Those of you who have wondering about this can now finally get all the details.
Vegas Pro 11 GPU acceleration (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/gpuacceleration)

Benchmarking GPU Acceleration in Vegas Pro 11

Vegas Pro™ 11 leverages the processing capabilities of modern GPUs (Graphic Processing Units) using the industry-standard OpenCL™ framework. Rather than being tied to a single manufacturer or technology, this hardware-agnostic approach enables Vegas Pro 11 users to enjoy remarkable performance improvements across a broad range of popularly-priced, widely available GPU devices. By utilizing the amazing parallel computing resources of the GPU for video processing, the main CPU is freed up for other tasks, such as video decoding and user interface display.

Vegas Pro 11 accelerates both video playback and rendering, providing improved performance results from start to finish. Significant portions of the application were entirely reworked, resulting in an enhanced and more creative editing experience. Over 45 effects, transitions, generators and compositors are GPU-accelerated in Vegas Pro 11, as well as a substantial amount of built-in video processing such as crossfades, fades, alpha compositing, framerate resampling, interlace processing, pan/crop, track motion, opacity, fade-to-color, and multicamera display.

Vegas Pro 11 was benchmarked on a very affordable Dell Studio XPS 9100 PC, featuring an Intel Core i7 960 3.2 Ghz CPU and discrete GPU cards from both AMD and NVIDIA. The motion graphic test project uses AVCHD, XDCAM EX, and XDCAM HD422 video formats, along with PNG still images, generated text and a noise texture. The project takes advantage of GPU-accelerated compositing, track motion, fades, crossfades and time remapping, as well as a number of accelerated effects including gaussian blur, black and white, cookie cutter, bump map, mask generator, sepia, lens flare and chroma keyer. It also includes accelerated transitions such as cross effect, iris, and clock wipe.

I am test rendering as we speak. It is only using 60%-70% of my CUDA on the average. Very disappointing.

What aspect of a video card affects the level of improvement, # of bitstreams?

I have a GTX 460 and it will be utilized to some degree, but I wonder how much. I am going to install 11 in a bit and run comparison. I am working on a 1080p render now, so this is the perfect opportunity!

I have a GTX 460 and it will be utilized to some degree, but I wonder how much.

Download GPU Shark - lightweight and free GPU monitoring tool for NVIDIA GeForce and AMD/ATI Radeon graphics cards | oZone3D.Net (http://www.ozone3d.net/gpushark/). It will tell you exactly how efficiently any software uses the GPU.

Geeks3D: All GeForce 8 and higher are OpenCL-capable devices.

Sony NVIDIA: GPU-accelerated video processing requires an OpenCL-enabled GPU and NVIDIA driver 270.xx or later with a GeForce GT 2xx Series or newer GPU.

I can't enable "GPU acceleration video processing" in Vegas Pro 11, has anyone else been able to activate this? What video card do you have? Any ideas why mine won't activate?

Mine is on by default, it might be your card. Have you checked your card against those listed in the link?

Nicholas, if your card is as old as I think it is (3-4 years?) it won't work.

Don't feel bad, my relatively new card is a GTX 460, and it works, but has very little effect. Playback is the same, and rendering speed so far seems barely affected. I haven't researched it yet, but let's see who gets what results, and when they post that we'll know how much to spend on a new card, and if the results are worth it.

Jeff true I have a 2009 video card but according to Sony it's supported, oh well. GPU accelerated rendering only applies to AVC & selected plug-ins I figure.

This is my results from 1MIN of Sony EX1 footage with an added "Glow" filter. Setting for codec's wasn't the same only compare results within each codec to itself.

MainConcept AVC/AAC (*.mp4)
CUDA indicated in "System" tab.
Vegas 10: 00:03:49
Vegas 11: 00:03:02 - Faster

Cineform (*.avi)
No CUDA or "System" tab.
Vegas 10: 00:04:35
Vegas 11: 00:04:42 - Slower

V10 was actually faster with Cineform! I did this test twice to confirm these results. My conclusion is that GPU acceleration only applies to AVC rendering, I almost always render out to Cineform so I'm not sure what benefits V11 has for me?

Installed V11 on my brand new Dell XPS i7 laptop and for the life of me I can't tell if there is an improved preview video with GPU acceleration turned on, they both look pretty much the same to me.

A few months ago I decided it was about time I got a new video card. The one I had was seriously out of date and there were no recent updated Windows 7 drivers for it.

I got the HD 4600 series. Reasonable price and uses OpenCL.

B U T Vegas 11 does not support my newer card!!! So it Would cost me another $100 plus for a supported card on top of the price for Vegas 11.

So for the first time since I have had Vegas (since version 6c) I will not upgrade this time.
Sad…

Well, according to their website, previews and timeline functions are supposed to be improved by GPU acceleration...not sure because I also can't activate the button. I suspect my problem is related to my inability to load catalyst on my workstation. I suspect there's some remnant of an nvidea driver causing a conflict...I'll see if I can fix that tonight. On another note. I downloaded the trial of Boris Chroma Key and it seems to work fine with 11.

You might also need to verify that the video driver is also up to date if the card is listed as supported.

So for the first time since I have had Vegas (since version 6c) I will not upgrade this time.
Sad…

Truth be told Vegas updates always suck to a degree, I'm always super excited and then disapointed, always hoping Vegas will become more kick-ass, on the bright side atleast they design a new shortcut icon for every new version ;) along with a few new features. I'll upgrade before the promotional upgrade price expires. Do I need V11? Probably not but the smaller updates to come will be worth the upgrade.

It seems to do well with the Quadro 5000 cards but will anyone want to hand over $2399 for a graphics card!!! That's what my wholesaler has them listed at!!! (Order by special request only)

I don't think 11 will help me any...My current card is the el-cheapo Nvidia GT430 1GB (list price is a mere $62) .. to take advantage I would need at least a GTX570 and here that's $500!!!

I think I'll stick with 10 for a while and see what happens!!

Chris

Chris, I have a GT 430 as well. Vegas Pro 11 works with it just fine. GT 430 is a Fermi card, CUDA v. 2.1, precisely what Vegas wants. It has 96 CUDA cores, so, in theory, everything should run up to 96 times faster than without CUDA. In reality, Vegas only uses about 70% of its abilities, which would make it only about 67 times faster than no CUDA.

Still, nothing to sneeze at.

I have the GTX 570 and it works very good.
I did a 4 track multicamera editing with 7d footage while preview is Best(full) without no hiccups.
My computer is a I7 with 16GB RAM

So many questions....
Will my DDR 5 1GB GT240 work at all?
A quick look says prob not.
The card above works great with Premieres Mercury playback engine, after editing the Adobe supported cards list.
How does Vegas determine if a card is supported, if a card is not in the " list" of supported cards is there a way to edit that list like with Premiere.
If not, has anyone worked out the best "bang for buck" card available right now?
Is anyone here using Vegas and Premiere?
With the right card ( and I hope it's not just a quadro that's needed) , is the playback engine now as good as Adobe's?
I can prob answer a few of these questions myself tonight :)
Will report back

My findings so far with video assisted rendering

I have a project from 10e, loaded it into 11. So not sure if there is some hold up there or not.

Canon 7d native footage with lots of color changes, digital pans, some newbluefx added.

I selected a 1 min clip and started at a marker. Rendering media concept, blueray, 1920x1080 60i 25mhz.
When I say gpu rendering, I mean gpu acceleration, under options. ( i also gave up after doing 20% of the rendering as doing a whole min worth of footage, seemed pointless and it is getting late )

vegas 11 with gpu rendering 560TI at the 15% mark took 2 min 46 secs. 20% mark 3:39
vegas 11 with gpu rendering quattro 2000 at the 15% mark took 2 min 48 secs 20% mark 3:43
vegas 11 gpu rendering off at the 15% mark 6min 7 sec at the 20% mark 8:05

So using GPU rendering helped.

However. The system used 468watts of power and my cpu usage hovered around 21% for all three tests.

The kicker, vegas 10e same test.

15% mark 2:27 20% mark 3:13

cpu ran at 67% and system used 459 watts of power.

Dual xeon X6550.


