Would a better video card improve Reaper's ability to process videos?

[uncleswede]

My studio PC is a rock solid Scan 3XS system (core i7, 16gb ram, win64, onboard graphics). Lately I've been using it a lot for multi video projects. Once I have more than 4 video tracks, it struggles to playback without glitching. Rendering times are OKish, considering (my most recent project was just over 4 mins long, had 25 video tracks and took 25 mins to render).

OK, my question is...

... would adding a dedicated graphics card (Pcie) significantly improve reaper video project performance?

Cheers

[EpicSounds]

to some degree, in that it would take the load of the system video processing away from the onboard processor. But reaper doesn't use GPU for rendering.

[uncleswede]

Originally Posted by EpicSounds

to some degree, in that it would take the load of the system video processing away from the onboard processor. But reaper doesn't use GPU for rendering.

Thanks. Not so worried about rendering. If I could playback a lot more video tracks smoothly, I wouldn't need to do intermediate renders just to check my edits 👍

I guess it's a question of how much improvement I could get for £250 investment.

[EpicSounds]

reaper always displays the real video wherever your cursor is positioned. shouldn't be any guessing.


lots of ways to improve performance but 25 layers of compressed video is a lot for any system.
If those video items do not have audio disabled then it's more like 50 layers of video.

[SonicAxiom]

Originally Posted by uncleswede

My studio PC is a rock solid Scan 3XS system (core i7, 16gb ram, win64, onboard graphics). Lately I've been using it a lot for multi video projects. Once I have more than 4 video tracks, it struggles to playback without glitching. Rendering times are OKish, considering (my most recent project was just over 4 mins long, had 25 video tracks and took 25 mins to render).

Cheers

you can make video preview more fluid in two ways:

1. by fiddling with the "Preformance tweaks" parameters shown when you right-click into the video preview window

2. by temporarily putting in a low-res value like "400" into Project settings -> Video -> "Preferred video size". Putting in the x-value alone is enough to render the preview more fluid. Make sure to delete this value prior to rendering the video or else, the resulting video will be low-res, obviously.

I'm pretty sure that a project containing 25 videos will still make the cpu choke regardless any performance tweaks but it will probably improve the editing experience.

.

[Skijumptoes]

I presumed that the codec used to play the video would either use GPU decoding where possible, Regardless of what software the Codec was running within (i.e. REAPER in this case).

I appreciate that REAPER doesn't utilise the GPU for rendering it's own GUI, but surely if the codec responsible for video playback is utilising the GPU better, then it would be an improvement?