Does Video Card Matter For Exporting

I have an AMD Radeon HD 5870 in my pc right now with the ability to have 2 of those cards connected with crossfire. I am also looking into upgrading to a new video card as well. I don't play games so the only use for the video card would be virb edit. During export, virb edit uses 0% of my video card and cpu runs near 100% and I am running SSD so I'm getting really good disk access times. That being said, I don't see the point in upgrading video card if it doesn't get utilized. Does anyone using an Nvidia card see virb edit utilize it? I export full videos of my rides, so about 2-4 hrs a video, and each video takes twice as long to export than it took me to ride. It seems since 4.2.3 the export takes a lot longer. I am using FFMpeg as both decoder and encoder. Have run the system test to test the different encoder options on my pc and it says FFMpeg is fastest.

So I guess in summation, I'm interested to know what video cards everyone is running and do they actually get utilized by virb edit?

0 Former Member over 8 years ago

@aramezan
I'm glad to hear it sped things up. I'm not overly surprised that you are not seeing high GPU utilization. As I understand it, the 1070, along with a lot of other recent cards, have ASICs on board that do video encoding (the most expensive part of export). These ASICs don't share resources with the rest of the GPU, so it wouldn't show up in any kind of GPU utilization metric. This feature was added so people could play video games, capture the screen, encode it, and stream it on services like Twitch without it affecting the performance of the game itself. Some parts of video processing cannot be parallelized well. When decoding h264 for example, the current frame often depends on data from the previous one, so you can't do them both at once. Also keep in mind that the 1070 is a beast of a video card, so the remaining operations we do aren't going to tax it too much.

We'll get that GMetrix issue resolved asap, we know that's really hurting a lot of people.