P.S. both systems set to 16 cores or threads. ( this system has 12 cores, and 24 threads )

P.S.S. playback in 8bit mode was considerably better with Pro 11 with either video card. It was not fluid but with all the fx I had on the clips, much better than 10e. In 32bit, with out any fx, the playback was very smooth too. 10e in 32bit, playback was a bit jerky. ( that is using video preview on the quattro 2000 on a nec 10bit panel. on the best full setting )

Going to bed. I am going to look for more settings to find out why pro 11 is running with so much less cpu usage tomorrow...

One great thing is Vegas supports ATI cards unlike Adobe & ATI has Eyefinity so you can hook up to 6 displays on one card, the HD6870 comes with 2x DVI, 2x Mini DisplayPort, 1x HDMI ports.

Update: I bought a Radeon HD6870 today will post some results as soon as I have it installed, should tell a pretty good story.

Will my DDR 5 1GB GT240 work at all?

According to | NVIDIA Developer Zone (http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus), yours has compute capability 1.2, while Vegas 11 expects 2.0 or higher. Vegas will still work, it just will not give you the GPU acceleration.

So many questions....
Will my DDR 5 1GB GT240 work at all?
A quick look says prob not.
The card above works great with Premieres Mercury playback engine, after editing the Adobe supported cards list.
How does Vegas determine if a card is supported, if a card is not in the " list" of supported cards is there a way to edit that list like with Premiere.
If not, has anyone worked out the best "bang for buck" card available right now?
Is anyone here using Vegas and Premiere?
With the right card ( and I hope it's not just a quadro that's needed) , is the playback engine now as good as Adobe's?
I can prob answer a few of these questions myself tonight :)
Will report back

Unlike Premiere Pro CS5.x, there is no known hack for Vegas 11. The problem here is that the GPU support is within the executable that can't be modified without bricking the program. And as Adam stated, Vegas Pro 11 expects a CUDA compute capability of 2.0 or higher - which rules out all of the GeForce cards below the Fermi GT/GTX 400 series (the older cards will still work, but without GPU acceleration).

I would really hate to work in Sony Vegas support call center today, or for that matter ever. People calling, complaining, and griping about this feature not working when they are running older cards. What a freaking nightmare it would be.

My card barely makes a difference so far, but the render I did was very heavy with unsupported FX. I am anxious to do another test today, which I will get to do this afternoon.

My Radeon HD 6870 tests results are in and GPU acceleration is simply mind blowing! Playback is incredible even at Best (Full) it play (EX1) real-time and smooth when using "GPU Accelerated" filters.

1MIN of EX1 footage with a "Glow" filter, same system as my previous tests only got a new graphics card.
MainConcept AVC/AAC (*.mp4)

Vegas 11: 00:03:02 (Geforce 9800GT)
Vegas 11: 00:01:07 (Radeon HD6870)

Cineform (*.avi)

Vegas 11: 00:04:42 (Geforce 9800GT)
Vegas 11: 00:01:44 (Radeon HD6870)

In conclusion if you have been looking for an excuse to upgrade your graphics card Vegas 11 is that excuse! I'm getting 300% faster render times by simply upgrading my graphics card, performance like that usually costs much more than a $250 card. I can preview video Full Screen at Best with real-time speeds for EX1 footage and DSLR footage is very smooth however plays better at Preview level. Magic Bullet 2 however doesn't play smoothly at all I don't think it's using the GPU.

Many thanks for the replies.
Tried the trial last night and confirmed, doesent see GPU at all :(
Graphics card shopping this weekend :)
Any suggestions on best card to get that still allows Cuda support for Adobes playback engine as well?
GTX ????

nVidia GTX560Ti should be a great card for mid-range prices.
nVidia GTX570 for high-end.

My Radeon HD6870 is equivalent to a GTX560Ti, the only reason I went for the ATI and not nVidia is because my ATI card supports 4 monitors and I don't use Adobe enough to justify CUDA, 4 monitors was more important for my needs but if you use Adobe moderately a nVidia card that supports CUDA is a must! I've always been an nVidia guy this is my first ATI & I still wonder if I shouldn't have gone with nVidia instead but at least I have an entire monitor dedicated to a full screen video preview now.

