Yes, with video editing, the video card *can* matter

[gsellis]

For those who have been here awhile, the general statement that the video card does not matter sometimes moves that mouse pointer to the reply button. More and more advance suites are using the GPU and some have used the card as a transfer device for awhile. When Pinnacle worked with ATI a ways back, ATI helped Pinnacle use the 8500 chipset to then use DirectX for processing video for effects. Now, the current Pinnacle Studio and Avid/Pinnacle Liquid have a large group of GPU effects and process converts playback in real-time through the GPU for sampling.

And we all know that both nVidia and AMD now offer their own compression engines to convert formats that are very fast.

Well, Gary and company at Videoguys just sent me an ad. The new nVidia PNY Quadro CX CUDA with CS4 kicks serious butt. http://www.videoguys.com/Emails/quadrocx_09.html. HDV to H.264 4 times faster? Sweet.

Snippage for the anti-linkers.

2h35m vs 9hr57m using a dual core CPU.

Project and Settings
We created a 1440x1080 @ 29.97fps Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 project running 1:18:20 in length. Using a dual core CPU system, we have compared the performance of the standard H.264 media encoder included with Premiere Pro CS4 with the CUDA-enabled video encoding plug-in to convert this project into a 1920x1080 @ 29.97 H.264 file.

A Faster Way to Work
Don't sacrifice creativity to meet a deadline. Quadro graphics solutions deliver GPU-accelerated rendering time for rich visual effects in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and Adobe After Effects CS4. Plus with Quadro CX the accelerator for Adobe Creative Suite 4 - get advanced features including up to 4X faster H.264 video encoding speeds with the NVIDIA CUDA-enabled plug-in for Premiere Pro CS4. This time savings means instead of encoding Blu-ray DVDs overnight you can now do it in a few hours during the day.

So add CS4 to the video engine using GPU acceleration (OpenGL).

 

[coxmaster]

Any word on how fast it is using a standard (cheaper) CUDA card? 88,98, or GTX series cards should perform fairly well still right?

 

[gsellis]

Not by me. I was going by what Gary had in their ad. Videoguys do some do-it-yourself projects with some very limited benchmarking. They help a bunch with their customers, but nobody is really posting 3rd party benchmarks. Part of it is that the market for systems vs the number of users is small. Not like gaming, which will sell millions of game units vs hundreds to thousands of editing systems.

 

[Kaido]

I'm very excited about Snow Leopard for a similar reason. It has OpenCL, which turns the Video Card into a CPU. All that extra processing power, yum!

 

[jamesbond007]

Hey, that's pretty snazzy! I think someone recently was saying that Pinacle utilizes ATi GPUs for a similar process boost, right? I wonder if that Plug-In would work with Sony Vegas? I like Vegas way more than Adobe Premiere, but I am a big Photoshop whore.