Future ready gaming/editing rig: 2 x RX 480's, or GTX 1070? ($380-400 GPU budget)

[ragnarok94]

vote here: http://www.strawpoll.me/10396136

Im trying to plan a build within the next year for gaming as well as video editing
I use Adobe Premiere Pro & encoder, which utilizes Mercury GPU acceleration, and want to be able to do 4K editing.
Normally, CUDA cores gives Nvidia the advantage, and before these cards were announced I had planned on getting a 970.

However, the new AMD Polaris card entering at $200 would make it possible for me to run 2 way crossfire for the same budget. Would this be enough reason to choose over the 1070?

Please vote and leave a reason here.

other notes: My planned build is haswell-based $1000 mid-range, microATX/ATX budget build, probably running dual monitors and windows 7 Pro/Ultimate x64 bit.

 

[Starcruiser]

It's impossible to give a definite answer until the release of both the RX 480 and GTX 1070. The best practice for gaming is usually to get the strongest single card you can afford, since few games actually support SLI/CF, and even less do out of the box.

 

[ragnarok94]

It's impossible to give a definite answer until the release of both the RX 480 and GTX 1070. The best practice for gaming is usually to get the strongest single card you can afford, since few games actually support SLI/CF, and even less do out of the box.

That is really good advice, although, when AMD announced the card they actually ran a pair of them against the 1080 for comparison, using SLI/CF. http://www.roadtovr.com/amd-rx-480-gpu-price-specs-release-date-virtual-reality/

The fact that this is possible, as well as the price, are the only reasons Im even considering that option.
Then again, I still have a while to save up funds.

 

[Starcruiser]

The benchmarks they use for comparing cards has full support for CrossFire.
Not even 20% of games support it.

 

[ragnarok94]

The benchmarks they use for comparing cards has full support for CrossFire.
Not even 20% of games support it.

I understand that point, but what I want to is is if the crossfire works for gpu-supported video editing/rendering

 

[Starcruiser]

That depends on your video program. Most don't, but it's best to ask the support team for each you want to try. Most video editing is CPU focused, although some programs take advantage of CUDA cores in Nvidia GPUs for effects and physics in editing.
Rendering is almost exclusively CPU based, only a few codecs take advantage of GPU processing. That said, rendering doesn't take much power to begin with.

 

[ragnarok94]

That depends on your video program. Most don't, but it's best to ask the support team for each you want to try. Most video editing is CPU focused, although some programs take advantage of CUDA cores in Nvidia GPUs for effects and physics in editing.
Rendering is almost exclusively CPU based, only a few codecs take advantage of GPU processing. That said, rendering doesn't take much power to begin with.

"I use Adobe Premiere Pro & Encoder, which utilizes Mercury GPU acceleration, and want to be able to do 4K editing.
Normally, CUDA cores gives Nvidia the advantage, and before these cards were announced I had planned on getting a 970."

That being said, Im contacting AMD and Nvidia to see what they say about it.

 

[Starcruiser]

For Adobe it's best to get an Nvidia card. The CUDA cores will help you greatly.
And it's still best practice to get the single most powerful card you can afford. Also AMD is known to use unrealistic "benchmarks" for comparisons to Nvidia, but to be fair Nvidia does the same by only using PhysX games for compares.
Power concerns would be an issue if you tried to CF the RX 480. While more power-efficient than previous GPUs, each will use 150 Watts. This will result in a higher power bill as well.

 

[ragnarok94]

Update: Got a response from Nvidia

"Thank you for contacting NVIDIA Customer Care.

This is Kenny, assisting you in regards to your query about the compatibility of GTX 1070 with Mercury Engine.

Mercury Playback Engine is a name for a large number of performance improvements in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and later. Those improvements include the following:
•64-bit application
•multithreaded application
•processing of some things using CUDA (and OpenCL in Premiere Pro CS6)

GTX 1070 is the latest Pascal architecture based GPU from NVIDIA and it supports almost all the latest GPU technologies such as DX12 / H265 codec / Open GL 4.5 / Vulkan API.
So you should be able to get a very good performance for Adobe applications.

NOTE : Though you can get good performance I'd like to inform you that GeForce GPUs are designed for gaming and entertainment purpose and for professional usage Quadro is the ideal choice.

We look forward for your reply to assist you better.
Best regards,
Kenny
NVIDIA Customer Care "

still waiting for AMD to respond

 

[Starcruiser]

Of course they would push the Quadro, it's 3 times the price for lower specs. Don't get one.

 

[mstrgraff]

Another thing to note is that the game that AMD used in the benchmark was Ashes of the Singularity which is a game designed to support Crossfire AND favor AMD cards. I would use the pcgamer and Tomshardware graphics reviews and benchmarks more than I would use the propaganda put out by either NVIDIA or AMD.

 

[ragnarok94]

Update:
okay, so Ive already decided the 1070 is best for my needs
Ill jsut have to wait for prices to fall sine the only thing out right now are founders editions for $450 and every other version isn't available yet

what has changed is my choice of CPU
I've revised my original xeon 1231 plan to instead use the more powerful haswell refresh 1241v3, but also with insight from one of the moderators here, created a version using the skylake xeon 1245v5 & DDR4 ram

haswell (ref): http://pcpartpicker.com/list/VKZzM8

skylake: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/F2rqkT

really since my budget doesn't account for the OS or peripherals, I could probably afford to go skylake and thus be upgrade ready when the time comes.

 

[ragnarok94]

another update:
picked up a zotac GTX 980 AMP! edition GPU from craigslist for $250
got an MSI lga2011 board with a 6-core i7-3930K