Best GTX card for video editing PC build

[bobjackson]

I will be building a new PC within the next month, and I'm trying to decide on a video card. The PC will be used for HD video editing and processing, with high-res photo editing as well. I would like this build to stay relevant for the next 3-5 years, and not need to upgrade the GPU because of the increased demand of advanced editing programs and higher-res video.

The cards I'm looking at are:

EVGA GTX 770 4gb Dual FTW ACX at 1.08 ghz (04G-P4-3776-KR) for $460

ASUS GTX 780 3gb Direct CU at 889 mhz (GTX780-DC2OC-3GD5) for $510

EVGA GTX 780 3gb Superclocked ACX at 967 mhz (03G-P4-2784-KR) for $550

EVGA 780 6gb Superclocked ACX at 967 mhz (06G-P4-3787-KR) for $580

The cost is a slight issue, but seeing as how the difference between the cheapest and most expensive card is only about $100, and the total build will be around $2700, it's not that big of a deal. I'm going with the i7-4930k, with an ASUS X79 Deluxe motherboard with 32gb of RAM.

What I'm wondering is, what difference will a 6gb VRAM make when rendering large, processed HD videos? Also, the 770 card has a higher clock speed over all of the 780 cards, will this make positive difference over the 780 cards? And, does a card being "superclocked" mean it will run hotter, because I plan on using a Phanteks PH-TC14PE_BL 78.1 CFM CPU Cooler, rather than a liquid cooling system.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[BruceUSA]

You need to specify what is your nle. If you are using Vegas pro 11-13, that video cards choice is very poor= useless. System below was built for photos/video editing and is working awesome. But I am using Vegas Pro. I think those cards you listed is better fit for PPro CS5+.

 

[cyberfish]

Video and photo editing don't really require a video card. They don't really take advantage of it, and you can do it just as well on integrated graphics.

The only possible way for video editors to use a GPU is if they use the hardware encoder for video encoding, but hardware encoders aren't on the same level as software encoders yet (they are just fast), so most people still encode using the CPU.

 

[BruceUSA]

Obvisously, you have never done any serious video editing and you have never experienced gpu acceleration encoding vs cpu only is like day and night my friend. Beside, the gpu encoding, there is also other benefit like time line performance is better with gpu acceleration.

 

[cyberfish]

Obvisously, you have never done any serious video editing and you have never experienced gpu acceleration encoding vs cpu only is like day and night my friend. Beside, the gpu encoding, there is also other benefit like time line performance is better with gpu acceleration.

I worked at NVIDIA and was involved in the launch of Keplers . Yes, I have played with video encoding quite a bit, before the cards were even released.

GPU encoding is much faster but the quality is still not comparable to software encoding.

For timeline, GPUs do have hardware acceleration, but so does any newer integrated graphics. Hardware decoding circuitry is also the same on all GPUs of the same generation, so a 730 will perform the same as a 780.

 

[BruceUSA]

I hear that before, gpu rendering does not have the same quality like cpu only. Yes I have seen people post their gpu rendering sample and it look bad in some case. But on my end, I could not see the different as far as rendering quality go. Don't believe me? wanna do some video quality inspection? I bet you could not tell oe see the difference if I send you 2 sample. 1 sample is for cpu rendering only and 1 for gpu rendering.

Keplers cards do not work well with Vegas Pro. Vegas Pro work really well with AMD OpenGL and work best with Nivida 5xxx series cards.

My question to you is? have you play with the newer cards and vegas Pro? Or specifically what NLE have you play with in regard to GPU acceleration.

 

[cyberfish]

I hear that before, gpu rendering does not have the same quality like cpu only. Yes I have seen people post their gpu rendering sample and it look bad in some case. But on my end, I could not see the different as far as rendering quality go. Don't believe me? wanna do some video quality inspection? I bet you could not tell oe see the difference if I send you 2 sample. 1 sample is for cpu rendering only and 1 for gpu rendering.

Keplers cards do not work well with Vegas Pro. Vegas Pro work really well with AMD OpenGL and work best with Nivida 5xxx series cards.

My question to you is? have you play with the newer cards and vegas Pro? Or specifically what NLE have you play with in regard to GPU acceleration.

Ah I see we are talking about totally different things.

I am talking about GPU hardware encoders (introduced in Keplers for NVIDIA, and I believe earlier this year for AMD, and earlier last year for Intel). You are talking about GPU software encoders in CUDA or OpenCL (I am assuming you meant OpenCL, since OpenGL is something entirely different).

GPU software encoders are better than GPU hardware encoders, but also a lot slower.

From my quick Googling, it looks like the problem with Keplers and Vegas Pro is there is a bug in the MainConcept encoder that makes it much slower with Keplers. My guess is a patch will fix that and Keplers will be much faster than Fermi, since Kepler cards have much much higher CUDA performance.

No, I have not done any video editing recently. But I work for a camera company and we work with H.264 all day, so I do have pretty current knowledge on all the different encoders, and how H.264 works under the hood.

 

[bobjackson]

You need to specify what is your nle. If you are using Vegas pro 11-13, that video cards choice is very poor= useless. System below was built for photos/video editing and is working awesome. But I am using Vegas Pro. I think those cards you listed is better fit for PPro CS5+.

I will mainly be using Premiere Pro CS6 and Davinci Resolve, which as I've read, should really benefit from a card with more CUDA cores.

I'll also be using Photoshop CS6, but it'll pretty much just be the RAM helping at that point.

 

[BruceUSA]

Bobjackson,

Go with GTX780 3gb or 6gb of your choice. Can't go wrong on either one. If you are going to be editing 4k down the road and you are going to have multiple 4k monitors. 6gb card is a better choice.

 

[manu2b]

CS6 takes advantage of open CL (and AMD )...

 

[bobjackson]

I will likely be getting into 4k video before I get a new PC (or add anything substantial to this build), so I am leaning towards the 780 6gb.

If I wait, and end up going with a new Intel processor like the 5930k and an X99 motherboard, will existing GTX 780s work on that setup? Or will there be new GPU released specifically for that new hardware?

 

[manu2b]

CPU's/Chipsets and GPU's are independant. You can run any GPU on any CPU/Chipset platform as soon as the architecture is recent enough (PCIe 2.0/3.0).