Nvidia GTX 660 Ti not working with Vegas

[Marius Boruch]

I upgraded my graphic card from GTX 470 to GTX 660Ti and to my surprise and big disappointment CUDA and card itself is not even recognized in Vegas 10e. I got latest drivers 314.21. what is going on????? will older drivers make it work?
(I also have trial Vegas 12 and it recognizes the CUDA but there is minimal improvement in rendering speed if any. Did you have similar experience with newest Nvidia cards??? Will older drivers work or it is just Vegas problem. and why???

[Danny Fye]

Nvidia designed the 600 series cards to be game cards. Along with the latest drivers.

If it is not too late, return that card and find a new or used 560ti or 570 card and install it with the 296.10 drivers.

[Chris Medico]

It doesn't have anything to do with the cards target (gamer vs pro).

The processor architecture changed with the 600 series cards. Software directly accessing the CUDA engine is not going to work.

I ran into the same situation with Squeeze when I upgraded my video card. Luckily I have been able to use HandBrake on my 6 core machine and I now get better performance than when I was using CUDA acceleration on my GTX250.

Take a look at this chart and you'll see which version the different chipsets support.

CUDA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cards supporting v3 and above will be the troublemakers till the vendors update their products.

[Marius Boruch]

thank you; I wasn't aware of that. I have my old GTX470 with 300+ CUDA and was hoping to leap into 1300+ CUDA with GTX660.

[Chris Medico]

I was hoping for an bump up in performance as well. I was disappointed to find out that Squeeze would use only 128 cores. They tell me in a future release it will be supported but it will be a paid upgrade. They don't intend to patch the problem in the current software.

I'm sure Sony will update Vegas to include the new GPUs.

[Marius Boruch]

well...as I mentioned before I have trial V12 and with this new card works horrible; much, much worse than V10e; yellow rectangle appears around the video - are we back to those times of Premiere and Apple rendering nightmare.

[Chris Medico]

For kicks you may want to try and do a "same as source" type of export and see if HandBrake will work any better for final renders.

I know that won't help for internal rendering. I'm using Media Composer and have my internal renders set to DNxHD so when I export I get a DNxHD output file that HandBrake converts to h.264 with excellent quality and at a rate at least 5x real time.

I needed to keep the newer video card in my machine to make Davinci Resolve happy.

[Marius Boruch]

I dont get that handbrake advantage in vegas...how does it help me when I am editing project in vegas timeline...how can I "handbrake" a project from vegas? Do you pre render it to h264 and then import all your files to timeline for editing...kind of confusing

[Chris Medico]

Sorry if I wasn't clear. That is what I meant by "internal" renders. Things rendering on the timeline. A HandBrake workflow won't help with that at all. If you are using an editing friendly codec as your timeline render codec the CUDA won't help you there either. What are your timeline render codec settings in Vegas?

If the performance of the software itself is not good enough you'll have to change video cards.

[Marius Boruch]

I am using MAgic Bullets which would benefit greatly by having more CUDA

[Jeff Harper]

I suspect Chris is right. As he advised in another thread, your upgrade was probably not a wise choice, and might have been a waste of money.

It has long been known here that taking advantage of GPU acceleration with Vegas is NOT guaranteed to work for every configuration, there are many many people who have to turn it off to get best performance.

Can anyone confirm that the 6XX series cards work with Vegas or not? I really don't know, but thought I'd read in this forum that the 6 series do not work with Vegas.

[Joe Kollee]

I have been doing research on the kepler series video cards and read some interesting changes. From what I read, it appears that nvidia is trying to put a stop to using the gaming cards for professional use. I gather there were many complaints as to why buy a $1700 quadro card when a $300 570 geforce card would cream it for cuda work. So they changed the way the cuda core engine works in the new kepler series cards and they wont release the SDK to anyone who should be using the pro series cards. Well almost anyone, I believe Adobe has the rights to use the gaming card in their software as they have the SDK to use geforce kepler series and cuda. From what I read, the new cards are not completely handicapped someone was saying they are dividing the total cuda cores by 4 and that is all that will be used so that the card is not completely useless when used in a pro environment using the fermi SDK. Nvidia is releasing a new gaming card called the Titan, it has 2688 cuda cores and is built on the Telsa K20 technology. This would have been wicked if we could use it in an NLE environment. That card is coming in at about $1000. The K20 nearly $4000 as a pro card add in secondary card, which also needs a Quadro K series video card to work.

I hope this helps.

JK

[Randall Leong]

Hold everything. No version of Sony Vegas Pro ever supported CUDA for GPU acceleration (because Sony did not want to pay nVidia for the use of the CUDA license and SDK). The only API that Sony supports for GPU acceleration is OpenCL. And nVidia's gaming cards have always had relatively slow performance in OpenCL in comparison to the same company's Quadro cards with even lesser specs than the GeForces, as well as competing GPUs from AMD (the former ATi graphics company).

And it looks like the GeForce 600 series GPUs are not the only GPUs affected by this bug. I dug further, and also discovered that users of Vegas with K-series Quadros are also having the very same problem as those with GeForce 600-series cards.

[Joe Kollee]

Thanks Randall, for pointing that out. Like I said I was reading about SDKs and issues with the K series cards. It makes sense that the issue travels over to the other pro cards too then. I was trying to figure out how any K series card could work, since they changed the way things work in the new series. It would be up to sony to support them then.

I was working on a quote for a software package called Lumion3d for a customer, and they use directX to get around the SDK issues too. That company uses HLSL shaders within DirectX to do its rendering, so the gaming card is perfect for them, namely the Titan and the company states they do not recommend the quadro or the firepro cards at all. Then I tried to find out if that Titan card would make a huge difference for vegas and since so few of them are on the market and even fewer of those people use vegas, it took along time to gather what information I could find. Thanks for the correction.

JK

[Christopher Young]

Hi All ~

Working with two boxes here both running with Vegas v12. One running with the 660 Ti card and the other with a GTX 680 and both machines have benefitted from the card upgrades. Interestingly though both boxes have v10 and v11 on board and even with the latest drivers won’t see the series 6 cards. Yet both v10 and v11 had no problems seeing the series 5 cards that were previously in the boxes. Soon as the series 6 cards went in v10 and v11 lost the ability to see them. Looks like the series 6 cards and drivers are not backward compatible with Vegas v10 and v11.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney