Best video card?

[Michael Szalapski]

There have been many posts ever since the beginning of this website on video cards for use with AE.

The advice boils down to this: Get lots of processing power and lots of RAM. Video card has no effect in terms of rendering time.

In this thread Adobe’s own Adolfo Rozenfeld says

OpenGL rendering is not meant to be a means for producing high-quality end results in rendered files from AE. So graphics cards, no matter how powerful, will not affect Render Queue renders at all. The exception is enabling the OpenGL renderer, but this will give you different results (more draft-like) than the software renderer.

Nvidia has a model tailored for the CS4 applications (Quadro CX).
This and other high-end models should give you a very nice experience in terms of having smooth interactions when adjusting parameters and dragging layers around, but they will not improve rendering speeds. This card will also provide advantages when using OpenGL accelerated features in Photoshop CS4 (3D, zooming/panning, etc), and I understand it also provides acceleration for some features in Premiere Pro. Overall, you can expect the drivers for this card to work nicely with CS4 apps, which is of course a good thing. So, it could be a good investment – just don’t expect it to speed up AE renders.

Finally, bear in mind that with a configuration like you have now, you probably are getting render times 10-20x faster than you would have had a couple of years ago. This is nothing short of amazing, and it’s not only a consequence of modern hardware, but also of the multi-processing feature in AE.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Jason Brown]

Great information…thanks for the link.

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

To take maximum advantage of multiprocessing in AE, make sure you get at least 2 GB for each core in your machine. So, for an octo-core machine you’d have to consider getting 16 GB of RAM. Otherwise you may need to tell AE to use fewer cores for rendering.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe