I'm just starting to do more "work" with 4k clips. I'll be producing mostly 1080 and 4k movies, between 5-80 minutes, HEVC. When I produced a simple 10 minute movie from 4 clips with just fades and crossfades, 30 fps, high quality, 1080 required 25 minutes on my machine, 4k required 2 hours.

I'm wondering if I should consider upgrading GPU to get quicker rendering, assuming of course that I can make sure the drivers + PD work properly together to actually do any hardware acceleration. I don't seem to get any hardware acceleration making HEVCs with my current setup (PD 14, hardware acceleration checkboxes are grayed out for HEVC).

My system was reasonably quick 3-4 years ago. I use an m2 ssd system drive and have another ssd available for working.

System Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
System Model: Z170XP-SLI
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz (4 CPUs), ~3.2GHz
Memory: 32768MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 32718MB RAM
Page File: 8057MB used, 25683MB available
DirectX Version: DirectX 12

Display Devices
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Card name: AMD Radeon (TM) R9 380 Series
Manufacturer: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Chip type: AMD Radeon Graphics Processor (0x6939)
DAC type: Internal DAC(400MHz)

Is there a chance I could see a meaningful speed improvement in rendering HEVCs at 1080 and 4k by putting a couple hundred into, say, a GTX 1060 (but I see I'd need older drivers to keep hardware acceleration working with PD14)? Or should I just leave well enough alone?