choose a Nvidia

[bdyctchr]

Buying a laptop that I will run Pinnacle video editing software. Pinnacle states that I need a NZIDIA GeForce 6 series or higher (CUDA enabled for support). I am looking at the HP Envy 17" whick has the processor needed with an i7, but has a Nvidia 940M GPU. My question is, is this NVIDIA a 6 series or higher, that will accommodate my software requirement?

 

[SoNic67]

Theoretically it is. Practically Pinnacle, since it was bought by Corel, it was left behind in development. I used to own both Pinnacle and Corel, but now I have switched to Cyberlink PowerDirector because of their constant support of newer video cards capabilities.

Also a word of advise - the laptops that have combo Intel and nvidia GPU's have a lot of issues with video editors. The price you pay will not get a lot of performance.
Personally I always recommend a desktop/workstation for video editing and keep laptops just for browsing the web. Second hand Dell's on ebay are very cheap.

 

[bdyctchr]

Theoretically it is. Practically Pinnacle, since it was bought by Corel, it was left behind in development. I used to own both Pinnacle and Corel, but now I have switched to Cyberlink PowerDirector because of their constant support of newer video cards capabilities.

 

[bdyctchr]

Thx SoNic67. I will dig into Cyberlink and check it out. You think that graphics card will support?

 

[migronesien]

Thx SoNic67. I will dig into Cyberlink and check it out. You think that graphics card will support?

Yes, the GPU is supported, since it's a 900 series card.
So a lot newer than a 600 (6) series card.

 

[SoNic67]

The level of "support" varies between different editors. Last version of Pinnacle that I have used was 18.5 and, even with GPU acceleration being enabled, the performance was behind the PowerDirector, because this one uses for encoding the new nvidia NVENC encoder (not the CUDA cores). I had to actually extract some components from an older nvidia driver (the driver wasn't supporting 900 series) to make my GTX 960 CUDA -based encoding work on Pinnacle 18. Newer nvidia drivers dropped the CUDA encoding support in favor of NVENC.

I am strongly suggesting though not to buy a laptop for video editing. On every forum that I go related to video editing (one of my hobbies), 80% of the complains are related to laptop issues, especially to intel-nvidia cooperation.
On a desktop you can disable the intel video when you have a dedicated video card (like a GTX960), but on a laptop the nvidia video has to "flow" trough the intel to get to the integral LCD display.