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Hey gang,

I'm looking to get a mid-range video card for a build that I'm doing for a friend. He is an non-serious gamer (FPS primarily) but also does occasional photo/video editing. My question is whether it makes sense for him to go with a radeon card over a geforce at the same price point given that the radeons have much better compute performance? Will he see the benefits of the compute performance with his photo/video editing needs? Is compute performance going to matter 2-3 years down the road more so than it does now? He plans to keep the computer for 5+ years.

Many thanks!

Photoshop use? nVidia cards (even an older fermies) generally edge out the AMD cards even with Adobe going to openCL acceleration.

Yeah, photoshop 2D effects tend to work pretty well on both AMD and Nvidia hardware, and beyond a very low threshold it doesn't make any difference how powerful the GPU is. I seem to remember seeing somewhere that OpenGL is 5x faster than letting the CPU handle it, but that an HD7970 is no faster than something cheap - I think it was an old HD4650.

As for video editing, ignore OpenCL for the moment. Any Intel with QuickSync is a much faster option.

In the future, if OpenCL is important, then even $150 cards will likely be much faster than what we have today.

If you're intent on doing any 3D work, that area is for now, in practice if not in theory, Nvidia-only.

The benchmark results suggest that anything above a mid-range card doesn't make a difference in Photoshop CS6's OpenCL performance. A $100 Radeon HD7770 or $125 GeForce GTX650Ti is sufficient for this task and for moderate gaming.
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articl ... ation-161/

morphine wrote:

If you're intent on doing any 3D work, that area is for now, in practice if not in theory, Nvidia-only.

Are you talking about nvidia 3Dvision rather than 3D applications like 3DSMax/Rhino/Maya etc?

We find that AMD's performance and stability in those applications (on consumer cards - we have several 7850s and 7970s) is better than the performance and stability of the 560Ti cards that we have in the Conference PCs and it was better than a GTX680 that we borrowed before making the decision to stack the renderfarm with 7970s.

Last time I had checked, was over a year ago - I suppose things may have changed in the meantime.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

The benchmark results suggest that anything above a mid-range card doesn't make a difference in Photoshop CS6's OpenCL performance. A $100 Radeon HD7770 or $125 GeForce GTX650Ti is sufficient for this task and for moderate gaming.
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articl ... ation-161/

Depends on the games he is playing. FPS games demand the most from the system. I would suggest a GTX650ti Boost or Radeon equivalent would do well for most FPS games.

Chrispy_ wrote:

morphine wrote:

If you're intent on doing any 3D work, that area is for now, in practice if not in theory, Nvidia-only.

Are you talking about nvidia 3Dvision rather than 3D applications like 3DSMax/Rhino/Maya etc?

We find that AMD's performance and stability in those applications (on consumer cards - we have several 7850s and 7970s) is better than the performance and stability of the 560Ti cards that we have in the Conference PCs and it was better than a GTX680 that we borrowed before making the decision to stack the renderfarm with 7970s.

I think he means the integrated Nvidia 3d engine in CS6 AE which is still only accelerated using CUDA processing (at least last time I checked) . Once you turn up the ray instances, or whatever they call them, it drags your render down incredibly unless you can enable CUDA acceleration.

CS7 AE may be a different story because of the 4d lite they've integrated but I haven't seen anything specific about support for OpenCL in regards to this feature and the old engine will still have to be included to provide backwards compatibility.

Ultimately it comes down to your workload and in general CPU+RAM is probably a sounder investment most of the time. Its still largely useless in CS6 PP and AE unless your task is either fairly specific (as in the Nvidia Optiplex stuff) or ultimately rendered rather efficiently on the CPU. In general, if I was buying right now and intending to use Adobe CC (or whatever they've called Master Collection) I would get a mid range Nvidia card and if I wanted to splurge maybe one with larger than stock ram. Who knows? Maybe down the line they'll figure out how to make full use of it.

It all comes down to what task you intend to throw at it, YMMV.