivers, using shaders. (Less performance and efficiency than a hardware implementation.)

 

[ShintaiDK]

Pretty sure that Intel doesn't support those in hardware either... just in the drivers, using shaders. (Less performance and efficiency than a hardware implementation.)

They all got hardware acceleration. They dont on AMD.

You can play it fine without problems on Intel and nVidia, you cant play it at all on AMD.

 

[Snafuh]

This small test compares a 290x with a Gtx 670. The 290x is a bit faster. Unfortunately I can't find any Adobe Premiere tests with Maxwell cards.

http://www.dslrfilmnoob.com/2014/04/26/opencl-vs-cuda-adobe-premiere-cc-rendering-test/
A upgrade to a card like 780 might improve your render times by 30% (Just a wild guess, could be 10% is maxwell doesn't perform well with Premiere).
A CPU upgrade would give a even smaller boost.

I'm not sure if Quadros perform much better in Premiere than their GeForce pendants.

I don't think a upgrade is worth it.

 

[Azix]

opencl might be faster at this point than CUDA in adobe software but can't find benchmarks. Comments say its faster. using adobe means its decent choice since they focused on opencl a bit

https://community.amd.com/thread/183792

https://youtu.be/0W-5qpLyBpA?t=6m1s

might be nice with a 390 390X OR 8gb 290X

 

[piowoc]

Thank you all!
Are you by chance aware of any speed tests in Adobe Lightroom and/or Photoshop? I would love to see them, because I use these programs even more frequently than Premiere.

 

[therealnickdanger]

A few questions that are most important:

1. What resolution is your display? What is your target resolution for your video projects? 1080p? 2.5K? 4K?

2. What version of LR/PS/Pr are you using?

3. What additional plugins or enhancements do you use?

The reason I ask is that for the most part, even the latest version of LR and PS are more heavily single-threaded than multi-threaded. Yes, they have made some strides in this area, but the CPU clock speed/turbo seems to be most important. Some operations will use 4-6 cores well, but SPEED helps the most. I think you should look at overclocking your 3930K/RAM to its limit for some tangible benefits, because you're really at the sweet spot for CPU performance if you do that.

Also, despite the enhancements available for OpenCL/CUDA, the bulk of Adobe operations are still heavily CPU-dependent. Unless you're doing a lot of high-resolution, 4K+ video work in Pr, a beefy GPU doesn't do a lot. If you're doing 1080p, the CPU is all you need and any GPU will work about the same. Likewise, unless you use some other plugins that are proven to work much, much better with GPU acceleration, don't bother. Since you didn't mention After Effects, which makes the most use out of GPU power in the whole Adobe suite, that makes me think CPU should be your focus.

OC that CPU, OC that RAM, and put your money into a PCIe SSD.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Photoshop-CC-Multi-Core-Performance-625/
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Lightroom-CC-6-Multi-Core-Performance-649/
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-Professional-GPU-Acceleration-502/

EDIT: I also wanted to add that depending upon the quality output you expect, if is often better to just use CPU-only encoding.

 

[DigDog]

I don't think I would advise going with NVidia. They reaaallly gouge the prices of their cards, no matter what tier. And from what I've researched AMD's cards always have faster RAM and better bus-width. NVidia has kind of stagnated, they lag behind on quality and speed of their drivers and products. :sneaky:

what?

 

[RussianSensation]

Thank you all!
Are you by chance aware of any speed tests in Adobe Lightroom and/or Photoshop? I would love to see them, because I use these programs even more frequently than Premiere.

For now, just overclock your existing CPU if the work output is not for critical applications. For productivity apps, it's going to be very hard for you to upgrade to anything meaningful. I mean Hardware Canucks is putting out some incredibly high quality YouTube videos and his i7 6700K is not even as fast as his old overclocked 3930K. Therefore, at some point the quality of your work will matter a lot more than the small time saved:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_fOI7laPns

I think you might be better off buying a 6-8 core Broadwell-E in June 2016 and overclocking it. Since you kept your CPU for so long, and you use it for productivity, I'd lean that way over an i7 6700K:

If you don't overclock, then still the 6-core Broadwell-E 6800K or 6850K could be a nice upgrade but you'd have to ditch your 32GB of DDR3 memory which is an extra cost because 32GB DDR4 costs about $180 or so.

AMD has also enabled OpenCL acceleration in Photoshop and your existing card should be able to take advantage already:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LHLkS32EWs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86x7llTIWXc

Just make sure you actually have GPU acceleration enabled in the Adobe Suite products:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFwKEUS4hVM

I cannot readily find benchmarks that compare modern AMD vs. NV cards in many of the Adobe programs you listed. In some benchmarks, I read that Quadro/FirePro accelerate certain tasks but in others they lose badly to much cheaper consumer GPUs. That's why it's very difficult to flat out recommend an $800-900 FirePro or Quadro card.

I think it gets tricky since R9 390 has 8GB of VRAM vs. just 3.5 on GTX970 and 4GB on GTX980. In how many scenarios would that help though? I guess if you also play videogames on the side, it's much easier to recommend you to sell your existing 7970 and buy an R9 390 8GB as that upgrade would be cheap for you.