Will a stronger Video card improve SONAR's overall performance?

Hi gang,

I've never had a need to mess with video cards in the past really - but I want to make a move to 4 monitors and I know a lot of open GUI windows can slow SONAR down.

My question is "what class of video cards will I need to get in order to have 4 monitors worth of stuff open - video window, track view, Kontakt, and a few VST effects - without hurting SONAR's performance and hopefully withour having a lot of fan noise in the control room?"

Thanks!

~DPS

(This would apply to a fast Quad-Core or an i9 computer with PE7 and PE8.5 on it.)

My question is "what class of video cards will I need to get in order to have 4 monitors worth of stuff open - video window, track view, Kontakt, and a few VST effects - without hurting SONAR's performance and hopefully withour having a lot of fan noise in the control room?"

 
For quad monitors:
I'd run a pair of passive cooled video cards (that have smaller heatsinks)
You need not go overboard with the GPU speed.  HD4350+ or 9400GT+
 
Another potential option:
With 28" monitors being relatively affordable
You could go with a pair of 28" monitors...

Jim is correct as always.

I had two PCI cards in the  last computer, both matrox. Worked fine.

The new board has 1 PCI-e 16, 1 PCI-e 1, 2 PCI slots.

The sound card uses the one PCI slot, and using a passive vid card in the PCI-e 16 slot.

I could add a PCI card for more ports. But, currently just using 2 monitors.

So, first be clear about how many slots ya gots. And what must be inserted.

And, does the board have a vid out? If so you may have a 3rd port already available.

And, do get two cards from the same manufacturer. It will help reduce any driver conflict trouble shooting.

And there are 4 port cards.  Matrox,... but not all are quiet.

And so on.

I am saving the pennies for a couple of 26/28 inchers.

J

Thanks Jim and jm,

I have been building a desk that slants down in the back so that the monitors can be set very low and still be given a clear line of sight.
This is to keep monitors (video) out of the way of the monitors (audio).

But now that you mention it, 3 wide-screen monitors, with the S-video 3rd output might work just as well - putting video playback in the center, SONAR track manager on the right, and VSTs on the left.

Coolio.

The overall answer is no and using a card with 1gb of memory steals 1gb of system memory which is XP is limited to 4gb.

 With Windows 7 I thought that having more video memory increased over all performance.
I'm running Windows 7x64 . Widows 7 comes with an app that rates your PC performance.
I have a 7.5 (which is high) rating on everthing but my video card.
The video card (only 256 mb of memory) knocked my performance rating for the whole PC down to 3.5.
  I ordered a new video card today with a gig of memory I'll let you know if I see an improvement.

Often it's the most powerful video cards that hog system resources the worst. Manufacturers apparently assume that if you want a high-performance video adapter it means that video performance is all that matters to you. That makes sense if you're primarily playing video games, but not when video is incidental to what you're using the computer for. I wouldn't bother with any kind of high-end video card. My low-end 256MB Radeon X600's do exactly what I want: provide a crisp display, especially for text, without commandeering my computer.

I totally agree with Jim and others who suggested two large screens rather than four smaller ones. That would have less impact on your CPU, I think. Of course, you'll still want to limit the number of open windows, especially when pushing the CPU hard.

BTW, the idea of lowering the displays in a custom desk is brilliant. I plan to do the same thing when I have my own desk built. In fact, I'd like to have them completely recessed like the monitors they use on the TV evening news desk. As it is, even my existing 20" widescreen monitors partially block my speakers, which is not good.

Hopefully the next version of Sonar will offload graphics to the GPU.
Photoshop CS5 does this already and it makes quite a difference.
Zooming in and out is as smooth as butter.

> My low-end 256MB Radeon X600's

PCI?  AGP?

I replaced the vid card with a passively cooled ASUS | EAH4350 recently, cuz the old card was the noisiest bit in the box.

J

Do yourself a favor, go NVidia. Ati is too much hassle.

FWIW we have ATI in our demo machines ... even Intel uses ATI in their demo boxes.

Seth Perlstein [Cakewalk
]

FWIW we have ATI in our demo machines ... even Intel uses ATI in their demo boxes.

Haha, you're just saying that because they're right down the street from you!

My ATI has never given me one ounce of trouble
If that is worth anything to you

...wicked

Seth Perlstein [Cakewalk
]

FWIW we have ATI in our demo machines ... even Intel uses ATI in their demo boxes.

Haha, you're just saying that because they're right down the street from you!

ATI is in Canada. I'm in Los Angeles. Must be a loooooong street.

soundtweaker


Hopefully the next version of Sonar will offload graphics to the GPU.
Photoshop CS5 does this already and it makes quite a difference.
Zooming in and out is as smooth as butter.

Photoshop is, of course, entirely focused on graphics, and rendering speed is important. So it's understandable that they would put resources on that. By comparison, changing a program like Sonar over to doing GPU-based graphics would be a lot of work, for very little gain.

bitflipper


Often it's the most powerful video cards that hog system resources the worst. Manufacturers apparently assume that if you want a high-performance video adapter it means that video performance is all that matters to you. That makes sense if you're primarily playing video games, but not when video is incidental to what you're using the computer for. I wouldn't bother with any kind of high-end video card. My low-end 256MB Radeon X600's do exactly what I want: provide a crisp display, especially for text, without commandeering my computer.

+1.  Something also to be aware of is that some higher end video cards emphasize 3D performance for games over 2D performance which is what Sonar would make use of.  Somewhere there was a calculator for figuring just how much video memory your video card needs to run your screens at different resolutions.

I should ammend what I typed before. My ATI card is a very good card. The problem lies in the software. Not that the software is bad but it is a 100% PITA when updating from version to the next. You have to buy a third party program (driver cleaner) to do it (unless you know your way around the system folder and the registry). If you only care about the driver and not the Catalyst Control Center software, it's a great card. The PITA software update process is a complete turn off. They do keep improving the drivers and software which is a plus but not the hassle of updating the software.

I'm with the grape ape.  ATI has given me problems in the past whereas nVidia has always worked like a charm.

Oh, along the lines of offsetting some processing to the GPU, I thought that was video card specific and not the software in question.  Would SONAR have to be coded especially for this feature?

Kind regards,


Living Room Rocker