What determines whether hardware is better for video editing or gaming?

ImNotTheDonkey

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Jan 4, 2014
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Firstly I'm not much of a computer geek, I know a bit about computers but don't really know how to compare hardware, the most I know is Googling different components and seeing their benchmark scores, but presumably this doesn't really tell the full story in terms of its performance. So, bear with me.

Recently Apple's new Mac Pro was released and with it plenty of people attempted to gather components to build a better PC for less money, Tek Syndicate made a video in October claiming to have made a better PC before the Mac Pro was actually released to the public - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeIW7PAi6_o

But according to a lot of people, it turns out Tek Syndicate is building their PC incorrectly, approaching it with a gaming stance, while the Mac Pro isn't built for gaming and is actually for things such as video editing. So, from what other people have tried in terms of building a comparable DIY PC, the new Mac Pro is actually 'cheap' for what it is, and it's difficult to build a PC that's close - http://www.extremetech.com/computing/173695-apples-new-overpriced-10000-mac-pro-is-2000-cheaper-than-the-equivalent-windows-pc

Now that the Mac Pro is available to buy people have been doing benchmarks and trying out games on them to find that the overall performance for gaming is rather bad, obviously because it's not built to be a gaming rig, it's built to be a workstation. So, my question really is, what is it about different components that determines whether or not it'll be better for gaming or video editing? Is it easy to build one that will be equally as good at gaming and video editing? Or is this just a load of garbage? What is it that makes such a powerful machine such as the Mac Pro play games badly?
 
In general, gaming needs a strong graphics card able to present frames fast enough.
Few games can use more than 2-3 threads, so a quad with strong individual cores is best.
Intel prevails there because of much more efficient cores.

Editing can use many threads or cores, so a strong cpu with many cores is most helpful there.
amd with more cores becomes competitive.

For editing, some apps can use facilities of the graphics card such as CUDA on Nvidia cards to speed up work.
 

ImNotTheDonkey

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Jan 4, 2014
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Should have mentioned that I know a bit about CUDA stuff as well in regards to video editing. I do video editing not gaming, I don't think I'd build a gaming PC but I'm still interested nevertheless.

I think I found the answer anyway when it comes to GPUs - http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/workstation-graphics-card-gaming,3425.html - so I guess there's not much more to the CPU than what you said? Gaming = cores not too necessary; video editing = cores very necessary. But what about RAM? From what I've read, games don't need to have too much RAM, but video editing needs as much as possible (I have 16GB and I don't think I get close to using up that much when editing 1080p video), how about speeds though?
 
Games, by itself will not use more than 2-3gb.

64 bit apps can use as much ram as they can get to keep work in ram and reduce external hard drive I/o which is comparatively slow.

Intel does not much depend on fast ram for compute power.
AMD chips need faster ram to work at their best.