Well, I used to edit standard def video on a 400mhz G3 just fine (that's a single core BTW
). Wasn't ideal but it worked.
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-Professional-GPU-Acceleration-502/
I don't see a particular favoritism to a GPU platform in Premiere CC, so I don't see that there's a reason it "has" to be a Gforce card.
http://blogs.adobe.com/premierepro/2013/05/improved-gpu-support-in-adobe-premiere-pro-cc.html
^^^
Note the above, there is no longer any reason it has to be an NV card for Premiere if it is version CC. Adobe appears to be moving in a direction that will work pretty well on both GPU platforms.
I would not buy into Nvidia at this time personally. The world is moving OpenCL, and Nvidia architecture is still optimized around the CUDA framework.
If there is a "minimum" hardware requirement to edit video or perform image manipulation, it is VERY low. Think about it... Half the country is walking around with a portable video toaster in their pockets or backpacks. you can edit HD video an a freakin iPAD [
http://www.apple.com/ios/imovie/ ] or Laptop. Additional hardware performance is just a convenience to improve productivity.
If it were me, building a max value AMD
media workstation, I would either use an A10 APU, or move straight to the FX-8320-FX-8350 + HD7770-HD7950 territory. For image editing only, anything beyond the HD7770 is not going to return much performance but HD7870s are often only $50 more so it's sort of an "obvious" jump considering how much of a leap in core configuration that buys [like double] (which underutilized or not, leaves room to grow into as software improves). For video editing, the "sky" is the limit on potential gains from GPU hardware under some circumstances, but there are other cases where it does not scale well.. so YMMV and there are obvious "value" stopping points. I would probably "stop" where the CPU and GPU are around the same price to maximize the performance/$ value.
A Lot of the functions in photoshop are still not taking advantage of multiple cores very well. Intel IPC advantages will typically win here if either is compared with equal GPUs, but realistically speaking image editing can be done pretty well on almost any hardware. Having enough RAM to "fit" the project size is the main factor that will bring a project screeching to a halt if it goes to the scratch disk (or system swap space). A Pentium G3220+HD6670 would be very comparable in performance to an A10 in photoshop CS6 or CC. If I were building a photoshop specific rig, and wanted to move up beyond the performance of an A10 or G3220+HD6670, then I would steer the build towards Intel, because an i5, i7[quad], E3, or E5[quad] paired with an HD7770 is going to be faster on average than a similarly configured AMD system with high end FX chips.
If I were building a system that is leaning more towards the optimization of Premeire pro performance [maximum value], then the FX-8320 and FX-8350 would absolutely command deserving attention in their respective price points as Premiere is very well optimized for multiple threads and scales well on AMDs new architecture, taking very good advantage of the high integer instruction throughput. One would have to move to a 6 core (or higher) Intel system at significantly higher cost to appreciate noteworthy gains above what AMD can offer for ~$150-200. Having seen the variability of GPU performance scaling depending on conditions (the project), I think that again, the CPU/GPU investment should be similar, (don't spend more than double the value of one of these, on the other).
Regards,
Eric