To ensure the best video performance, we strongly recommend a graphics card that is designed for video gaming (see below for more information). The following is a list of video cards that should work well with MediaShout (fastest at the top, and getting slower as you go down). All of these cards are in the recommended range of performance, but we recommend getting the best that you can afford. (The card that we use in systems that we sell are indicated in bold.) There are video cards that are more powerful than the top of our list, but we feel that in most cases, that is overkill and is not needed to run MediaShout.
| Nvidia GeForce | AMD Radeon |
| GTX 1080 Ti | RX 6700 |
| GTX 1080 | Radeon VII |
| GTX 1070 Ti | RX 6600 |
| GTX 1660 Super | RX 5700 |
| GTX 1660 Ti | RX 5600 |
| GTX 1070 | RX Vega 56 |
| GTX 980 Ti | R9 Fury X |
| GTX 1650 Super | RX 590 |
| GTX 1060 | RX 5500 XT |
| GTX 980 | RX 5500 |
| GTX Titan | RX 580, RX 570 |
| GTX 1060 | RX 480, RX 470 |
| GTX 970 | R9 390, R9 390X |
| GTX 780 Ti | R9 290, R9 290X |
| GTX 780 | HD 7990 |
| GTX 1650 (GV-N1650WF2OC-4GD) | R9 380, R9 380X |
| GTX 770 | R9 280X |
| GTX 680 | HD 7970 GHz Ed. |
| GTX 590 | HD 6990 |
| GTX 1050 Ti (PH-GTX1050TI-4G) |
R9 280, R9 285 |
| GTX 960 | HD 7950 |
| GTX 670 | HD 7870 LE (XT) |
| GTX 580 | HD 5970 |
| GTX 1050 | RX 460 |
| GTX 950 | R7 370 |
| GT 1030 | RX 550 |
(This chart is based on the excellent Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart from Tom's Hardware, which is updated monthly, and we encourage you to visit their site for up-to-date comparisons.)
More Information
In the chart above, you typically need to go about 2-3 sections (marked by the alternating shading) before you will see a difference in performance worthy of the difference in price. The cards above the range shown are significantly more expensive, but provide only limited—if any—difference in performance for the types of rendering that MediaShout uses. Cards below this range are considered unsuitable due to poor performance, incompatibilities with our graphics rendering, or both.
MediaShout processes graphics using technology similar to video gaming applications which utilize motion graphics rendering using DirectX and DirectShow (Windows' graphics technologies). While MediaShout uses DirectX 9 functions for communication between our software, video card, and the Windows OS, cards that support a higher level of DirectX also support DirectX 9 and may be used. Therefore, we recommend using a gaming video card like the NVidia GeForce or AMD Radeon series cards that have FULL DirectX 9 (or higher) support. In addition, we recommend that the video card have at least 1GB of "dedicated" (or "discrete") video memory. Of these two 'families' of cards, our preference is for NVidia cards because we've seen fewer issues with the driver software for those cards.
Vector-based graphics rendering is a common approach used by many engineering and design applications, and that is the rendering method that video cards like the AMD FirePro and NVidia Quadro are optimized for. While those cards will render using DirectX, they are typically much more expensive than gaming video cards, yet they will not typically provide better performance. Vector based cards are optimized for greater accuracy than is necessary for presentations, and the strength of gaming cards is speed.