Does an Audio workstation need dedicated graphics and why?

[thrf]

If your'e using integrated graphics, your'e using CPU+RAM of your system that you can use for intended tasks, if you use dedicated graphics, your'e using dedicated GPU (CPU) and Dedicated RAM (GDDR) so your motherboard can rely the graphics tasks on this device and save motherboard performance for final use.

If you want the least bottleneck in your System / DAW, i would recommend any decent macOS compatible card, if you dont game or dualboot, an Nvidia GTX960 is more than sufficient, for rendering power in OpenCL will rely on CPU more than GPU that takes the most part on previewing projects than the encoding performance task.

 

[jiffyslot]

I've now learned that it really depends on the code of the DAW. Avid's pull on resources is uh, uneven. In Pro Tools, some days it hammers the GPU, today, not so much. Same session, same setup. High Sierra here. I'll try it in Mojave and report back...


Okay, so here are the quick 'n' dirty results from my dual-boot system. Check out the GPU usage:

Pro Tools 2018.10 in High Sierra:




Pro Tools 2018.10 in Mojave: