Hey everyone! I’m finally reaching a breaking point with my current workstation and need some expert advice on a GPU upgrade. I’ve been using an older RTX 2060 for the last few years, but as I’ve transitioned into shooting more 10-bit 4:2:2 4K footage on my Sony A7SIII, my timeline has become a stuttering mess. It’s honestly getting frustrating to wait for the playhead to catch up every time I make a simple cut or try to scrub through the b-roll.

I primarily switch between Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. While I know the CPU and RAM are doing a lot of the heavy lifting, my current GPU is constantly hitting 100% utilization during color grading and whenever I apply any kind of temporal noise reduction. I’m really looking for a card that can handle smooth 4K playback without me having to rely on proxies for every single project. It would be a huge time-saver to just drop footage in and start editing immediately.

I’ve been eyeing a few options like the RTX 4070 Ti Super or even stretching my budget for the RTX 4080 Super, but I’m also curious if the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is a viable contender given its 24GB of VRAM. I’ve heard mixed things about AMD drivers in creative apps, but that extra memory is tempting for heavy effects and future-proofing. I’m also really interested in AV1 encoding support since that seems to be the standard we're moving toward in 2024.

My budget is sitting right around the $800 to $1,100 range. I’m not really a gamer, so I don’t care about ray-tracing performance in games; I just want the fastest render times and the most stable experience in my NLE.

Given the current market and the latest driver updates this year, what would you guys recommend as the best 'bang for your buck' GPU specifically for 4K video editing right now? Should I prioritize VRAM capacity or stick with Nvidia for the CUDA support?