GPU acceleration in Pro 11

[Gerald Webb]

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

[Joe Kollee]

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...

[Nicholas de Kock]

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.

[Adam Stanislav]

Originally Posted by Gerald Webb

Will my DDR 5 1GB GT240 work at all?

According to | NVIDIA Developer Zone, 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.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Gerald Webb

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).

[Jeff Harper]

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.

[Nicholas de Kock]

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.

[Gerald Webb]

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 ????

[Nicholas de Kock]

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.

[Ian Stark]

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!

[Gerald Webb]

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?

[Andreas Neubert]

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

[Jeff Harper]

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.

[Leslie Wand]

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!

[Adam Stanislav]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

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.