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Must I buy a standalone video card?
I had the good fortunate of being able to get a new rig. Given pricing for chips and the superior performance (as of now) of the i7-11700k @ 3.6 Ghz with a z590 motherboard, opting for the future of comet lake. Video cards are off the charts pricing and I still have my multi-monitor 2GB Ram card (Asus RX560-02g) Question is whether I’m better off just using the onboard video (which can drive 3 monitors at 4k) or use this old card to get some additional performance boost, whether it’s aiding watching video I’m editing (mostly still 1080p) even if it may not be used for encoding. I recall for a long time using the CPU and onboard video since it was more powerful than video cards which cost at least $400+ just to get anything which would impact change. Any of you guys with more insight have any thoughts on the matter?
The new CPU is trippy. Had an i7-3770K which was a great performer and this has a noticeable punch difference.
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2 Replies
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That is an excellent question that’s not quite as easy to answer. NLE Software is VERY complex. I’ve approached Magix with similar questions, on which hardware they recommend and they don’t even know.
I have a build that cuts video quite well, but timeline playback still isn’t perfect. I custom made the machine myself. I easily have $5,000 into the computer now. I’ve been wanting to get a second graphics card to link up to my existing and complete my ultimate build and discovered they are sky high in price yet. However…
Here’s the one tannate of software. It ALWAYS lags hardware design. My system was built off old less expensive hardware. At the time was hardware that came out two and three years prior. Last generation stuff. Magix and Vegas are JUST NOW catching up with those hardware designs from 5 to 10 years ago. No joke.
I have bought nearly every vegas update in last 10 years. With each update my NLE runs faster and faster. For instance they just started supporting H.265 playback. Before it was software decoding and sucked. Now I can actually edit h.265 and play it back in the timeline without issue. I bought no hardware to do that, just updated vegas.
Long story short, I’d wait till the cards get back down in price. I’d use what I have, can you share the chipset? I’ll compare I think mine is a Radeon RX480 w/ 8GB video memory if I recall correctly. If you want to see what I built for my system you can see it here:
https://creativecow.net/forums/thread/ultimate-vegas-machineae/
It’s likely Magix doesn’t even fully support what you have in your system as of yet. Especially if it’s a newer machine.
Another thing you can do and will want to do is open your task manager. Do a timeline playback as well as render and see how it effects your system performance. I think there’s a GPU monitor in there too. It will immediately show you if Vegas is even utilizing your GPU.
You can determine what your bottleneck is there. Typically it’s the CPU as the easy / quick way to write software is to write it with the CPU, not the GPU.
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Thanks so much for your detailed reply. I’ll have to look and monitor what’s happening, especially since I just upgraded to Vegas 18 and got many of the BorisFX that were part of the full bundle that I wanted. I’ll be working with it this week.
Given the pricing and performance, I nailed down the MSI z590 Pro Wifi comet lake motherboard with an Intel i7-11700 3.6GHz for $520, which is not so out of line with what i used to spend on bare basic upgrades. I kept the Asus RX560-02g card in (I think it only has GB RAM but can handle 3 monitors and up to 4K – I’m only using two) even though it’s probably no better than the onboard video because I’d rather dedicate the processor and all the RAM to what it does best. I got 32GB of GSkill memory and 1TB of M.2 with a 500GB SSD for video use for Vegas and another 240GB SSD external for source video to process.
I decided to opt away from the video card, as pricing is absurd. As I already had SSDs it also made the upgrade much less painful. Just mobo, CPU, Fan, PSU, case. I’ve gone extensive cooling and great so far.
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