Processor Usage

[Prodigy146]

My friend is wondering if he will get better processor performance if he switches from an integrated chipset graphics (gma 950) to a pci x16 graphics card (radeon x300 128mb)

he encodes ALOT of movies (avi to vob)
he doesnt really game alot.


Would investing in the graphic card help out his processor?


computer specs:
P4 630 HT 3.0ghz
2.0gb PC2-4300 533mhz 2x1GB Kingston Ram
Intel D945GCZ Motherboard GMA 950 Graphics
300 Watt PSU

 

[Holysky]

The graphics card will help out with movies. Usually the processor ram and hdd are the ones doing all of the avi to vob

the graphics card will help make movies look better, but i do not thing it will help with the encoding

 

[tom-knox]

The encoding will be affected by the RAM, the CPU, and the HDD's spin speed and seek time. A better graphic card will enable him to view better quality videos, but i don't think it'll help the encoding process along.

 

[Prodigy146]

what i'm trying to say is if he gets the graphics card wont that make his encoding faster because his desktop graphics will be processed by the x300's gpu? which free's up his processor to solely be dedicated to encoding.

Or is creating desktop graphics such a simple process for a P4 Cpu that adding a gpu will not free up the cpu that much?

 

[tom-knox]

Graphics aren't processed by the CPU, the thing that's processing them atm is an onboard graphics card. Whilst a GPU upgrade might make the system a lil tiny bit faster, he wont see much of a change in his encoding.

 

[Prodigy146]

onboard graphics do not have hardware geometry processing and relys on the cpu for over half of its pipelines and since its built in the motherboard, onboard graphics fight for resources on the same bus as the cpu.

Which means that the processor is almost 100% (remember they use the same bus) responsible for graphics when using onboard graphics.

Also graphics memory needed to load his desktop are in his DDR2 Memory (the GMA 950 allocates 224mb of ram regardless of what hes doing), which isnt that much slower than GDDR3?

 

[JogaBonito1502]

Prodigy you are correct. If he does get a dedicated video card there will be load taken off the CPU. I'm not quite sure how much that will help with encoding, but it should definitely be significant if it already uses 100% of his CPU.

 

[tom-knox]

Well, that's me in me place i suppose

 

[JogaBonito1502]

I'm not so sure on how DDR2 would compare to GDDR3. My guess would be that GDDR3 would be significantly faster. Don't quote me on that.

 

[worshipme]

Only some video encoding apps are GPU accelerated. We'll need to know what app he uses to determine whether a GPU or CPU upgrade would be more beneficial.