feinicks Wrote:

Vegetano1 Wrote:

feinicks Wrote:

Vegetano1 Wrote:i am saving for a geforce 280 its prob the best graphics card there is now,. but i read the 8800gts is still very good,. i have never bought a ATI graphics card,.

GeForce 280 can be considered as the best card for gaming... but for encoding, rendering etc, even the Quadro FX series is excellent...

if you got the $$$'s!! Quadro FX would be great!

whot part does a graphics card do when rendering/encoding,. i thought you needed a good cpu for that,.!>?

a simple example would be Photoshop CS4 which uses GPU rather than CPU to add filters...

essentially, a GPU is a lot more capable of high calculations that are required in encoding/rendering..

Encoding? Nah, it's currently like 100% CPU. Encoding is pretty much just doing DCTs and other kind of transforms (so pretty much pure number crunching). Don't know how good GPUs are on these transforms.

If you include filtering as part of encoding, then there's like 1 avs filter I know of that uses the GPU. (And for that particular filter, my computer actually runs faster using the CPU version than the GPU version, because I've got a much better CPU). Someone should write an anti aliasing filter for the GPU. All the current anti aliasing filters are pretty slow, and that's something that GPUs are supposed to be good at.

The problem is that the GPU is too limited in what it can do. Some video decoders uses the GPU though.