A Graphics Card or a GPU is very important when editing and rendering 4K and 8K videos as it significantly improves the video editing experience by utilizing hardware acceleration technologies like CUDA and OpenCL. Both, rendering and navigation through a timeline are faster when using modern video editing software and a powerful GPU. Even when editing a 1080p video project, export times will be faster, especially when using NVIDIA graphics with lots of CUDA cores.
Video editing is CPU and GPU-intensive work that requires a powerful video creation computer instead of a basic PC that you use every day for surfing the web, listening to music, or watching movies.
Depending on your budget, especially if it is tight, you will have to consider different pros and cons of having a more expensive GPU vs a cheaper one. Quite often you will have to choose between buying a faster 6/8-core CPU vs a high-end GPU with plenty of VRAM. However, nowadays, it is good to have both a fast CPU and GPU.
Not sure which Graphics Card you need for video editing? check our list of top 10 Graphics Cards for video editing
Now, the question is: how important a graphics card really is, when it comes to video editing?
Will a premium GPU, with more VRAM, actually increase your video editing speed? Will the rendering or previewing become much faster?
Let’s begin with finding out if video editing is using more of your CPU or does it rely heavily on a GPU.
What’s more important for video editing: a CPU or a GPU?
A CPU is the top-priority worker that is involved in video editing and exporting. It does all the management of what instructions with what data comes next and is also responsible for rendering via its built-in integrated graphics(if present). It is a must-have to get a good multi-core CPU (6 or more is recommended) before even attempting to create some serious video project.
If your CPU is low-end, it doesn’t matter which graphics card you install – a slow one, or a fast one. The CPU is a bottle-neck that will not allow GPU to quickly receive instructions. This will result in a CPU being overloaded while the GPU will just be having a vacation. So, a CPU, as a manager, must be fast enough and keep telling the GPU what to do next in a continuous manner.
So, long story short – for best video editing performance you will need both a powerful processor and a graphics card. Following this advice will ensure your video editing process is as smooth as possible.
Editing a video in Adobe Premiere Pro
During the video production, you will always be deciding what type of effects, adjustments, and corrections, and how many of them you will use, to produce a professionally looking video. When adding complex transitions and effects, you will often want to preview them prior to moving to the next frame.
Now, the preview of the non-rendered video that is still in work in progress, would benefit from a well-performing GPU. Without a powerful graphics card, you will be forced to lower the quality of your preview window. This can become especially annoying when having a lot of complex effects and transitions added. The preview will get much slower than you would normally expect.
Generally speaking, the higher end your graphics card is and the more VRAM it is equipped with (8 GB at least), the better quality you can choose for the preview window. Higher resolutions always require more VRAM and, ideally, more memory bandwidth.
It’s not just previewing of your video project that gest affected by a slow GPU. You will often need to navigate through the timeline during the creation process. Moving through it gets annoyingly slow when hardware acceleration is not available.
When having a lot of effects that rely heavily on a graphics card, you may require restarting your video editing tool quite often, after completing every single portion of your work. Otherwise, you may start getting dreaded “Not enough video memory” errors.
How important a powerful GPU is for video rendering?
When working with video editing software, at some point you will finalize your project and will need to render the resulting video. While some video editors offer a really fast rendering speed, they often rely on your machine having a faster GPU installed.
Both AMD and NVIDIA have a built-in technology that allows utilizing their graphics cards in a video rendering process. A GPU contains a huge number of small cores in contrast to a small number of big cores in a CPU. That’s why it is just a waste not to utilize a GPU to significantly increase rendering speed.
Video editors such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Davinci Resolve, Vegas Pro, Final Cut Pro, and other professional-grade software have now full support of hardware acceleration via GPU.
It is worth mentioning, that video editors work better with NVIDIA cards as NVIDIA has been pushing its proprietary CUDA technology that allows using CUDA cores in video rendering and editing.
Radeon graphics are coming with OpenCL which is an open-source alternative to NVIDIA’s CUDA, but, the OpenCL can not boast the same level of compatibility with Adobe Pro and other professional video editing software. Having said that, Radeon GPUs work quite well with Davinci Resolve.
Be advised, you will still need a good multi-core CPU (Intel Core I7 or AMD Ryzen 7) to allow the video rendering to be fast and utilize your GPU as much as possible.
Even though, you will always see your CPU having a significant load during rendering, be advised that it also does a lot of delegation of computationally heavy tasks to your GPU.
NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000. Image credit: servethehome.com
Graphics card plays an even bigger role if you often need to combine a lot of advanced video effects, color grading, complex transitions, and high-res footage in 4K, or even more importantly in 8K. Just because right now you’re not doing any high-resolution projects, you will most likely feel the need to start doing those soon. You really don’t want to waste your money building a cheap video creation rig that will later put restrictions on your creativity.
A complex video project that is built with the modern video editing tool, and is abundant in GPU-intensive effects, will always get rendered much faster when having a better graphics card installed. This refers to any resolution (even 1080p).
Final thoughts. Should you buy a more expensive graphics card or a high-end CPU?
Ideally, you should have at least a 6-core CPU and one of the best 8GB GDDR6 GPUs from NVIDIA (sometimes AMD is going to work too). With this setup, you will rest assured that you can easily create and quickly render a video project of any complexity and length. The latest video editing technologies will do their best to offer you a smooth and comfortable editing and rendering experience.
In case you have a limited budget and have to choose between a fast CPU and a fast GPU, I suggest you take a short break. See if you can get one of the decent CPUs for a bit cheaper price (as they are not as overpriced as GPUs nowadays). You may easily find a cheaper version of a particular processor that comes without integrated graphics allowing you to get it for a cheaper price. Saving those funds will likely allow you to purchase a medium-tier GPU. Just don’t rush towards the most powerful CPU (Core I7 or Ryzen 7 is generally enough).
If your budget is even tighter and you can only get one thing at a time – get a good CPU with integrated graphics and a cheap GPU or no GPU at all as a temporary solution. Later on, you will save some money and get a high-performance GPU.
When trying to get either one or another, you’re going to quickly realize that a video editing workstation can’t be very cheap. Both GPU and CPU need to provide good performance for the best video editing and rendering experience. Don’t forget that you also need at least 16 GB of RAM installed in your system for best results.
