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Upgrading video card to improve preview movie on Sony Vegas? Will this work?
I own a Q6600 processor, GT 8500 (512mb) nvidia graphics card, 3gb of ram, and a 7200rpm hardrive. Vista 32.
Right now my computer can edit HD movies with sony vegas, but to watch the movies in Sony Vegas I have to lower the preview quality (before I even edit the video file) just to watch the preview video with out it lagging. After adding on some effects I have to lower the quality all the way to draft just to watch it.
When I try editing the maximum settings at 1080 60i on a clip of video that has a lot of color correction to it the Task Manager shows that I am using my 4 processors and I have 55-59% CPU usage and 1.58GB Memory usage. In comparison when rendering the video it uses 97-99% CPU usage.
So my question is will a better graphics card allow me to view the preview of HD movies at the best quality? Or is this an issue of processor speed?
P.S. I don’t have the money to upgrade my computer, just a graphics card or something similar in value.
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2 Replies
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Short answer is: No.
Generally, the fancy “professional” graphics cards do only three things: (1) they boost 3D rendering performance across the board (in apps that support the card specifically or the 3D standard in general), (2) they offload a specific type of rendering to the card (e.g., MPEG-2 or H.264 – again, in apps that support the card) and (3) they provided very narrowly defined advantages to specific feature (e.g., a small set of transition effects or other specific function – again, in special apps with the special card). So, if there isn’t a very specific function that you want to accelerate and a card in Nov. 2009 that matches the software from the same period, you won’t see any performance advantages across the board.
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“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”
— Robert Altman
https://videopia.org -
I believe Vegas is a main CPU only when it comes to your video preview.
File format does make a difference though. What kind of file and what’s the speed of your computer?
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