The Song Fight Bulletin Board

So, I just recently upgraded from SX2 to SX3 and I am in the market for a video card. Primarily for the reason to make SX3 smoother along with plug-in use. I was wondering if anyone would be in the know on what card to use.

The card would also allow me to do some post work for cutting picture in addition to taking some heat off the CPU in some of the bigger mixes. Also no fan, but maybe a heat sink, cuz of the added noise I don't want. The card would be great if it had a firewire SB1394 connection as well (cuz I don't have firewire with my recording machine and it kills two birds with one stone) and something not too crazy in price. I'm not that concerned about 3D gaming shite, but am more concerned about it being able to deal with picture and helping with sync stuff. Time Code in and Out would also be cool. Just want to take a little heat off of the CPU so that I can get better resolution for picture and audio. Anyone have any ideas or have implemented this in their system?

I've also created this thread for people with other software as well, cuz we all know that specialized PCI card slots taken up by miniature CPUs is great for the main CPU of said PC. This thread may not apply to Mac users, but feel free.

- Pablo

Unless Cubase has started using OpenGL or Direct3D, a different video card will make no noticeable impact on your songwriting experience, as every graphics card today already takes off as much CPU load as possible for 2D graphics.

I've never heard of a graphics card with built-in firewire. (Also it's called IEEE1394, not SB1394.)

Handling timecodes puts you into a whole different ballpark with prices - stuff which syncs with offboard video equipment is extremely expensive, and is typically only seen with firewire-based A/V boxes nowadays anyway (rather than being part of the main computer video card). The only place a video card will help you video-wise is by supporting YUV overlays directly, which, again, most graphics cards made today already do (though ATI are particularly good about it).

I don't have a video card at all, just on the motherboard 64 mb graphics chip... so if anyone knows of a particular spec or card to go with a 2.4 ghz, 1 g ram xp based system.... lay it on me! II'm playing on upgrading my cpu to a 3.0 soon though....) I get a lot of video glitches and audio when ever I get past around 80 tracks or so ( I count each effect insert as an active track in my personal lexicon cause a plugin insert seems to drain my cpu meter space around the same "bar" amount as a "bare" audio track... so anyway....) suggestions for what video card can maximize the cubase experience and performance would be mucho appreciated....

A built-in video card is still a video card, even if it's not a card strictly-speaking. It'd still be using a modern chipset which can handle 2D just as well as any other chipset.

Plugins take a lot of CPU, because they're doing a lot of work. A graphics card won't help that.

my uninformed self was under the impression (thought I read somewhere) that on board graphics processing "steals" cycles or processing power from the CPU, so by installing a seperate card, you could free that up, therefore giving the CPU a bit more headroom to process plugins and other stuff.

There definitely seems to be a link between having a screen that is full of active tracks in cubase, so the meters are all going, and moving that screen around, it can cause audio glitching if you have a big project.

Are you saying, Fluffy, that there isn't any tangible benefit from installing a seperate video card?
(I hope not, because I just bought one. now, it has dual outs, so there's another purpose, but I had hoped there would be this processing benefit as well.)

This is good info!

Some of the operations involved in drawing the screen can be sped up by the graphics card. However, current graphics cards all speed up these operations as much as they can.

Most of the processing required for visible tracks on the screen isn't with drawing them, but with calculating what to draw. A graphics card can't help with that at all.

(Of course, I'm only talking about traditional 2D applications here, and not ones which use 3D rendering features of a card. Those are a whole other story.)

Multiple outputs are useful on their own merit, though.

Thanks for the dillio Fluffy. sigh...I thought i was going get this great boost in performance from said card...oh well.... dual outs will be fun when I get my studioreno completed.

Yeah, I was going off of Hipster's idea myself... so I think it seems that the thing to do is just upgrade my cpu ...it's a shiteron...oops I mean celeron, and that JUST WILL NOT DO!!!!


Maybe I'll get a 3.2 .....hmm dee hummm.

anyway, it(64 mb)
totally sucks for games like NHL 2005... so I'm still gonna upgrade , however... I appreciate the info on the cubase/video relationship....


I wish I was rich.

I've got the matrox g450 card and it works well. dual head and everything, so you could have a tracking mixer and a monitoring mixer or whatever.

Ken