SSDs are not highly recommended by some on the forum here, I have no personal experience there, however, if you let me test that new graphics card for 10 or 12 months, I'll write a detailed report for you... HP Envy Phoenix/4thGen i7-4770(4@3.4GHz~turbo>3.9)
Nvidia GTX 960(4GB)/16GB DDR3/
Canon Vixia HV30/HF-M40/HF-M41/HF-G20/Olympus E-PL5.
Tape capture using 6 VCR, TBC-1000, Elite BVP4+, Sony D8 camcorder with TBC.
https://www.facebook.com/BarryAFTT

Hi kmzimm -

I'm no expert on stuff like this, but I have been doing a bit of reading in deliberating over upgrading myself.

As it happens, the GTX680 is one of the cards on my short list so it's been the focus of some of my "research". I'm not even considering the 4GB option. From what I've read there would be no advantage unless you were running multiple monitors with resolutions of 2560x1600+

The 2GB 680 already outperforms many of the other big guns.

Comparison Specs GTX680 FTW/4GB http://eu.evga.com/articles/00669/#GTX680FTW

Here are some forum discussions I came across:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/348833-33-tomshardware
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1700271


Cheers - Tony
Visit PDtoots. PowerDirector Tutorials, tips, free resources & more. Subscribe!
Full linked Tutorial Catalog PDtoots happily supports fellow PowerDirector users!

In my opinion, PD is not a big user of VRAM. What takes lots of VRAM is tessellations and shading, not PD. In an attempt to help quantify VRAM usage a little I put seven 24Mbps 1920x1080 footage in the timeline with full HD preview resolution and for each clip added an effect over the entire clip that utilized Nvidia CUDA. Peak memory usage was 300MB, having 4GB is not going to make the editing of PD function any better than 2GB. Also keep in mind the card is not restricted to use just the VRAM (although faster), it can also use RAM if need be for that niche project. Look at your Nvidia system information, you will see "Total Available Graphics..." 4096MB in my case, "Dedicated Video Memory" 1536MB in my case for the 1.5GB GTX580. The total available is predefined by Nvidia and is a function of installed RAM and will only use if required.

Jeff

Quote: SSDs are not highly recommended by some on the forum here, I have no personal experience there, however, if you let me test that new graphics card for 10 or 12 months, I'll write a detailed report for you...

I have PD11 running on two systems, which are both on SSDs. One, Win 7 is a PCIE and the other Win 8 is a SATA and they perform wonderfully. My card is a GTX680 2GB. I have no info on how well a 4GB might perform against this one. But I have no complaints, both in quality and speed. Intel Core i7 3770K 3.6 Ghz,
GTX 680, 2 X Benq23 3D monitors,
6G DDR3, Win 7 64, Win 10 (Insider) 64
PCIE SSD, Intel Sata SSD 2 500 Gbyte Seagate,
Minoru 3D WebCam, NVIDIA 3D Vision-Ready

Quote:

Quote: SSDs are not highly recommended by some on the forum here, I have no personal experience there, however, if you let me test that new graphics card for 10 or 12 months, I'll write a detailed report for you...

I have PD11 running on two systems, which are both on SSDs. One, Win 7 is a PCIE and the other Win 8 is a SATA and they perform wonderfully. My card is a GTX680 2GB. I have no info on how well a 4GB might perform against this one. But I have no complaints, both in quality and speed.

That's good to know, most of the posts here on the forum seem to be shaky on SSDs. HP Envy Phoenix/4thGen i7-4770(4@3.4GHz~turbo>3.9)
Nvidia GTX 960(4GB)/16GB DDR3/
Canon Vixia HV30/HF-M40/HF-M41/HF-G20/Olympus E-PL5.
Tape capture using 6 VCR, TBC-1000, Elite BVP4+, Sony D8 camcorder with TBC.
https://www.facebook.com/BarryAFTT

I also have a 120gig SSD as my main drive, no problems with PD plus a WD 6gb/sec hard disk.

System: Win 7 SLI Nvidia GTX 460's. 6gig ram.
Used this to tweak my SSD.
http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/SSD_Tweaks

Extra bedside reading.
http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/SSD_Tweaks My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

Hi All,
Thanks for your input and feedback.

I went with the 4GB version in the end.
I haven't had a lot of time to really test it but noticed one thing relating to PD...

I'm not sure what's causing it, but I constantly get "Rendering" pauses when playing in the edit screen.
And this is with just photos, no transitions or anything else complicated.
Just a timeline with photos.

I have the latest drivers installed but I read somewhere the nvidia drivers are pretty bad for this so I'm going to test going back to 301.42 and see if it fixes it.

Any suggestions on the settings in PD that could impact this issue?

Thanks

You need to update PD to the latest update, it fixes the rendering problem.

Top of this page has the updates link. My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

Hi Robert,
Downloaded the latest 2023 update for PD10 and it didn't do anything for rendering.
I drug a bunch of photos into the timeline with no transitions and hit play.... it plays about 2 seconds, then stops, then renders, then plays again... but it won't render anything past the current photo so it's rather pointless.

So I created a profile in NVidia settings to disable Cuda for PD10. Seems to work.

But that brings the question.... is PD using anything on my new card for speeding up the editing or rendering process?

Or is it just a boat anchor?

Thanks for any other feedback.

Interesting it didn't stop the continual re-rendering, it certainly fixed the problem on my system and many people here.

Just one more thing to try. On a new project with just the default Nature.mpg on the time line, does it still stop and start rendering?

Regarding CUDA on my system which has two GTX460 graphic cards in SLI it does speed up producing slightly, but in certain conditions causes artefacts in my produced video. Hence I do not use CUDA it is not worth the hassle.

Cheers

Robert2 S My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

Quote: PD10

That's the reason. Robert was referring to the latest patch for PD11.

Disabling CUDA is the only fix as far as I know.

Cheers - Tony
Visit PDtoots. PowerDirector Tutorials, tips, free resources & more. Subscribe!
Full linked Tutorial Catalog PDtoots happily supports fellow PowerDirector users!

Good catch Tony, missed the PD10 reference. My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn