i occasionally do quite a bit of rendering and editing on one of my computers (yes i have multiple, helps distribute the load :P ) and with the video editing and rendering i was wondering if the video card u used really affected how well your computer runs video editing software and if it helps with render times, i know for sure that the proffesional card can run programs like 3d model building, etc type programs a lot better than consumer cards, becuase they use different algorithms
the main question would be, if i get a proffesional video card would my editing become smoother and would my render times increase?
I've noticed this, and I can garuantee you on this, when you render, it generally falls to the CPU to the do load and brunt of the calculations. Working wise, you'd see a bit more performance with a workstation card, like a Quadro or Firepro. With AFX though (I'm assuming that's what you are using), it uses CUDA, so any nvidia card will work, as NANO stated, and the reason we picked a 680 for my build.
The reason I say the CPU does the brunt, is that when you are rendering, it's numbers, just tons and tons of numbers, better to have a faster CPU. I say this because I ran a small renderfarm, all headless Linux machines, copied an install of Maya 2012, they still ran faster than the single machines of course.
tl;dr version: go for a faster CPU and get a desktop nvidia card :)
cpu wise i have a fx-6100 and im kinda bottlenecked their upgrade wise till the next bulldozer series comes out, video card wise i am running a radeon 6850, but the nvidia geforce 680 has been looking tempting
And another thing about those workstation cards. The drivers for them doesn't release on a monthly basis, IIRC. They're like released almost frequently for extreme stability, which is what producers want. You would also wonder why there's alot of memory on these cards than your typical consumer level cards. Again, this is an advantage for video producers, which you can think of the purposes yourself.
The GPUs, while they're released under the same architecture, they're acutally different. These ones have alot more shader cores (I think) than the standard GPUs. And as for thermal, these cards are clocked lesser (GPU, memory), again, for stability purposes. You don't want to end up with hot air comming out of the blower, nor persistent overheating.
I think that should add up why workstation cards are more expensive than your normal hobby cards.
interesting, the main thing that i heard that seperated them is that consumer and pro cards were designed to do different algorithms, and that most pro cards are desgined to handle a lot more monitors, like some can do 6 to a card easily
Yes there are differnet types of workstation cards. There's some that are designed to handle multiple displays (like up to 6) and the most are your professional cards used for AutoCAD, video editing, Photoshop, etc.