Does Video Card Matter For Exporting

A newer video card will decrease export time and increase performance when editing. VIRB Edit 5.1 takes advantage of video card technologies, as long as you have a video card that meets the minimum or recommended video card you should see better performance. Your current video card does not meet the minimum system requirements for VIRB Edit 5.1, so I would expect export to be slow.


Minimum System Requirements
Operating System (PC): Windows 7 SP1 (64-bit) + Platform Update
Processor: 2.5GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 or AMD FX
Memory (RAM): 8 GB
Graphics Card: Intel HD 5000 / nVidia GeForce GT 630 / AMD Radeon 8570
Graphics Memory (RAM): 2 GB
Display Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Storage: 20 GB Free Space
Recommended Configuration
Operating System (PC): Windows 10 (64-bit)
Processor: 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 or AMD FX
Memory (RAM): 16 GB
Graphics Card: Intel HD 530 / nVidia GeForce GTX 960 / AMD Radeon R9 380
Graphics Memory (RAM): 4 GB
Display Resolution: 3840 x 2160
Storage: 20 GB Free Space

Thanks for your reply. Just a few questions before I fork out for a new card.

1. What card are you using and do you actually see virb edit utilize the gpu and graphic memory?
2. Do you think those benefits are only in 5.1? I'm having to use 4.3.2 because 5.1 has so many issues.

I've used AMD for a long time. Thinking of switching to Nvidia as it seems they put more into CUDA and offload gpu processing. Just wanting to know that people with the good cards can see the benefits.

Where do I find out what Video Card my system has?

@aramezan
Your graphics card matters a lot, especially in VirbEdit 5.1, where we've offloaded a lot more on to the GPU than in previous versions. We acquired a PC with an Nvidia GTX 1060 for application testing purposes during 5.1 development. It can export 1 hour of 4K 30fps video in about 27 minutes, and 1 hour of 1080p 30fps video in about 9 minutes. We offload as much to your GPU as it can support, and recent generation video cards are extremely impressive. Our testing has shown that recent Nvidia GPUs outperform comparable AMD ones in terms of video export speed. I also believe that AMD did not add on chip encoding until 2015 (and encoding is where a lot of your export time comes from). The Nvidia machine has an older/slower processor than our AMD test machine, but still dominates it in performance, so your CPU matters less than your GPU does.

@mmi16
There are a variety of ways. One of the easiest is to run dxdiag (which you can do by typing "dxdiag" into the start menu). Under the "display 1" tab, there should be a ton of information about your video card, including its manufacturer and model number. Since you have consistently had problems with VirbEdit in the past, once you find what graphics card you have, can you post it here? The driver date would also be an interesting data point.

Thank you Purdington. Exactly the information I was looking for.

@aramezan

@mmi16
There are a variety of ways. One of the easiest is to run dxdiag (which you can do by typing "dxdiag" into the start menu). Under the "display 1" tab, there should be a ton of information about your video card, including its manufacturer and model number. Since you have consistently had problems with VirbEdit in the past, once you find what graphics card you have, can you post it here? The driver date would also be an interesting data point.

On a Dell Inspiron 3847 purchased in April 2014.

@mmi16
I notice that the Dell Inspiron 3847 comes with Windows 8.1. Are you using windows 8 or did you upgrade to Windows 10?

@mmi16
I notice that the Dell Inspiron 3847 comes with Windows 8.1. Are you using windows 8 or did you upgrade to Windows 10?

Upgraded to W10 and now have the Creators upgrade on the machine.

@aramezan
Your graphics card matters a lot, especially in VirbEdit 5.1, where we've offloaded a lot more on to the GPU than in previous versions. We acquired a PC with an Nvidia GTX 1060 for application testing purposes during 5.1 development. It can export 1 hour of 4K 30fps video in about 27 minutes, and 1 hour of 1080p 30fps video in about 9 minutes. We offload as much to your GPU as it can support, and recent generation video cards are extremely impressive. Our testing has shown that recent Nvidia GPUs outperform comparable AMD ones in terms of video export speed. I also believe that AMD did not add on chip encoding until 2015 (and encoding is where a lot of your export time comes from). The Nvidia machine has an older/slower processor than our AMD test machine, but still dominates it in performance, so your CPU matters less than your GPU does.

Purdington, I have some updates to this topic. I have upgraded my AMD Radeon 5870 graphics card to an Nvidia GTX 1070. I created a 10 minute test video to do some comparison testing before and after the upgrade. The 10 minute video is a multi-cam video consisting of a 1080p@30fps front camera source and a 720p@30fps rear camera source. I am exporting 1080p@30fps with medium quality for this test. Following are my results:

Test #1:
Graphics Card: Radeon 5870
VirbEdit Version: 4.3.2
Encoder/Decoder: FFmpeg/FFmpeg
Cpu Utilization: 100%
Gpu Utilization: 0%
Total Time: 19 minutes

Test #2:
Graphics Card: Nvidia 1070
VirbEdit Version: 4.3.2
Encoder/Decoder: FFmpeg/FFmpeg
Cpu Utilization: 100%
Gpu Utilization: fluctuated between 0-30%. probably averaged 10%
Total Time: 19 minutes 40 seconds

Test #3:
Graphics Card: Nvidia 1070
VirbEdit Version: 5.1
Encoder/Decoder: FFmpeg/DXVA (this is combination virb edit recommended for my system)
Cpu Utilization: 20%
Gpu Utilization: 17%
Total Time: 3 minutes 5 seconds

Test #4:
Graphics Card: Nvidia 1070
VirbEdit Version: 5.1
Encoder/Decoder: FFmpeg/FFmpeg
Cpu Utilization: 60%
Gpu Utilization: 23%
Total Time: 3 minutes 39 seconds

So long story short, looks like the upgrade of the video card and going to 5.1 cut my export time to ~15%, which is huge and I am happy about and hopeful that these results will correlate to my normal videos. Unfortunately, I still have to roll back to 4.3.2 for the time being because of the gmetrix issue that has been discussed throughout these forums. Even more unfortunate that my new video card was slower than old card with 4.3.2 lol. I would have also hoped that the export used more than 17% of my gpu, but I understand this is the first release that Garmin is offloading more to gpu and I'm willing to be patient. Thanks again for the help.