Premiere Pro 2.0 graphics card to help reduce rendering time ?

[Mike Velte]

1. The graphics cards can improve real time previews, but dont help with rendering.
2. No

[Vlad Kosulin]

1. I am not sure about $200 card. Try the GeForce 7800 or 7900 series one. NVIDIA utilizes unified driver architecture for all their cards; this means their GeForce card drivers are as hard tuned for NLE as professional ones. Do not buy ATI, their consumer card drivers are hard tuned for games only, not good for NLE; their professional card drivers are good for NLE, but not for games, and are expensive. Premiere has 3 levels of graphics card utilization (Playback Settings/Desktop Display Mode in the Program Monitor):
– Compatible does not use GPU;
– Standard uses CPU for rendering, and GPU – for display with Direct3D operations (not much); this is the setting to use with $200 card;
– Accelerated GPU Effects utilizes GPU for both rendering and to display; if you see some real time video glitches in this mode, switch to the Standard one.

2. If your CPU is underutilized, the bottleneck is somewhere else: slow RAM controller can limit the data troughput, small RAM size requires too frequent pagefile operations, slow harddrive slows down IO operations. By the way, if the Display Mode set to Standard or to Accelerated, try to set it to Compatible; may be, your GPU is too slow and slows down the phole system.

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Vlad