Which is more important, graphics card or processor?

[John Rofrano]

CPU is far more important because GPU acceleration with Vegas pro has been “hit and miss” at best with some even making it slower.

Definitely get the Core i7. A Core i5 is not optimal for content creation with Vegas Pro. It likes fast cores and multiple threads.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Sean Mcnally]

Thanks for the clarification! So does the graphics card make any difference at all then? For example, would I see a difference in performance with a more expensive laptop that has both an i7 processor and dedicated graphics?

[Mark Barton]

A graphics card will still make a difference, but your original questions was which one is more important. You will get more out of the better CPU than spending less for a CPU and getting a better graphics card. If you can get a better graphics card without compromising the CPU with your budget then you will get some better performance, but it may not be all that it is hyped up to be. I have an Nvidia GTX 570 and now a GTX 970. The 970 helps my preview significantly, but not my rendering (encoding) phase of the workflow. It would be great if Vegas could use one card for preview and the other for rendering, but I have to restart Vegas to select a different card. JR mentioned in another post that having the faster preview has its benefits to speeding up the editing workflow. I can always find something else to do while the render/encoding process is taking place, so for me whether that takes 1h or 2h does not really impact me. I don’t typically have tight deadlines as a hobbyist.

[Aaron Star]

Processor. No portable GPU will ever come close to desktop GPU compute performance, mainly due to power draw and heat reasons. Do not expect desktop i7 performance from that yoga, but you can edit reasonably well single screen on an i5 with 8GB of ram.

[Dave Osbun]

The CPU is BY FAR more important. Also, keep it Intel. AMD makes fine processors but NOT for video editing workstations.

Also keep in mind that there’s many factors that contribute to the performance of a video editing system. With many people moving to 4k, they think their system will be fine if they have the latest-and-greatest Intel i7, but there are other items that will be the bottleneck to smooth 4k editing. Specifically, the video drive array. You really need to have a TRUE disk drive array for 4k editing. Even the better consumer SSD drives don’t have the output performance that’s needed.

Dave

[John Rofrano]

I agree with all of the above. You can get by with a Core i5 but a Core i7 will be better. As for 4K… Sony recommends 8-cores and a RAID for 4K editing so people who are still investing in quad-cores with expectations of editing 4K in Vegas Pro may be surprised.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com