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Geforce 8600GT Card and SLI for faster previews/renders?
I’m upgrading my whole system hoping to speed up reviews and final renders. I’m switching to an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, XP machine. The choice now is the video card. Nearly all the benchmarks I see about video cards concern playing video games; there are very few benchmarks related to motion graphics and effects work.
I’m looking to buy the XFX GeForce 8600GT card. Adobe says After Effects CS3 and Premiere CS3 support this card, which is great, but I haven’t been able to find anything about any rendering benefits if you have two video cards running in SLI mode. Does anyone know anything about this? For the price ($109), I’m wondering if two of these cards can give performace similar to single, more expensive ones. (I’m upgrading from a P4 3GHz, GeForce FX 5900XT, so anything at this point will be impressive.) Thanks much!
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5 Replies
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After Effects doesn’t really lean on your GFX card unless you have one that fully supports OpenGL, such as the Quadro line of cards. The gForce cards are all consumer grade and, while great cards, don’t support the features of the “pro” models. SLI won’t impact much if anything since the cards themselves lack the feature support to be useful.
If you want to put some money into render/preview speed increases, get as much RAM as you can and a 64-bit OS. The new multiprocessing features of AE rely on your machine having 2GB (or more) of RAM per cpu core. In fact, it won’t even LET you enable multiprocessor previews unless your system meets certain RAM requirements. If you have a quad processor machine, you could have 8GB RAM and AE will use all four cores to render/preview. Without that, your Quad core machine is not really being utilized by AE at all.
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you mean that my 4Gb of RAM is worthless because it is not 8Gb?
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Having 4GB of RAM is not worthless, just that AE will only use 2 of your CPU cores with that much RAM. It will certainly be a big performance improvement over AE 7.0, but just not taking full advantage of having a quad-core machine.
A slight workaround is to lower AE’s RAM cache settings (the default is 60%) to free up RAM until it uses more cores. You can check this by toggling back and forth between the RAM Settings and Multiprocessor window in Preferences, lowering the Cache setting in increments until it announces more cores will be used.
Only problem is, since you will have to lower it to use only like 30-40% of your RAM, general interactivity in AE will suffer, and while the renders will use more cores each will have less RAM to work with and the benefits are probably not amazing.
ALSO, as I mentioned in my first post, you must have a 64-bit OS to really get the benefits of AE CS3 since Windows 32-bit only recognizes a maximum of 3GB RAM, and even then only by tweaking your ini file to recognize that much (the default is 2GB).
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“SLI” is marketing BS.
Based only on my own experience with four SLI’d cards in an Intel Mac, I think it was inaccurately promoted when it was introduced and was quickly shown to be useless. There is certainly not a bit of image processing improvement in anything I do on my Mac; although I enjoy being able to tell people I could hook up eight displays if I wanted to.bogiesan
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[bogiesan] “SLI’d cards in an Intel Mac”
not that i think there is enough benefit to opengl rendering in ae, but have you tried removing two of them to allow upping the bus speed to just two slots?
you’d still be able to connect 4 monitors to your mac 🙂
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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