Video card choice to improve render times with VS 11?

[lespurgeon]

I'm trying to get a bit more life from the home computer (AMD X2 4800, 2 GB ram) and looking at a new video card to replace the old 6600GT.

I've noticed both the 8800GT and the ATI 3850/3870 talk about video acceleration off-loading from the CPU. Anybody do any tests to see if rendering times improve with VS11 when using one of these new cards and latest drivers (Win XP please, so far every machine I have tried with Vista was better off with XP).

Thanks in advance.

[GuyL]

To my knowledge, the graphics card is not used to render video - at least not in VS. I know ATI has an AVIVO converter that uses the GPU.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

[jparnold]

Guy is correct.

Video cards do not affect rendering times by Videostudio. What faster video cards do is speed up the processing of video data sent to the monitor (eg drawing polygons etc etc). Rendering time (by VS) is affected by mainly by processor speed and to a lesser extent by speed and amount of memory (ram).

[Ron P.]

John is correct, and to add to that, if you want to increase rendering time, figure out what the slowest component on your system might be. A computer will only run as fast as it's slowest component, be that the FSB (front side bus), RAM (amount and speed), then HDD, free space, defragmented regularly, size, and speed), then processor. You could have a processor that's the fastest made, placed on a motherboard with the FSB of a PII (around 60Mhz), and your PC would not process much if any faster than the FSB will allow.

[2Dogs]

I'm trying to get a bit more life from the home computer (AMD X2 4800, 2 GB ram) and looking at a new video card to replace the old 6600GT.

An X2 4800 is not too shabby. The fastest C2D or quad would only be maybe twice as fast.

I've noticed both the 8800GT and the ATI 3850/3870 talk about video acceleration off-loading from the CPU. Anybody do any tests to see if rendering times improve with VS11 when using one of these new cards and latest drivers (Win XP please, so far every machine I have tried with Vista was better off with XP).

As others have said, the hardware acceleration will offload cpu usage for video playback only, when using suitable programs, and VS can not make use of the feature. If you're editing SD video, it's irrelevant.

Perhaps you're a gamer, though, since video editing only requires the most rudimentary video - integrated graphics do just fine. With the advent of the 8800GT, older video card prices are falling fast, so an 8600GT might be a worthwhile upgrade for playing video games, and it offers the same level of hardware acceleration for playback of HD video. The 8800GT and ATI cards would enable you to play almost all the latest video games (Crysis excepted!) at reasonably high resolutions.

Of course if you are a gamer, you might also be an overclocker, and that can be a way of speeding up video encoding......

[etech6355]

I don't know what 6600Gt video card the poster is using but my AGP 8X GeForce 6600GT is by no means slow in my P4 3.2Ghz computer.
It has 128megs of DDR3. I find that the older Nvidia drivers work better with that card then the new releases.
That computer can playback High Definition mpeg2 video no problem.
It can also playback High Definition avc/h264 at 4MBS, maybe 6MBS.

[2Dogs]

I don't know what 6600Gt video card the poster is using but my AGP 8X GeForce 6600GT is by no means slow in my P4 3.2Ghz computer.

Trouble is everything is relative. Your pc would have been considered to be a real screamer a few years ago - and when the 6600GT was introduced it was much more powerful than any other mid range card of the time. Nowadays some modern pc games would struggle to play with "only" 128MB of video memory.

You might try loading RivaTuner and see how much of a boost you can get on your 6600 if you're interested. It gives me an extra 25% or so on my old MX440, which makes a noticeable difference when I feel the need to kill a few aliens.....

[lespurgeon]

Thanks all,
Yes I have been found out. I do a bit of casual gaming, and my now nearly 3 year old then high-end workstation is looking to get a bit more life. I already have an extra 10% on the FSB and RAM.

The motherboard is not compatible with the new G92 (8800 GT/GTS) chips, so I think I will be going with a 3850. I had just hoped that I could speed up working with HDV a bit. I'm guessing another generation or 2 of computers before we work real time in HD, but off-load to the GPU could probably do it today.

[etech6355]

Trouble is everything is relative. Your pc would have been considered to be a real screamer a few years ago - and when the 6600GT was introduced it was much more powerful than any other mid range card of the time. Nowadays some modern pc games would struggle to play with "only" 128MB of video memory.

Of course, it played Doom3 pretty nice, I guess in 2 years the Q6600 quad will also be considered outdated.. But we are speaking about video editing. A P4-3.2Ghz with 2 hard disks using VS or MF performs very well.
I'm speaking about real HDV which is hd-mpeg2 video, not the new avc/h264 video format.

[2Dogs]

The motherboard is not compatible with the new G92 (8800 GT/GTS) chips, so I think I will be going with a 3850.

Not much of a hardship then! The 3850 is a great video card and good value!

I had just hoped that I could speed up working with HDV a bit. I'm guessing another generation or 2 of computers before we work real time in HD, but off-load to the GPU could probably do it today.

As I see it, you can use Smart Proxy to help when editing HD, speeding up preview times and so on to acceptable levels, and enabling you to use hardware such as etech6355 describes - but the problem is what to do with the output! Unless it's to be stored on hard drive for playback thru a pc, the price of HD-DVD or Blu Ray burners, discs and players is currently prohibitive for most users. VS makes it possible to create an HD mpeg-2 DVD, but you would be limited to a project duration of only about 15 minutes using a single layer DVD. Although using a DVD9 disc would of course double that, I feel that DL discs are still over-priced.

Since it's likely that the price of HD-DVD and Blu Ray hardware and media will stay out of reach of mainstream users for some time, perhaps future versions of VS should support HD H.264 encoding.

[etech6355]

2Dogs,

Since it's likely that the price of HD-DVD and Blu Ray hardware and media will stay out of reach of mainstream users for some time, perhaps future versions of VS should support HD H.264 encoding.

Are you using a different version of VS11+? It currently supports all or most HD formats and media now (with the patches).

Using VS11+ to export/render 1 minute of avc/h264 to avc/h264 (same format) no editing effects with smart-rendering off takes about 4:07 minutes on an Intel Q6600 computer (not overclocked, 2.4Ghzx4cores).

To render HDV to HDV (hd-mpeg2) 1 minute with smart render off is 1:42 Minutes
To render HDV to HDV (hd-mpeg2) 1 minute with smart render ON is 9 Seconds.

[2Dogs]

Are you using a different version of VS11+? It currently supports all or most HD formats and media now (with the patches).

Ooops! Just found the AVCHD choice in create video file! I'll have to get hold of some HD source material and run some tests - though I suspect none of my pc's will be up to 1920x1080 H.264 playback, and I don't have a set top HD or Blu Ray player.

Using VS11+ to export/render 1 minute of avc/h264 to avc/h264 (same format) no editing effects with smart-rendering off takes about 4:07 minutes on an Intel Q6600 computer (not overclocked, 2.4Ghzx4cores).

Are you able to Smart Render HD H.264?

To render HDV to HDV (hd-mpeg2) 1 minute with smart render off is 1:42 Minutes

That sounds remarkably fast. Have you rendered any real world HDV or AVC projects and burned them to DVD? If so what kind of project duration can you fit on the DVD? My favourite bitrate calculator doesn't do HD....

To render HDV to HDV (hd-mpeg2) 1 minute with smart render ON is 9 Seconds.

Like Smart Rendering DV avi files, this benefits from being read from one physical drive and written to another physical hard drive. You only show one hard drive in your pc. Time for a New Years present? It also benefits from more RAM, of which I see you have 4GB. Are you doing the tests whilst running a 64bit version of Windows, since the 32bit effectively has a 3GB limit on how much it can make use of?

[d1ms]

sorry to interrupt...

Are you able to Smart Render HD H.264?

yes, I did Smart Render AVCHD (H.264)
what is Smart Render?
I have this dialog box but I don't know do I need Smart Render or not, is it making video better or worse, faster or slower etc

Have you rendered any real world HDV or AVC projects and burned them to DVD? If so what kind of project duration can you fit on the DVD?

I did avchd project, wrote it to normal DVD and played it in blue ray playet at my local best buy. Don't know size, but somebody said ~15 minutes per DVD. it might be more because nature of h.264 compression

[2Dogs]

sorry to interrupt...

No problem! I think etech and I were meandering a bit anyway!

what is Smart Render?

It's what Ulead, now Corel, and Intervideo before them called a process whereby the program does not re-encode video files if they are being outputted (for want of a better verb!) to exactly the same file format.

I have this dialog box but I don't know do I need Smart Render or not, is it making video better or worse, faster or slower etc

When SmartRender is enabled, it speeds up rendering - since the Smart Rendered sections of the project or files are not being re-encoded, but simply written to the hard drive - in effect copied. With most hardware this will occur at many times the speed of re-encoding, so there can be considerable time savings.

On the downside, Smart Render used to be associated with audio out of sync problems in earlier versions of VS. At any transitions, there are also possibly issues when working with video files using compression based on a Group of Frames - eg mpeg-2, H.264.

I did avchd project, wrote it to normal DVD and played it in blue ray player at my local best buy. Don't know size, but somebody said ~15 minutes per DVD. it might be more because nature of h.264 compression

I sort of hoped you might be able to get more than 15 minutes on a single layer DVD. With a bitrate in the region of 18,000kbps, maybe 30 minutes.

Interesting concept, though, using a system in Best Buy to view your output! I'm not sure they'd let me get comfortable with an armchair and some beers though!

[etech6355]

The video codec used doesn't matter.
The length & size of all video is dependent on the average combination of the "Video_Bit_Rate & Audio_Bit_Rate".

It's not hard, just calculate the MegaBytes_Per_Minute
If you encode using the ulead h264 encoder (in the burning module) at 18,000kbs Variable Bit Rate the Average bit rate of the video will come out to approx 12,000kbs (because it's VBR). The burning module estimates of the 18,000kbs setting so it's calculation will be a little high.

So if the average bit rate is 12MBS or 12,000kbs then for every minute of video:
( 12,000k * 60) / 8 ) = 90,000 KiloBytes or 90 MegaBytes per minute of video.

A standard single layer dvd is 4.370 GigaBytes so use 4.20 gBytes to allow a safety factor for menus etc.

So ( 4200 / 90 0 ) = 46.6 Minutes for a single layer dvd. This provides excellent HighDef Video using VBR.

If you used 15,000 Constant_Bit_Rate then (15,000kbs + Audio@265kbs x2 for stereo ) = approx 15,500KiloBits per second then that's MegaBytes Per Minute.
But, in real life because of the avc/h264 compression scheme the actual file size was 110 MegaBytes.
( 4200 / 116.250 ) = 36 Minutes (Calculated).
( 4200 / 110 ) = 38 Minutes. (Real)

The tests below were using 100% Compression
Using MovieFactory 6+ on a P4 - 2.8Ghz HT computer to convert 1 Minute of true HDV HD-Mpeg2(1440x1080) video to AVC/H264 at 1440x1080@15MBS ConstantBitRate with Dolby 2/0@256kbs took 16 minutes. CPU usage on both cores was 98%-100%.

So using the P4-2.8Ghz computer when I convert all my VHS tapes to AVCHD format it's only going to take a mere 6 months to render the videos on that computer.

Using an Intel Q6600 quad running Vista this took 3:38 Minutes

Also on the Q6600 quad to convert the same 1 minute HDV mpeg2 video file to Standard Definition for DVD took 35 Seconds.
So this shows how high a compression codec the avc/h264 is and to work with it requires a fast cpu.