Answer is Yes.

http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/8445.page

Have a look at the link I've given, might help you.

Dafydd

Hi David,

I am certainly not an expert on hardware...but all of the specs you listed are important regarding a graphic card, I am not sure if one spec is more important than another. The more expensive a card is...generally so are the specs.

So maybe the best advice is to get the best card you can afford. As prices drop on the card you choose, in the future you can always add an additional card and put them in a crossfire configuration. That is what I did...although I went with two cards right from the start(Two ATI 5770). But ATI has lots of choices in the 5800 series.

You can spend some serious cash on Graphic cards and you will see a benefit with a more powerful card. It will certainly help when you are in the editing phase of a project and it will help with decreasing your rendering times with certain file types....certain wmv...mpeg-2 and H.264 files are rendered faster with Hardware Acceleration.

I am sure that other members here will offer their advice and experience.

Regards,

Kevin
Check out PDtoots. PowerDirector Tutorials and more! Over 5,000 Subscribers.

Did you find that adding the second card in a crossfire setup to double your performance?

Hi David,

I used this chart for reaching my decision as to what cards I wanted to get for my system. The results from this chart are a 3DMark Score: It shows how different cards from both ATI and Nvidea stack up against each other both as a single card and crossfired.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-cards-charts-2009-high-quality/3DMark06-v1.1.0-3DMark-Score,1829.html

In summary an ATI Radeon HD 5770 by itself scored 17,546 with a cost of $159.99
CROSSFIRED ATI Radeon 5770 scored 24,836 with a cost of $320.00

An ATI HD Radeon 5870 scored 21,131 with a cost of 400.00

So I chose the route of doubling up the 5770. It seemed reasonable in performance and price.

But you could spend a $1000.00 on a single ATI HD 5970 with 4GB of GDDR5 RAM and then buy THREE more of them and put them all crossfired on a new EVGA 4-Way Motherboard for $280.00, for a grand total of $4280.00 in just two items!!....hmmmmm now we are crossing over into the "over the top zone"..

It's a personal preference.....

Regards,

Kevin
Check out PDtoots. PowerDirector Tutorials and more! Over 5,000 Subscribers.

How directly does a 3dmark score relate to PD8 encoding and editing performance?

After your post I did some searching and found this:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-5670-review-test-crossfire/21

You can see in this benchmark that after a certain point, the faster cards did not help in encoding tasks (at least in this benchmark with this hardware config).

Anyone else with PD8 specific thoughts on video cards?

Hi David,

Your link had some interesting results, it seemed that the graphics cards reached a level and there was no improvement. I am sure there are cases where a CPU can actually surpass a graphics card ability to render files....but what I have found is that if I use my graphic cards to render , then my CPU resources are available to do other things. I don't need to worry about my PC crashing while I am rendering a file and doing something else on my PC. So I can't answer your question as to how a 3DMark score directly relates to video rendering speed. Maybe some of the more technically knowledgeable members here could shed some light on that question. It's way over my head.

My Intel i7 920 CPU is over clocked to 3.85 Ghz, but I can MAX it out (100% CPU usage) during the editing mode in Power Director just by using additional video tracks and placing High Definition m2ts files in them and playing back in High Quality mode in the PREVIEW SCREEN. It is a question of scale...you can always have more powerful hardware, it will not usually be a disadvantage even though the chart you had a link to showed that several graphic cards with different specs all scored the same in a rendering test. Does that make sense?

Kevin


Check out PDtoots. PowerDirector Tutorials and more! Over 5,000 Subscribers.

More googling and another benchmark to check out:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/graphics-power-consumption,2708-10.html

Although the focus of this testing was power consumption. You again see an interesting pattern. The difference in PD8 performance with different ATI 5000 series cards is pretty close. Just using any ATI 5000 series GPU assist in PD8 is dramatically better than depending on the CPU alone. But one can conclude that running at least a ATI 5670 card gives you the majority of the performance improvement without going to the higher end cards.

I have several machines here and moved some video cards to do my own testing. Some interesting results:

PD8 v3022
Windows 7 32 bit, 4GB RAM, Q6600 2.4Ghz quad O/C to 3.0Ghz
5 minute HD1080 MOV file from my Canon 7D camera with simple beginning and ending titles added.

Test 1:
CPU only, all video hardware encoding turned off
"Burn BluRay" to disk folder
13minutes 32 seconds, all four Q6600 CPU's loaded to 98%+ during most of the enoding.

Test2:
CPU + 1 ATI HD5670 video card
all video GPU acceleration options turned on
"Burn BluRay" to disk folder
7minutes 35 seconds, Single one of the Q6600 CPU's loaded to 80%, other 3 CPU's at 25% load

Test3:
CPU + 2 ATI HD5670 video cards in a CROSSFIRE configuration
all video GPU acceleration options turned on
"Burn BluRay" to disk folder
7minutes 28 seconds, Single one of the Q6600 CPU's loaded to 60%, other 3 CPU's at 25% load

CONCLUSION:
At least for this test case, the addition of even a moderate level ATI card can nearly double the performance of your enodes plus free up your CPU to actually do other work during the encoding session. Using multiple ATI cards in a CROSSFIRE setup does not yield any advantage for PD8.

Possibly, with a lessor CPU, the GPU and CROSSFIRE results might change.

Just for the record, so to speak, as well as speed performance etc there does appear to be a "difference" in file specification in some circumstances when using ATi HA, which may also have a bearing on usage.

http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/10379.page#45974

My PD8 currently resides on a slower system so I can't test it out any further but it might be something to consider?

Cheers
Adrian Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. (see below)
Confucius
AMD Phenom IIX6 1055T, win10, 5 internal drives, 7 usb drives, struggling power supply.