chipset query

[peacefrog]

Hi all,
1.
Do people have an opinion on the strength of intergrated graphics on a chipset. ..i'm looking at intel915 range for an upgrade.

2.
I've seen many discussions for and against the part played by a standalone GPU in video editing/rendering and have a slight lean towards a card plays very little. But i could be sooo wrong!

If there are articles or opinions could ppl suggest....

cheers
froggy

[Terry Stetler]

Mine below in BLUE.

Terry

Hi all,
1.
Do people have an opinion on the strength of intergrated graphics on a chipset. ..i'm looking at intel915 range for an upgrade.

IMO integrated graphics are best used for one purpose: as a backup in case your real graphics adapter fails. Otherwise they tend to be slow, outdated and absent a TV-out/theater mode, which disqualifies them for use in editing systems IMO.

2.
I've seen many discussions for and against the part played by a standalone GPU in video editing/rendering and have a slight lean towards a card plays very little. But i could be sooo wrong!

If there are articles or opinions could ppl suggest....

IMO the best display cards for systems dedicated to editing are those by Matrox.

For AGP systems the P-750 is a great package and offers 3 display heads, one of which can provide a very high quality TV-out for previews/tape recording. This "DVDMAX" mode is flat out excellent. Up the food chain quite a bit is the Parhelia, which is very similar in design to the P-750 but much faster and offers TV-Out plugins for programs like After Effects, Photoshop, Maya, 3D Studio etc.

For PCIe systems the top of the line APVe offers the same features as the Parhelia plus either HDTV out and SD out. With SD out you also get SD capture.

For non-dedicated video systems I prefer the ATI cards that have their theater mode TV-out. It's nowhere as nice as Matrox's, but the ATI cards have better gaming capabilities. Of these the new X1000 series is very interesting because there is a piece of s/w in beta for them that can do video encodes in the GPU several times faster than the system CPU can do them (AKA: XCODE or AVE [AvivoVideoEncoder]).

cheers
froggy

Cheers back atcha

[sjj1805]

One extra point
An integrated graphics chip steals part of your RAM whereas a seperate graphics card will normally have its own onboard RAM.

OK a minor point, but still a point to be considered as video work is one of the most (if not the most) labour intensive tasks carried out by a computer and so anything that will free up RAM and/or CPU usage has to be a good thing.

[tyamada]

I wouldn't consider a motherboard with a intel 915 chipset due to the fact they are alread obsolete.

The latest chipset with intergrated graphics is the 945 chipset.
I would choose a separate graphics card, since I am now doing High Definition video the new 1000 series Graphic card from ATI have Hardware/software acceleration buit in, on of those card would be my choice.

[DVDDoug]

On the other hand...

The actual digital-video "data" does NOT get affected by the video card/chipset. The card/chipset is used only for display... It only affects what you see on your computer monitor. So, if you do the exact same edits and burn a DVD on a minimal system and on a high-end "gaming" system, the results will be identical! Digital video editing/processing is just "number crunching" to the computer. (i.e. A spreadsheet will give you the same numbers on a cheap computer as a fast computer with lots of RAM... The fast computer will just do it faster.)

The advantage of a good card/chipset and a good monitor is that the video will look better on your computer, and hopefully more like it will on a TV. For example, if you're applying a color-adjusting filter you need to know what it's going to look like on a regular video system. It's my understanding that pros use special calibrated NTSC (or PAL) video cards and monitors, not regular computer monitors.