Hi Russell and welcome to PowerDirector and the exciting and sometimes frustrating world of video editing.

To answer your question yes, a dedicated video card instead of an on board graphics chip will definitely improve the SPEED of rendering your videos. Regarding the quality of rendered video no. Regarding the quality of the preview window inside of PowerDirector I would say yes.

I have an old Nvidia 9800GT graphics card ( I think the minimum NVIDIA card to use CUDA is an 8800 chip you are using an 8300 chip) and a fairly fast a i7 920 cpu and rendering my 720p HD video to MP4 which allows me to use the power of my graphics card using CUDA I can render a 9 minute video in 3 minutes flat. Even rendering the same video to .wmv format which doesn't allow me to use the graphics card it still only takes around 14 minutes to render the video. Oh how things have changed when I used to have to leave my computer on overnight and sometimes most of the next day to render my videos.

ATI cards can also use their extra power to speed up rendering but they use a different method and I don't have any information on them.

Cheers

Robert S My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

Robert,

Thanks for your prompt reply and help. I just need to decide which card to buy, ATI or NVIDIA, and then which model?

Russell

On my last computer, I had an ATI. My new one has an Nvidia GTX480 (Nvidia fastest card now). You cannot go wrong with either brand as one is constantly trying to outdo the other. Intel i930 (4x 2.80ghz), 12 gb Corsair Dominator DDR3 ram, 1.5gb Nvidia GTX480, Asus P6t mb, 850w XFX PSu, Windows 7 HP

Quote:
To answer your question yes, a dedicated video card instead of an on board graphics chip will definitely improve the SPEED of rendering your videos. Regarding the quality of rendered video no.

This does also all depend how much RAM have in the first place.

If you have a PC with 512mb of ram and onboard graphics of 64mb usage then you wont see much difference, if you have 1gb of RAM and 64mb of onboard graphics then youll get better performance, now with for example the top amount of visible RAM on 32bit machines is 3gb so lets say you have 3gb of RAM and 64mb graphics then youll have a good increase in job speed as the RAM that the onboard graphics is only making a slight difference to the 3gb you have.

So if you have 3gb of RAM and a Graphics card with 512mb of its own RAM then all this means is that you wont be using the 64mb that the onboard graphics would of used but you are utilising the whole of the 512mb of RAM on the graphics card as long as your processor can cache fast enough.

Basically for fast encoding/rendering you want a good amount of RAM and a good processor and if using onboard graphics just make sure that you have enough RAM.

Thanks gentlemen for all your feedback. I have 2x2G of RAM, (though I guess only about 3 gets used).

I think I will go with an ATI 5770. Looks like I will need to updgrade the power supply as its only 420 watts.

Thanks again.

Russell