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EVGA GTX 580 1.5gb vs 3gb

Michael Millichamp

Michael Millichamp

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Hey guys,

I just ordered a Geforce GTX 580 3gb graphics card for editing/color correction/everything else. Upgraded from a NVidia 460. Now, I saw the 3gb and decided to go with it, thinking that it was better. Im not very computer savy, but I can work my way around.

I was thinking that the 1.5gb might be fine, but I thought I might as well go for the 3. Only 50 bucks more. So, my question is...

Can you possibly help me in cracking the difference between using the 1.5gb vs the 3gb graphics card?

Is there really that much difference at all in these two card?

Thanks!
 
It depends on your software and source resolution. 3 GB is worth the extra cost regardless. If you are working at >4K in Resolve it is most essential.
 
I shoot everything in 4k.

Im running an i5 quad core, 16gb of ram, and now this 3gb card.

I have a 1080p 24inch monitor and a 40inch Sony Bravia hooked up for viewing.
 
The 3GB card makes a difference when you are editing 4K vs 1080p.
 
It's gonna dominate Alan Wake even at 2560x1600 with 16xAA...

Oh wait... Uhhh....yeah, it should be good for CS5.5 too :) Seriously though, you're saving so much money over a Quadro, that the $50 shouldn't matter too much. And it's only going to help later on with future applications CS6+ and so on.
 
So I just got my card in, hooked it up and threw a 4k clip into premiere.

I don't know if im doing something wrong, but im kind of disappointed so far. I put the clip down and played it back at 1/4th resolution. Perfect. I put it into 1/2 resolution, plays back somewhat smooth, then gets choppy. I put it into full and it won't even budge.

My GTX 460 played 1/4th resolution back just fine. I thought this card would allow me to play back in atleast 1/2 without being jittery. I don't know if it was lack of research or me trusting everyone when they said this card was amazing. So far, it's not dazzling me.

Any suggestions?
 
I am FAR from an expert.... But what I have read is that it is a balanced system design that gets the best playback. Throwing a massive card into a mix of components that is not up to the level of the card will not get you much or anything.

Not saying that is what is going on, as I do not know what your config is (and again, this is just "relaying" the info I have gathered here and @Adobe.

I have a Quadro 4000, and get about 1/4. But... I have only a Core2 Quad@3GHz and 8Gb ram. So I believe my card is not the bottleneck, the rest of my system is. If I was running an i7 and 16Gb or more, I am guessing that with the same card I would get better response.
 
Like I mentioned in my earlier post, you didn't give us nearly enough information. If your primary objective was moving up from 1/4 to 1/2 res real-time editing (and editing only) in Premiere Pro, then what you really needed was a CPU upgrade.

As Scott mentions above, it is all about a balanced system. Smooth 1/4 res is pretty amazing off a Core i5 when you think about it. But 4 threads is quite obviously the bottleneck here as R3D decode is very CPU intensive, so your CPU is holding back the rest of your system. For flawless 1/2 res you need to upgrade to a 6-core Core i7 39xx. That will of course need a motherboard change as well. Again, you are not giving us enough info, but I will assume your CPU is a Core i5 2xxx, in which case your other option is upgrading to a Core i7 2600K and mildly overclocking. That will get you smooth 1/2 res playback as well. Full res playback is currently not possible short of Rocket or Xeon E7 systems.

Edit - The above was considering 5K. If all you need is 4K, then Core i7 2600 is just fine. Or if you wait 5 weeks you could get a Core i7 3770K which would also fit in to the same motherboard, give you a free 15% performance boost for the same price as a 2600 and a 20% power consumption reduction. That should be more than enough for easy 1/2 res playback for 4K material even without overclocking.
 
Im running a i5 quad core 16gb of ram.

I assumed that my core was ok. it's overclocked to 3.2 which is pretty good.

Running it without rendering it all out, I can only get to a 1/2 max. But when I render the timeline, it plays silky smooth in 4k.

And my render times are down significantly. Idk if it's the card or the overclocking of my cpu.

I am definitely ok with render times going down and be able to play it at full that way.
 
