Intel Sandy Bridge integrated graphics

weaver wrote on 12/16/2010, 11:49 AM

I am holding out for a new desktop and the soon to be released Intel Sandy Bridge CPU. Since it has integrated graphics and I've read some positive reviews about it - will it suffice for VMS work? It would be fantastic not to have a supplemental video card. On the other hand I understand it can be advantageous to have a NVIDIA/cuda card.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 12/16/2010, 12:36 PM

Other than the nebulous and minimal CUDA assist with MPEG & AVCHD encoding, the graphics card does precisely nothing for Vegas. If you're not doing CUDA assisted encoding then Vegas runs just as well on an ancient 2MB video card as it does on the fanciest new $1500 video card.

Eugenia wrote on 12/16/2010, 1:06 PM

This is 90% true, but not fully truthful to the case. See, newer cards have faster buses, and therefore more bandwidth in their operations. So even if no special hardware acceleration is supported by the client, a faster 2D pipelined gfx card will do better than a cheaper one. When I upgraded my 128 MB ATI gfx card to an nVidia 256 MB one (both of them on the same price range, but the nvidia had a faster bus), I got 10% to 15% faster playback in ALL media player and editor applications. Just because its basic 2D functions were faster.

I'm *not* advocating that people should buy the most expensive nVidia card if they have no hardware acceleration in their app. Just that an nvidia card will still be faster than an Intel card, no matter what.

Finally, there is the media player case. CoreAVC uses CUDA, so as long as you stop using Quicktime for MOV and MP4 h.264 files, CoreAVC can playback these files with 2% CPU utilization. So it's not just Vegas you need to think of when you purchase something.