I know there are many questions about what specifically to buy, but this is a more general question. Is it generally better to improve the CPU or GPU to get better performance? I have a newish GPU (RTX 3060) and an oldish Intel i7 6-core CPU. The machine will only be used for VAI. GPU prices are very high and I don’t know whether a new one would be hampered by my CPU/MB combination. So the question is: where to spend the money?
In your case, an RTX 3060 is pretty good. A new CPU might get you some more speed, but before buying one, check out the benchmark thread and search for 3060. See if others are getting better speeds than your machine.
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Thanks for your reply!
yeah, probably it will already be diminishing return if you upgrade your CPU. your CPU in general doesn’t take most of the heat, it’s mainly on your GPU that takes it, that is how VAI was designed.
Have a 12 Core AMD CPU with RTX 3060 ( 12gb VRAM)
The computer originally had 1660 Super.
The upgrade to the RTX 3060 cut render times in half.
I think there would be some advantage to say a RTX 4070, but not worth $500.
That said, I may still upgrade the GPU again, not for better performance on Topaz Video AI, but for better
performance on Resolve. The Canon R5 10 bit video files have a codec that’s not liked by Nvidia GPU’s.
I tested VAI with my system which has a Core I7-8700 which has 6 cores and a GTX 1070. I had 16 GB or RAM. It took hours of processing to upgrade a single music video of say 4 minutes length from 480p to 1080p. I had been thinking that I could use some more RAM anyway, so I added another 16 to get to 32 GB total (cost about $80) and the improvement was dramatic, down to about 30 minutes. Based on that, I bought VAI. My GTX 1070 is pretty old but I am wondering if I upgraded that to an RTX 3090 would that give me as dramatic an improvement as the RAM did?
Thanks for the response!
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The new video card will probably make a big difference. When I installed an RTX 2060 (replacing a GTX 1660 OC) it made a huge difference. Then I installed a 3060 and it made another jump, although much smaller. The number of CUDA cores seems to matter. At least it does for Vegas Pro rendering.
Incidentally, Version 4 of VAI made huge leap forward in efficiency. That made a tremendous difference in my work, which is upscaling poor quality, blurry, low-resolution videos up to 1080p. Projects that rendered at 1-3 FPS in Version 2 are now rendering at 15-20fps. Videos of 1.5 – 2-hour videos that took 18-24 hours are now taking about 90-120 minutes. It also produced far fewer artifacts like occasional “checkerboarding”, and required much less tweaking of the parameters. Correcting stuttering playback (buffering and drops in frame rate) are still a problem, but if there’s no data in a frame, there’s not much to improve.
My system is an AMD Ryzen 3900XT (12-core) with 32 GB of RAM, about 3 years old.
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