I've just gone wild and ordered the GeForce GTX580 3GB version as part of a new edit system being built to order. I had already set aside a healthy budget for a complete system and as luck would have it the 3GB version was being offered as a free upgrade from the 1.5GB as part of a 'today only' promotion.

I'm guessing (hoping!) that preview performance and renders will fairly whizz along. Just in case it doesn't live up to expectation I thought I should hedge my bets and get 2TB of Raid 0+1 for data, a 600GB SATA III VelociRaptor for the OS and apps, an i7980 hexacore at 3.3GHz (also a free upgrade from the i970)and 12Gb of triple channel 1600MHz RAM, just to nudge it all along a bit further ;-)

Sorry, never had bragging rights before. Just seeing what they feel like! Flame away!

Lol, I'm feeling like I own a Pentium next to that monster Ian.

Can anyone answer this, would Ians GTX 580 give any better previews in Vegas than a GTX 560TI?

So my GTX 275 won´t work with Vegas Pro 11?!

Can anybody give me any recommendation on a new videocard to shop?

I´d love to do 1920x1080p29.97 preview with the following plugins:

Color Correction or Color Curves or Levels + Mercalli 2.0 (on CPU I guess) + Chroma Blur (sometimes: 5D2 you know!) depending on the individual Clip

AND:

Color Curves + Unsharp Mask in the video master

Do I need a whopping Nvidia 570 / Ati 6950 for that or should the 560 / 6870 even handle that?
Would you recommend Ati or Nvidia for thermal & power issues?

I used to be well informed on the Nvidia vs. Ati issue in earlier days but right now I have no clue if one or the other leads the race....

Any help greatly appreciated!

Best wishes, Andreas

Any video card will work with Vegas 11. It's a matter of which ones will speed up rendering and playback, and by how much. The latter is what is cloudy to me.

i'll join jeff in the clouds.....

it would be REALLY, REALLY helpful if scs could identify which cards assist rendering AND / OR playback.

i'm not really interested in a rendering speed up since it's the last step of my edit and basically a one off, but by gosh, if i can speed up playback rate i'm all for buying the RIGHT card, right now!

The latter is what is cloudy to me.

The nVidia cards with the Fermi architecture (CUDA 2.0 and 2.1) will speed things up.

Thanks for the earlier link Adam, very helpful.

But how much will Card A speed up things vs. Card B, that is what I wonder. Rather than blindly buying a card with a vague hope of improved performance, I would like to know specifics, as I'm sure we all do.

This info will become clearer as the dust settles and more reports come in, I suppose.

i HOPE!!!!

But how much will Card A speed up things vs. Card B, that is what I wonder.

Let us remember why a GPU (graphics processing unit) makes things run faster. Not because it processes graphics but because to process the graphics, modern GPUs are PPUs (parallel processing units). They have large numbers of cores, each of which can run the same code on different data. In our case, each can process a number of different pixels at a time.

So, all other things being equal, the more CUDA cores a card has, the more it speeds things up.

Now, the one I have is a GT 430. It costs less than $80 and has 96 cores. So it can process 96 pixels at a time. There is some overhead (the pixels have to be copied from computer memory to the device, then the results have to be copied back to computer memory). So, let us be conservative and say it speeds things up 50 times.

Let’s say some other card may have twice as many cores and cost twice as much. Is it worth the double price? I’d say no. The first $80 increases the speed fiftyfold, but the second $80 only doubles that. That is not a big difference compared to the 50.

Many cards cost a lot more money but the increase in speed is not great in comparison with the cheaper models. The GPU’s main functionality is to process graphics so people can play computer games. Essentially they are hardware-based ray tracers. That is their main purpose, the PPU is just a pleasant side effect. But most people who are looking for a fast GPU could not care less about video editing, they want to play games. We are a highly specialized type of GPU users, so we are not a priority to GPU manufacturers, just a niche market.

So, many of the expensive cards will not give us a much better performance than the more affordable ones, though they will make the games run faster.

