Jeff.. I'm impressed! Your tests and description explain a lot.

I understand, that your numbers are valid for your CPU (i7-3770). My case is more from lower end but I'll try to translate your results into my world taking into consideration BillyR numbers with his i7 950 when producing 34 min clip in 112 sec.

Maybe I am not very accurate, but taking my CPU (2x Xeon 5130), it takes +/- 1 hour to produce 1 hour clip. Yes, believe me or not, it is 1 hour! So I can assume, that any middle level video card will speed up my processing dramatically. In my case, gaining 1 hr clip produced in 10 min means 6 fold acceleration.

Am I right? _______________________________
regards, Tom
(PD365, Win10 Pro x64, Dell Precision T3500, Xeon W3670, 12GB, SSD)

Quote: taking into consideration BillyR numbers with his i7 950 when producing 34 min clip in 112 sec.

Maybe I am not very accurate, but taking my CPU (2x Xeon 5130), it takes +/- 1 hour to produce 1 hour clip. Yes, believe me or not, it is 1 hour! So I can assume, that any middle level video card will speed up my processing dramatically. In my case, gaining 1 hr clip produced in 10 min means 6 fold acceleration.

Am I right?

Tom:
Just to clarify, the clip I used had no edits, so it produced a lot faster than it would if I had edited it normally, i.e.; cutting out the commercials leaving about a 21 min. clip, sharpening, editing for brightness, contrast, etc. It's been a while since I did any editing on that machine, but if I remember correctly the same clip edited as described took about 10 min. to produce (without using HA), so you should take that into account when you estimate how long your machine will take. If you get a mid-level GPU and use HA I suspect it will improve your performance, but I doubt if you will get a 6 fold improvement, but even doubling your performance would be significant. Dell Precision 7510 Laptop
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit | Intel(R) XEON(R) CPU E3-1505M v5 @2.80 GHz
RAM: 32 GB
Windows Experience Index 7.5

Yes, maybe my estimate was to optimistic

My numbers for rendering were given for clean clip, no effects added. It just goes 1 to 1 - 1 minute of clip by 1 minute of rendering - so simple

I am not sure what I can get with given card because simple buying one which gets rendering at the same speed as my CPU is wasting of money.. NVIDIA® GeForce® 9800 GTX+ In its description, Nvidia states, that CUDA speeds up transcoding by 7x compared to CPU usage. Taking into account, that this card has been launched to the market 2 years ago and my CPU is much older.. maybe it would be a good shot? What do you think? _______________________________
regards, Tom
(PD365, Win10 Pro x64, Dell Precision T3500, Xeon W3670, 12GB, SSD)

Quote: Nvidia states, that CUDA speeds up transcoding by 7x compared to CPU usage. Taking into account, that this card has been launched to the market 2 years ago and my CPU is much older.. maybe it would be a good shot? What do you think?

I'm really not that knowledgeable about this stuff, but I suspect the 9800 would improve your performance if you used HA, and it wouldn't cost that much. I see them on EBay for $20-$30 with one as little as $5, so it wouldn't be that much of an investment:
http://tinyurl.com/klfar5g
However, the benchmark score is pretty low (http://tinyurl.com/n6mg9kz) compared to a 470 (http://tinyurl.com/k2hejoz), and you can get a 470 for as little as $40 (http://tinyurl.com/nakxtgg) (maybe), so if I were in your place and could get one for that price I'd be tempted to go for the 470. Dell Precision 7510 Laptop
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit | Intel(R) XEON(R) CPU E3-1505M v5 @2.80 GHz
RAM: 32 GB
Windows Experience Index 7.5

Hi,
My opinion on this matter is that the GPU has to have a decent amount of memory (1GB or more) to take the load off of the CPU or the card is going ot be slower than just the CPU. I don't think the 9800 card had large memory to work with.
JIm Intel i7-2600@3.4Gz Geforce 560ti-1GB Graphic accelerator, windows 7 Premium 12GB memory

Visit GranPapa64's channel for your YouTube experience of the day!

@BillyR
Benchmatk is really low for 9800 although the price you gave for 470 is 40$ but.. it is just initial bid and cards with Buy it now option are 90+ It is above my budget for now. I have to wait, collect some money, look forward to some bargain or just wait for price to drop down

@James1
It looks like nobody knows what really maters for PD12. Using common sense I would say the same - the bigger RAM, the better. But as JL_JL stated before, it is not only a matter of speed. Some cross-dependencies happen, proving our predictions wrong.

Thank you all for your input. I've learned a lot from this thread. Now it's time to collect some money _______________________________
regards, Tom
(PD365, Win10 Pro x64, Dell Precision T3500, Xeon W3670, 12GB, SSD)