Re: 256 DDR3 or 1Gb DDR2 VGA for AE by Brendan Coots on Aug 6, 2008 at 3:22:01 pm
You're not going to get much of a performance boost in After Effects from your video card, unless you go big and purchase a workstation card like one of the nVidia Quadros or an ATI FireGL. The only benefit you will get from your graphics card in After Effects is the ability to preview using OpenGL which can speed things up. Problem is, many people report that it's buggy, not all it's cracked up to be and not really worth spending extra money on a graphics card for.
If you want to boost performance, making sure your machines have the maximum amount of supported RAM is always nice. Faster hard drives help as well.
Re: 256 DDR3 or 1Gb DDR2 VGA for AE by Brian Lynn on Aug 10, 2008 at 5:02:12 am
#1 Is it a true dual CPU system? Or a dual-core style system?
#2 How much RAM does Windows report?
#3 Are you on a 32 or 64 bit Windows?
#4 What kind of interface do your individual raid drives have?
#5 Do you use an onboard or slot card controller?
#6 How fast is your RAM?
My old machine had 2gb of high quality low latency RAM... I upgraded to 8gb but the RAM was slower, its latency not as good... this had a significant NEGATIVE impact on my machine. I even returned the RAM thinking it was faulty, and the replacements perfomed just as poor. So I bit the bullet and ordered 8gb of nice RAM, installed it, and it did wonders to speed the machine up.
4gb of RAM can also slow your machine down if you are not using a 64bit OS. 32bit OS can't address enough memory space to utilize much more than 3.5gb. (Macs 32 bit OS used an "exteded" address system allowing them to access more in a faked way). To get the full benefit of massive amounts of RAM your CPU needs to be able to address it, and 32 bits is just not enough. In contrast a 64bit OS is theoretically capable of approximately 17.2 billion gigabytes of RAM!
But the RAM amount issue all depends on how your motherboard handles its ram. If you have 2gb dedicated per CPU then you should be ok.