These things are important to consider when deciding which card to get. Is the better performance worth the price difference? Up to a point, perhaps. But do not go overboard. We are not the target market for GPU performance. We are an afterthought.

Lol, I'm feeling like I own a Pentium next to that monster Ian.

Can anyone answer this, would Ians GTX 580 give any better previews in Vegas than a GTX 560TI?

The GTX580 (512 CUDA Cores) is serious showing off Ian, hehe, monster card & price. Gerald it's hard to say how much faster Ian's card will be over a GTX560Ti (384 CUDA Cores) but it will be faster. I tend to stick to mid range products because in a month or two something new comes out that out performs the previous best, helps me sleep better knowing I didn't spend too much.

I could be wrong, but dollar for dollar I suspect it's best to put this money on a faster processor rather than sink $500 into a video card. Then afterwards think about a card.

Like I said - first time I've ever had bragging rights!

Seriously though, this was not a purchase made just to show off. If I had more budget I would (possibly) have gone for the 590 with dual GPUs, but what I did was to spread my (pre-determined and fixed) budget over the core components, basically to get the best OVERALL spec I could. As I mentioned elsewhere, there is a diminishing return on such things and I appreciate that my choice is possibly overkill, however . . .

Vegas is the primary tool in my arsenal for me to pay to pay the mortgage and put my kids through college. The faster i can open it up, load projects, edit, preview, render, convert, etc, etc, the more money I make, or put another way, the quicker I recover my investment. Simple as that.

With regard to double the speed being worth double the money, I respond with a resounding YES, OF COURSE IT IS if you're making a full time living with it! The difference in price between the 580 and the 430 is about $380, based on NewEgg prices after rebates. I charge up to four times that per day. If I only benefit from ten minutes saved time per day I recover that difference in 12 days. After that I make a further $32 margin each day. Of course this is all a bit academic as I'm actually establishing the ROI based on the overall cost of the system, but the point is, if I get a decent ROI in an acceptable timeframe, who cares what the initial cost is? This ain't down to whether or not I have x CUDA cores or y VRAM, it's purely down to 'how quickly do I start earning from it?' (with a fair bit of 'and how much more will I enjoy working with Vegas as a result?' thrown in).

Additionally, I have little doubt that over the next few years software (and video) requirements will place even greater demands on the pc so I'm as much thinking for the future as for now. My current quadcore (which was highly specced at the time) is five years old and other than adding some more RAM and disk to it I haven't spent a penny more in upgrades. It paid for itself certainly within 2 years if not sooner. I have every hope that the same will be true of the new system.

Finally, despite my promise to myself to keep this as a Vegas only box, I have no doubt I will succumb and install the only game I possess, Flight Simulator X. Now, that should be something to behold :-)

I'm also still on Quadcore Ian but I have two PC's so I spread the load, like you say it's business. Post results when you get your card, we should look at creating a benchmark Vegas project with generated media and effects and comparing results between PC's.

As luck would have it, Sony already has!

www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro11benchmark

It's 2.5Gb, before you leap in! I haven't explored exactly what it contains so I don't have any further knowledge about it. When my new system is bedded in I'll give it a whirl . . . then sit back and wait for the 'told you so's to roll in ;-)

Any video card will work with Vegas 11. It's a matter of which ones will speed up rendering and playback, and by how much. The latter is what is cloudy to me.
I can´t select GPU acceleration under the video settings - the option is not available.

I have a Nvidia GTX 275 - it was a upper middle class GPU of the 2XX series - back then 285 and above where the hi-end cards.
But all 2XX series cards are listed with compute capability 1.3 on the nvidia site - and the vegas pro 11 site says any 2XX card will work!

Andreas, what Jeff is saying is that any card will work will v11, but not every card will take advantage of the new GPU acceleration. The 2xx series still work as they did before. If you want to take advantage of the new GPU acceleration you will need a higher end card.

My wife drives a Honda Civic 1.4. She uses the same freeway as I do in my Audi A6 2.4. But if she wants to get to her destination faster she will need a better car. Simple as that.

