[SOLVED] CUDA vs VRAM - what's more important for video editing?

W.D. Stevens

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Sep 17, 2020
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Hi all,

So I'm building a new video editing rig which will be nice as I've been mostly using laptops up until now and I'm trying to decide which GPU I ought to go for. Obviously I don't need anything super high-end as I'm topping out at 4K in Davinci Resolve and Premiere/After Effects so my plan was to go with the 3060 Ti when it comes out in a couple of weeks (and the card's design provided I can get a Founder's Edition suits my build rather nicely which is a nice bonus). The recommended spec from Blackmagic is 8GB of VRAM for a 4K timeline so that aligned well but then the leaks that the 3060 in Januaryish may have 12GB for cheaper have me thinking that maybe that would be a better investment. It does come with the tradeoff of a narrower memory bus and fewer CUDA cores so I don't know whether having more VRAM than I potentially need is worth the tradeoff.
 
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Yeah, sorry about that. You're right and it IS counter intuitive on the 3060 vs 3060 ti VRAM. I think the extra VRAM outweighs any CUDA or GPU performance considerations for THIS particular argument as well, although, we've seen before in the past where additional VRAM didn't make sense because the GPU wasn't able to fully leverage it's presence. That was strictly gaming related though, this might probably be different and back then 4k was a VERY niche consideration, and very few people were concerned with anything related to anything over 1440p back then whether for gaming or anything else.

It's a lot of money, and they're not available now anyhow, so I think you're right by waiting to see reviews after the cards actually make it to...
Honestly, your CPU is going to be FAR more important than any of these other considerations. Certainly GPU performance and VRAM matter, because hardware acceleration is relevant, but I'd definitely worry more about that in general. Any of these cards are grossly more capable than just about anything that existed before them, and what existed before them was able to generally get the job done well enough, so newer cards should be even more capable in pretty much every regard.

What applications do you plan to be using and what does the rest of the build outline look like?
 

W.D. Stevens

Prominent
Sep 17, 2020
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535
Oh, yeah. I've well got that covered. I managed to snag myself a 5900X so I should be set on the CPU front for a while. I know the older cards would certainly do things just fine and any of the new stuff would be more than capable but given the price difference between the 3060 and 3060 Ti probably won't be a massive one, I wondered which spec would be more suited. I'll be using Davinci Resolve, Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop. I'm also going to try setting up a Mac OS VM but I've heard there are issues with graphics there so I won't be too upset if I can't get that to work. I will possibly be doing some very light gaming but nothing that either of these cards couldn't handle.

This is the current spec list for the system (this is in Australian currency, by the way):

PCPartPicker Part List: https://au.pcpartpicker.com/list/M3dfdD

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 3.7 GHz 12-Core Processor (Purchased For $859.00)
CPU Cooler: ARCTIC LIQUID FREEZER II 360 56.3 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler (Purchased For $219.00)
Motherboard: ASRock B550 Steel Legend ATX AM4 Motherboard (Purchased For $249.00)
Memory: Crucial Ballistix RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 Memory ($280.52)
Storage: Samsung 860 Evo 500 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (Purchased For $77.00)
Storage: Kingston A2000 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive ($139.00 @ Centre Com)
Storage: 3xSeagate Barracuda Compute 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (Purchased For $88.00ea)
PSU: Bitfenix Whisper M 750W (Purchased For $129.00)
Case: Lian Li LANCOOL II-X ATX Mid Tower Case (Purchased For $205.00)

Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-11-20 15:23 AEDT+1100
 
Davinci Resolve will absolutely benefit from high end graphics card performance. Especially in the area of playback and rendering. Minimum VRAM recommended for 4K timeline is 8GB according to Puget systems. They do extensive testing on a variety of applications and if you are not familiar with Puget systems you should familiarize yourself with them because they are one of the preeminent sources of hard data when it comes to hardware recommendations on a variety of popular productivity and workstation applications.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/recomm...-DaVinci-Resolve-187/Hardware-Recommendations


Premiere, after effects and photoshop are getting better about using graphics hardware acceleration and also multithreaded CPU resources, but are still somewhat single core CPU centric, at least last time I checked. Newer versions may have introduced significant improvements in this area. If the 3060 ti is supposedly going to come with 12GB then that might definitely be worth waiting for, especially since it seems that there isn't going to be much if any availability on any of these cards in the immediate future anyhow.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/7633...months-before-geforce-rtx-30-stock/index.html
 

W.D. Stevens

Prominent
Sep 17, 2020
27
1
535
Premiere, after effects and photoshop are getting better about using graphics hardware acceleration and also multithreaded CPU resources, but are still somewhat single core CPU centric, at least last time I checked. Newer versions may have introduced significant improvements in this area. If the 3060 ti is supposedly going to come with 12GB then that might definitely be worth waiting for, especially since it seems that there isn't going to be much if any availability on any of these cards in the immediate future anyhow.
The thing is, it's actually the 3060 plain that's rumoured to have 12GB which is why this is a confusing question. It's worse in one area and better in another. I've looked at the Puget article before and it's very helpful. It's actually where I got my 8GB VRAM recommendation from. And I certainly wasn't about to step up to any of the cards with more VRAM as that's just too far out of my budget. I've heard that the 3060 Ti is supposed to match/beat the 2080 Super while the 3060 blank could match/beat the 2070 Super but with more VRAM if the rumours are true.

What I'm currently thinking is trying to get a 3060 Ti FE at launch in a couple of weeks and then I can actually at least use my system for a little while. If I don't get one, then I can try for the 3060 blank in January. Or if I do get one, I might be able to wait and pick up a 3060 if the reviews say it outweighs the Ti due to the extra VRAM.
 
Yeah, sorry about that. You're right and it IS counter intuitive on the 3060 vs 3060 ti VRAM. I think the extra VRAM outweighs any CUDA or GPU performance considerations for THIS particular argument as well, although, we've seen before in the past where additional VRAM didn't make sense because the GPU wasn't able to fully leverage it's presence. That was strictly gaming related though, this might probably be different and back then 4k was a VERY niche consideration, and very few people were concerned with anything related to anything over 1440p back then whether for gaming or anything else.

It's a lot of money, and they're not available now anyhow, so I think you're right by waiting to see reviews after the cards actually make it to reviewers, besides which considering the apparently poor Samsung 8nm yields we may be a long way out on getting any actual cards into the hands of consumers in numbers large enough to even matter anyhow.

The rest of the system looks pretty good.
 
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