See my setup in my sig. While I'm not running 3 GTX Titans in Tri-SLI, I can still confidently say I have a VERY fast computer. Prior to today I was not using a video card, only the Intel® HD Graphics 4600 on the cpu die.
In starting my first project, I am opening with some basic effects and some old SD (digitized) video. I have three layers, a particle layer background (Fairy Dust), the SD video clip on layer 2, and a PIP film projector on the third layer. I tweaked the video clip by adding slow motion, reflection an 'old movie' FX, soft border, a mask and I resized the clip to make it smaller.
So as I previewed this using 'High Preview Resolution' preview quality, I was a bit disappointed to see it wouldn't play smoothly. The two higher quality modes were of course pointless. So I dropped $250 on a GTX 760 Nvidia Card. Big mistake. It didn't make one iota difference in my preview playback. Yep, I've enabled both OpenCL and hardware decoding in the preferences menu. No improvement.
I reviewed the Passmark Software G3D benchmarks and for what it's worth, the resulting marks were:
Intel® HD Graphics 4600 - 636
Nvidia Geforce GTX 760 - 4,999
I think it's fair to say I added some substantial horsepower. So am I simply running into a software limitation of Power Director? I haven't even dropped an HD clip into my project yet, I'm really afraid to see how that goes!
Thanks for any of your thoughts, just very frustrated.
Eric Windows 10 64 Bit
ASUS Z87 Pro MB BIOS 2103
i7-4770K Haswell OC'd to 4.3Ghz
16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR 1600Mhz
EVGA Geforce GTX 960 2GB GDDR5 v368.22
Samsung SSD 840 Pro 256 GB (Rapid Mode)
Power Director 14 Ultimate 64 Bit