Sadly I have just spent all my spare cash on a new pc so she will have to wait. Also, she is not borrowing my car. Period. Just thought I'd mention it ;-)

We need someone with the time to create a list of facts and common issues with this GPU thing and to create a sticky, maybe, complete with links to the manufacturer websites, Sony websites, and a list of FAQs or something.

For example, if the "enable GPU rendering" cannot be checked or is greyed out or whatever, it means your card is not up to spec.

From the Sony Creative Software website here:

Vegas Pro 11 GPU acceleration (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/gpuacceleration)

Supported cards for GPU-acceleration:
To take full advantage of the GPU-acceleration in Vegas Pro 11, you will need a supported card with at least 512 MB of GPU memory.

GPU-accelerated AVC rendering:
NVIDIA: GPU-accelerated AVC rendering requires a CUDA-enabled GPU and NVIDIA driver 270.xx or later with a GeForce GTX 4xx Series or newer GPU.

ATI: OpenCL GPU-accelerated rendering requires an OpenCL-enabled ATI GPU and AMD Radeon Catalyst driver 11.7 or later with an AMD Radeon HD 57xx or newer GPU. AMD FirePro GPU should have 8.85 or newer.

GPU-accelerated video processing:
NVIDIA: GPU-accelerated video processing requires an OpenCL-enabled GPU and NVIDIA driver 270.xx or later with a GeForce GTX 4xx Series or newer GPU.

AMD: OpenCL GPU-accelerated video processing requires an OpenCL-enabled AMD GPU and AMD Radeon Catalyst driver 11.7 or later with an AMD Radeon HD 57xx or newer GPU. AMD FirePro GPU should have 8.85 or newer.

Bill, well done, thanks for your effort and the excellent specific information. We need to refer those who are having trouble to your post, for sure.

Do you know if the amount of RAM affects things much beyond 512MB? For example my card has 1 or 2GB of ram, I forget. I'm not seriously thinking about ditching my card, it's a new card with around 200 bitstreams or whatever they are called, and it would be frivolous for me to do so. I have an i7 980 processor, so I don't know how much more a $400 or $500 card would help.

If Adam is correct in his discussion of the diminishing returns, it would seem in my case I'm OK where I'm at.

...Do you know if the amount of RAM affects things much beyond 512MB?...


I have no idea - I am in the same boat as most folks here. I have an ATI 6670 Series card with 1 GB of memory. I like the x670 series because they don't require an auxiliary power connector and don't turn my desktop into a space heater.

But how well it performs - or if - I won't know until I test it, probably later this week.
I do know that on my Core 2 Quad Q6600 AVCHD/MPEG-4 encoding to almost any HD format is so slow that I don't. If I need to do an encode to HD, I use MPEG-2.

how do u know if the GPU is recognized?

Jeff, re RAM, the advice I was given was that you'll only really see the benefit of vast amounts of RAM in the gaming world, pretty much as Adam mentioned earlier. The 3GB in my card is waaay overkill, but as it was a free upgrade I wasn't going to complain . . . and then there's Flight Simulator . . . :-)

At what point beyond 512 the extra RAM becomes unnecessary (in Vegas) I'm not sure. Adam seems to be the font of knowledge in this regard.

Sean, in options/preferences/video there is a drop down list. If the only option is OFF, your card is not recognised.

If you can use GPU acceleration setting, turn it on and off, then your good. If not you can't.

Thanks Ian. It would seem that as Adam says it's the number of bitstream processors that's most important.

The Microcenter guy essentially told me that is what would affect things when I bought the card a few months ago, and it looks like he was correct.

The next step up from my GTX 460SE card was substatianlly more in cost as I recall, so the 460 seemed to be the best value. Hopefully I was right.

With my GTX 460SE I saved 3.5 minutes or so on a 5 minute project. 15 minutes with 10 versus 12 minutes with Vegas 11.

Respectable, but playback performance appears to be affected little. I do not render AVC for bluray, so the benefits are slim to me. A few minute saved on web renders, that's about it.

All in all, nothing to be excited about, but I'm not knocking it. It's a move in the right direction for sure.

Is the upgrade worth it? I don't know. If you have $150 why not? I'm hesitant to save projects with it for fear of some unknown bugs.