Best card for H264 encoding using Media Encoder

[Kusumas]

Hi,

I'm going through the pain of trying to upgrade my PC desktop / tower.

I only export .mp4 H264 videos, using Media Encoder.

What are the crietria I should look for in choosing the best graphics card, please? ... other than price - I need to stay under about £700 GBP.

The main issue is the H264 encoding - I learned that some cards simply don't do that but I don't even know what to look for, when assessing the bewildering array of hardware.

Any help would be fabulous because this seems to be such a difficult questions to answer!

[John T Smith]

This is about Premiere Pro, but I think the coding engine is the same

Not everything uses CUDA - and other hardware acceleration notes
https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/faq-all-about-hardware-encoding-in-premiere-pro-14-2/m-p...
https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/everything-you-need-to-know-about-gpu-in-premiere-pro/td...
https://community.adobe.com/t5/Premiere-Pro/GPU-Rendering-Unavailable/td-p/10726745

[Kusumas]

Thank you so much John T Smith.

To let you know, the video and much of the information in the second link https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/everything-you-need-to-know-about-gpu-in-premiere-pro/td... is out of date, being over 3 years old.

The rest of the information is helpful as background but, again, out of date to this issue.

I do appreciate your help.

Johnny

[RjL190365 · Accepted solution]

With that kind of GPU budget in the UK you might be lucky to score a GeForce RTX 3080, but more likely you'd have to settle for a 3070 or 3060 series GPU (with or without the "Ti" suffix). These GPUs have the NVENC that's useful for hardware encoding of H.264 output.

[Kusumas]

That's a great start. Do you have experiene using those cards? The reviews all complain that they're really noisy - is that likely to be an issue with video work (as in, is it an over-clocking gaming problem)?

Any ideas?