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Rendering stresses your GPU much more as the scaling algorithm switches to the resource-hungry high quality Lanczos from the low quality (and fast) Bilinear used for playback. 3.2 GHz seems like a low frequency, but perhaps you are using first gen Core i5s, which are significantly slower than 2nd gen Core i5s. The slowest overclockable Core i5 today is the Core i5 2500K which is stock clocked at 3.3 GHz, and can manage near 5 GHz without much fuss.
 
Does it have nothing to do with hard drives speed too ? Are you running a RAID system or...?
 
Did you add the GTX 580 to the supported gpu cards list in the Nvidia program files? I know that when I had my PC I had to add my GTX 460 to the cards list, after that it worked perfectly.
 
The 580 is already on the list.

Adding the 460 was a workaround hack.
 
Subhadip Sen said:
Like I mentioned in my earlier post, you didn't give us nearly enough information. If your primary objective was moving up from 1/4 to 1/2 res real-time editing (and editing only) in Premiere Pro, then what you really needed was a CPU upgrade.

As Scott mentions above, it is all about a balanced system. Smooth 1/4 res is pretty amazing off a Core i5 when you think about it. But 4 threads is quite obviously the bottleneck here as R3D decode is very CPU intensive, so your CPU is holding back the rest of your system. For flawless 1/2 res you need to upgrade to a 6-core Core i7 39xx. That will of course need a motherboard change as well. Again, you are not giving us enough info, but I will assume your CPU is a Core i5 2xxx, in which case your other option is upgrading to a Core i7 2600K and mildly overclocking. That will get you smooth 1/2 res playback as well. Full res playback is currently not possible short of Rocket or Xeon E7 systems.

Edit - The above was considering 5K. If all you need is 4K, then Core i7 2600 is just fine. Or if you wait 5 weeks you could get a Core i7 3770K which would also fit in to the same motherboard, give you a free 15% performance boost for the same price as a 2600 and a 20% power consumption reduction. That should be more than enough for easy 1/2 res playback for 4K material even without overclocking.
Click to expand...

Here is my setup-
ASUS P7P55D pro
i5-750 Lynnfield overclocked to 3.2g
16gb RAM
GTX 580

Need any other information?
 
Your decreased render times show that the GPU is indeed helping. But given your configuration and lack of a RAID, the bottlenecks are your CPU and slow (non-RAID) storage speeds. Throwing the faster GPU in the mix might actually cause playback to be less smooth as the rest of the system can't keep up with it when feeding it data. The older i5 isn't very powerful, especially for intensive processes like wavelet decoding.

The best upgrade you can probably do for this system now is to move to a RAID and eliminate the storage system bottleneck. That should help some as well... Although the CPU is still going to be a choke point and ultimately you will need to move to a faster system/CPU or get a RED Rocket to take over for the CPU for the R3D wavelet decompression.
\
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Your decreased render times show that the GPU is indeed helping. But given your configuration and lack of a RAID, the bottlenecks are your CPU and slow (non-RAID) storage speeds. Throwing the faster GPU in the mix might actually cause playback to be less smooth as the rest of the system can't keep up with it when feeding it data. The older i5 isn't very powerful, especially for intensive processes like wavelet decoding.

The best upgrade you can probably do for this system now is to move to a RAID and eliminate the storage system bottleneck. That should help some as well... Although the CPU is still going to be a choke point and ultimately you will need to move to a faster system/CPU or get a RED Rocket to take over for the CPU for the R3D wavelet decompression.
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Click to expand...

Thanks Jeff.

I thought my system could actually handle it without needing to upgrade much. Ill look into moving to RAID, but honestly, I tried to understand all of that once, and it flew straight over my head. Google here I come.
 
I am assuming you are editing Scarlet 4K footage, which is capped at 55 MB/s. Any modern 7200rpm hard drive can handle that easily, so disk I/O is not your immediate bottleneck - it is clearly your CPU. Consider upgrading to Sandy Bridge (i7 2600K) or wait for Ivy Bridge (i7 3770K) in 5 weeks. Either of the above will handle 4K Scarlet footage fluently at 1/2 res.
 
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