 Video cards. They're good for, you know, anything to do with video, right? I mean, it's right in the name. Video card. They've got features to enhance video playback in real time, they've got dedicated hardware to accelerate video games, and they're a necessary component of any system that needs to output video to a display at all. But what about video editing? This capability has been featured prominently on the boxes of video cards for over a decade. But do they actually make any bloody difference? Or should you just get a beefy CPU and tackle your video rendering that way? Let's find out, shall we? The MasterCase 5 by Cooler Master gives you the freedom to truly make your mid-tower PC case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. Let's start with a little bit of background on why it is that we are doing this. We make videos, and one of the most tedious and time-consuming processes that slows us down, aside from our servers being broken, is transcoding footage for faster performance in Adobe Premiere, a process that you can learn more about here, and encoding our finished videos using the optimal resolutions and video codecs for the various platforms that we publish on, including YouTube, Vessel, and BillyBilly.com. So we discovered when we were developing our Cineform workflow that GPU usage in our workstations was much higher than we expected with certain workloads, which is funny because we originally thought the GTX Titan-class cards in our editing workstations were basically a because-we-can thing. But something we never really had the time to investigate was which video cards are best for this process. We just stuck with what Nvidia had provided us back when we did our whole room water cooling project. Well, now we've got an opportunity to answer that question for the Adobe editors out there. For an unrelated project, Supermicro just sent us one of their Super Server SYS4028GR-TRT servers. This freaking badass of a machine is going to be used in a project where we run eight gaming rigs off of a single box with GTX 980 Ti AMP cards from Zotac. More to come. But in the meantime, it presented an opportunity for me and Ed to quickly and with relative ease, without any physical access to the machine, use On-RAID as a virtualization host and then use this thing as a remote test bench. So Ed could shut down a Windows virtual machine, virtually swap the video card to any one of the ones in here, turn it back on and be ready to rock with a new set of benchmarks. This let us examine how a wide cross section of different video cards on both the AMD and Nvidia side of the fence behaved in our typical video encoding tasks. So the virtual machines were set up with eight core hyper threaded virtual processors to represent a high end consumer or mid range Xeon processor and 32 gigs of RAM. The tests were done using the 200 gig boot SSD as a source and as a target and we used actual Linus Media Group video projects for all the scenarios. Let's start by looking at the time it takes to export a timeline containing mostly Cineform video clips in Cineform. This is how we would normally send the project to the final export server for processing into H.264. And the only real conclusion that we can draw from this is that whether you go with AMD and therefore OpenCL acceleration or Nvidia and therefore CUDA acceleration for your video workstation, you're going to be getting a very similar experience. Just make sure that you do have a video card as relying on the CPU to do this work on its own is clearly a bad idea. For the next scenario, we're looking at something that would be more applicable to most prosumer and professional video editors. So we're taking the 1080p Cineform export from the first test and transcoding it to 4K H.264. No separate encoding server involved. Our GPU usage hovered around 30 percent and the advantage that our video cards enjoyed over the CPU only workflow diminished significantly here, which might lead one to the conclusion that which graphics card you choose doesn't matter or even that a graphics card is really optional if you're exporting videos directly from your editing workstation. Except that our third test using chroma keyed Cineform 4K footage and exporting to 1080p Cineform showed us what we were finally looking for. The scenario in which a powerful video card demonstrates not just better performance against pure CPU encoding, but also lesser video cards. So the beefiest gaming GPU, in this case the GTX 980 Ti in the system, comes out on top with the lesser cards performing about as much worse as you would expect given their overall horsepower. And this would be applicable not just to chroma key green screen footage, but also to any project with other effects like lumetri color or warp stabilizer. Which leads us then to a really interesting final conclusion here. AMD versus Nvidia in this case doesn't seem to matter much. The 970 and the R9 290, which is about equivalent to its 300 series replacement, are similar enough across the board that I couldn't recommend one brand over the other for editing an Adobe Premiere. With that said, that might not be the case if you use other tools, but the takeaway here then is that for video editing and Adobe Premiere you should get a GPU, even if it's just a mainstream model, and that, much like for gaming, once you get into the performance and enthusiast product range you are getting diminishing returns for the money you spend. Neat. Speaking of which, this is pretty cool. This is a brand new sponsor for us. Blue Apron allows you to create delicious chef designed recipes at home. They deliver all the farm fresh ingredients you need right to your doorstep in exactly the right proportions, so no trips to the grocery store are required and there is no waste from unused ingredients. They offer two types of plans, the two person plan and the family plan. The recipes are delivered in a refrigerated box so the ingredients stay fresh even if you're not at home when your package arrives, and they offer a large selection of recipes and are always adding new dishes to the menu every week. There is no commitment, you can skip or cancel the service at any time, and each menu is between 500 to 700 calories per person. The ingredients are sourced from quality suppliers and artisans and all meals can be prepared in 40 minutes or less. So Blue Apron lets you learn to make new recipes and cuisines so you can get out of your dinner rut of making the same old dishes or relying on takeout. And the best part is that Blue Apron is available nationwide in the US and the first 250 people to try it using our link in the video description will get two free meals on their first Blue Apron order. So go check it out. So thanks for watching guys, if this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon. It costs you nothing, the instructions are up there. Buying a cool shirt like this one, which does cost you something, but you get a cool shirt. Or by joining our community forum, you can get your questions answered, you can answer other people's questions, you can become a contributor, get a cool contributor badge. All good stuff that's linked in the video description. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering, hmm, what should I watch next? And the answer is this video right here. I guarantee you it's awesome. My personal guarantee of awesome quality. I hope it's awesome. I don't know what they're going to put there.