hello. my interest is video editing. i want to get serious with it. i use final cut pro and motion. i am going to buy a new iMac soon and iwant to get a powerful machine to edit, better than a macbook pro. but i cant figure out how the gpu will effect video editing? i dont play video games, i just edit video and have a lot of things open all the time. does it make the rendering faster? exporting faster? if the gpu has nothing to do with video editing i was going to get the 21.5, i7, 16ram, and gt650m gpu. i dont get it. can someone clear this up for me? thanks.
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iMac GPU and video editing
- Thread starter PavelT
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I'm a video editor/compositor as well, although I primarily use Adobe products (Premiere Pro and After Effects) which can benefit greatly from GPU acceleration (specifically with the Mercury Playback Engine and the Ray Trace 3D Engine). I know that Apple FCPX and Motion depend on GPU to a degree, however not as much as the Adobe products as far as I'm aware. That said, I recommend buying the fastest GPU you can afford, since you won't be able to upgrade that component in the iMac in the future. GPU acceleration seems to be the way video software is going these days, so an investment in a fast GPU can go a long way in future proofing your computer investment.
To me, the question isn't what is sufficient now, but what you'll still be happy with in a couple years. Since that's not a user-replaceable part, and more and more processing is done on the CPU using OpenCL, it's not something I'd scrimp on.
The 680mx is likely to be much faster than the 675mx. I haven't seen benchmarks yet, but based on the specs, it will have twice the raw processing power and twice the RAM. While that may not translate into twice the real-world performance, the increase will be significant.
The 680mx is likely to be much faster than the 675mx. I haven't seen benchmarks yet, but based on the specs, it will have twice the raw processing power and twice the RAM. While that may not translate into twice the real-world performance, the increase will be significant.
i was going to get the 27 with 680mx and open mac to replace the hdd with an SSD. But after watching the difficult tear downs on ifixit. i dont think i want to do that. so I'm opting for the fusion drive....but with the 27inch,i7,and 680mx, i certainly cannot afford to add a fusion drive to that mix..its over my budget...so now I'm opting to go back to top of the line 21.5 with the 650 GPU...thoughts? for video editing
For editing by all means go with higher CPU and Graphic card, and definitely the 27''. These things are once-for-all, can't change them later.
The SSD does make a huge difference in a system, i feel my current macbook air much snappier than my old mac pro, but it's something you can add later via an external thunderbolt SSD that you can even boot from.
Video editing is one of the very few applications in which people can actually do drastically benefit from an actual difference driven by faster CPUs.
I see. since the 21.5 has the same i7 cpu, its just 0.3ghz slower..will that work out or do i need the stronger GPU on the 27?