If I don't play games, 3D card xp

[dan]

I don't play games, including FPS, on pc although I do watch movies and do basic video editing

And while I know Aero on Vista has benefits running a powerful 3D GPU I run XP.

Is there any benefit to having a powerful muscular 3D card over and above say a fanless GPU less powerful card?

For those who don't play games, is onboard video and/or fanless GPU enough?

[lodestar]

The advantage of using a graphics card from the nVidia range is that they have a technology called CUDA which uses the power of the graphics chip to process video including blu-ray for either editing or playback purposes. It is supported on all post-7xxx nVidia chipsets and the 200 series, so this will include onboard graphics for some desktop and laptop models.

If your PC does not have one of these onboard chipsets then you will not need a particularly powerful (or expensive) separate graphics card to use CUDA and something like a silent 9500 GT would be fine, such as this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814127386.

In terms of video playback, I use ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre which uses CUDA for blu-ray and video playback. For conventional movies it has a SimHD plug-in. This is an upscaling utility which uses CUDA; the results from this have been extremely good when a 1080p TV screen is used.

The advantage of CUDA is that you only need a system with a modest CPU. For example with TotalMedia Theatre you can turn the CUDA off, and use the CPU instead. The effect is immediate; CPU utilisation goes up from about 10% to 80%, and performance is visibly poorer.

Many video editing programs including Badaboom, Super LoiLoScope Mars, Nero Move It, Cyberlink MediaShow Espresso, Pegasys TMPGEnc Xpress, MotionDSP vReveal and Cyberlink PowerDirector 7 Ultra use CUDA. This does not mean that you need CUDA to use them, but CUDA will reduce the load on the CPU and in most circumstances produce a performance boost.

CUDA is installed with the nVidia graphics driver, and any software capable of using it should detect it automatically.

[edh]

For those who don't play games, is onboard video and/or fanless GPU enough?

There are onboard graphics chipsets which will do hardware video decoding which satisfies media playing if that's what you're after. For the majority of systems this isn't much of a concern anyway which is why most computers sold have onboard graphics.

[jessekopelman]

And while I know Aero on Vista has benefits running a powerful 3D GPU

A common misconception, but definitely not true. You would be hard-pressed to find a MB with an IGP that couldn't handle Aero. The 4 year old Intel GMA950, pretty much the bottom of the barrel of what is still used by vendors, handles it fine.

[lm]

Aren't all modern cpus capable of decoding HD video on the cpu anyway?

Not having a gaming GPU means less idle power consumption and less noise.

OP: just forget about it imo.

[dan]

thanks yall

I do have a fanless 7600 nvidia card, and driver, does it run w/cuda and vlc or wm 11?

[K.Murx]

thanks yall

I do have a fanless 7600 nvidia card, and driver, does it run w/cuda and vlc or wm 11?

Forget about CUDA as long as you are not very heavily into video enconding. For playback (whether via VLC or WMP), your GPU is just fine.

[dan]

thanks yall

I do have a fanless 7600 nvidia card, and driver, does it run w/cuda and vlc or wm 11?

Forget about CUDA as long as you are not very heavily into video enconding. For playback (whether via VLC or WMP), your GPU is just fine.

I do re-incode video to ipod mp4 format does a more powerful 3d cuda card help?

[CA_Steve]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html#

[lodestar]

I do re-incode video to ipod mp4 format does a more powerful 3d cuda card help?

You can get some idea of whether or not CUDA would be useful to you from this page http://loilo.tv/product/1/desc/49.

Your existing 7600 does not support CUDA so you would need to replace it with one of the later 8xxx or 9xxx cards, or something from the 200 series. As always with nVidia use the very latest nVidia driver (currently 186.xx) as there are constant updates to CUDA which is installed automatically along with the driver.

The more powerful nVidia cards do have a better CUDA performance, but equally the less powerful cards are not that far behind as in the first example on this page http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?o ... mitstart=4.

[PartEleven]

Aren't all modern cpus capable of decoding HD video on the cpu anyway?

Not having a gaming GPU means less idle power consumption and less noise.

OP: just forget about it imo.

Actually, full 1080P HD video requires quite a beefy cpu. And just how beefy a cpu you need will depend the efficiency of your codec. For example, my e2140 OC'ed to 2.5 ghz could not handle full 1080p video encoded in h.264 using the standard ffdshow decoder. When I switched over to CoreAVC, which is more efficient, I could finally play 1080p content smoothly at the cost of 90-100% cpu usage. The newest version of CoreAVC supports CUDA, which reduced my cpu usage to 30-35%!

[danimal]

I do re-incode video to ipod mp4 format does a more powerful 3d cuda card help?

if you are talking about shooting avchd, and re-encoding that to h.264, you'll need the most cpu that you can afford... avchd is very cpu-intensive to decode, and not many video editing apps can take avantage of cuda.

the nero media player can take advantage of your 7600 video card, and if you editing avchd with nero, it'll work there as well.

but ultimately, you really want a serious quadcore to edit avchd with, if that is what you are doing.

[K.Murx]

I would suggest that as long as you are not doing video editing several times a week, it is probably much more economical to simply leave your PC on overnight instead of rushing out to buy new hardware.

How long do the tasks you want to do take with your current system? And what CPU are you using?

[jessekopelman]

I do re-incode video to ipod mp4 format does a more powerful 3d cuda card help?

There's not yet much software support. None of it free. Factoring in the cost of the software and the cost of the video card, I think you are often better served by a higher end CPU -- especially one with more cores. In a couple of years (especially with DirectX 11, which offers a vendor agnostic path to much of the same functionality) GPU off-loading will be much more widely available. But until then . . .

[dan]

i was thinking of having a ripped from a movie like star wars, and then reincode it to 320:240 300bps to play on a 3 inch screen

[jessekopelman]

i was thinking of having a ripped from a movie like star wars, and then reincode it to 320:240 300bps to play on a 3 inch screen

Yes. One choice for better performance would be NVIDIA GPU plus software like Badaboom. Another choice would be a quadcore CPU. Both would probably end up being about the same price (when considering differential between typical dual-core plus integrated graphics) and have the same performance for this task. Since you don't game, I'd say the quad-core is the better value since it's power is potentially usable with a wider range of other software.

[K.Murx]

i was thinking of having a ripped from a movie like star wars, and then reincode it to 320:240 300bps to play on a 3 inch screen

Well, have you tried doing that with your current system? How long does it take?

[dan]

i was thinking of having a ripped from a movie like star wars, and then reincode it to 320:240 300bps to play on a 3 inch screen

Well, have you tried doing that with your current system? How long does it take?

I usually do it at night and leave it on all night where sometime at night it finishes the task so when I wake up in the morning it's ready to go



I've not upgraded my FANLESS 7600gs gpu

my msi 975 doesn't accept 45nm