Graphics card question

[Ian Stark]

Is there a 'league table' for the best/most stable graphics cards for Vegas Pro 12?

I'm most interested in the best preview performance rather than render speed. I edit a lot of mixed formats but mainly AVCHD from a Panasonic AF100 and GH2.

I've read a number of threads here but none seem absolutely conclusive and there are some conflicting views.

I currently have a Nvidia 580GTX with 3gb RAM. I don't know if it's the culprit for the numerous crashes I experience in Vegas but I'd like to try and eliminate (or blame) it by trying a different card. After Effects and Cinema4D are stable, so I'm not 100% sure if it is the card at fault. I have noticed that it runs hot (72 deg C) when it's rendering or previewing complex projects. I believe it's within tolerances, but could it affect other components such as RAM and cause a crash?

Perhaps it's the driver? I always keep up to date with the latest drivers, but I am now reading reports of people that have reverted to an earlier driver with positive results. What's the general feeling about that?

Finally, I have noticed (no empirical data, just a feeling) that crashes are less frequent when I only use one monitor. It would kill me to have to take this backward step, but I wonder if that does make any difference?

Any and all advice welcomed.

[Ian Stark]

I appreciate this is an article about Nvidia video cards with Adobe Premiere, but it contains a lot of useful information that I expect is relevant to the Vegas experience.

Adobe Premiere CC, CS6, CS5.5 and CS5 Video Cards with CUDA Acceleration Mercury Playback Unlock Enable MPE Hack Mod Tip OpenCL David Knarr

[Gerald Webb]

Hey Ian,
I have exactly the same card as you.
What do you consider frequent crashing? 1 every 5 min, 1 an hr, 1 a day?
When doing slightly more complex projects, ie. lots of Pan crop, varied opacity on multiple retimed clips with FX etc I prob get one white screen every hour or so.
I do find it annoying, but kind of except it as well. Hitting Shift B now has a prerequisite of hitting Control S before hand. It does become second nature.
On the monitor front, interestingly I think I have become more stable since upgrading my second monitor to match my main Dell ultrasharp monitor... maybe mismatched monitors contribute to problems... who knows.
Until recently I always had GPU turned off, lately Ive had it turned on and TBH havent really noticed any more instability. Latest driver too.
One more thing, I cant remember the last time I had a crash in AFX. So whatever it is does seem limited to Vegas.

[Ian Stark]

Sounds like my experience is similar to yours, Gerald, although perhaps more frequent. Like you I save frequently! In fact, I haven't reinstalled Edwards autosave since rebuilding - must do that.

If I'm doing a relatively straight edit then I can expect maybe one or two crashes (white screens) an hour, either during the render or when being a bit hasty with clicking something or other. Most of my projects are fairly complex, though, with mixed media, loads of track motion, pan/crop, fx, generated media etc. Those can be crash city, every few minutes at times.

One thing I have noticed is that following Edward's advice I now only use the OFX version of NewBlue's Titler Pro 2 and this is infinitely more stable.

I can almost guarantee that when I exit Vegas 'legally' I immediately get a 'Vegas has stopped working' message. Not a major nuisance but niggling (any app settings in Vegas are lost).

Both my monitors are identical. They're not great quality (Asus 23") but when I am doing critical cc-ing I view on a production monitor via a Blackmagic card.

I have been able to bring AE down, but it is a very rare thing indeed. Of all the apps I use, Vegas seems to fall over more than any of the others.

Still love it, though ;-)

[Leslie Wand]

agree with ian 100% - only difference is i use viewsonic 23" ips's.

[Graham Bernard]

All relating to nVidia.

Anything other than a QUADRO is regarded as not getting Pro support. Interpret that as you will.

Is there a definitive Table of Cards? No.

Are there pointers to what is possible with non-QUADRO cards? Yes.

Try this for interpretation:

"GPU-accelerated video processing and rendering require an OpenCL™-supported NVIDIA®, AMD/ATI™, or Intel® GPU with 512MB memory or more. (please see the GPU acceleration page for more detailed specifications and driver requirements)

Supported cards for GPU-acceleration

To take full advantage of the GPU-acceleration in Vegas Pro 12, you will need a supported card with at least 512 MB of GPU memory."

And this one!

"NVIDIA recommends NVIDIA Quadro for professional applications and recommends use of the latest boards based on the Fermi architecture."

See that? "NVIDIA recommends NVIDIA Quadro for professional applications" - What that means is that nVidia QUADROs get the technical PRO application elbow room and support focus.

So, there are QUADROs and then the "others". This has been talk-to-death in many places, many times but what is clear to me, is that the QUADROs are the choosen=supported PRO cards.

Am I staying with Vegas? Yes.

Am I staying with my nVidia GTX560ti? So far, yes.

Have I changed my workflow to make the best use of my creative output? Yes.

Have I done this 'cos of this card "support" separation on the support thing? Yes.

If I have got ANY of this wrong I'll be more than happy to retract.

[Leslie Wand]

+ 1 grazies comments....

dearie oh dearie me, i'm sounding like a stuck record....

[Al Bergstein]

Yes, Ian, crashes in Vegas are a way of life, many more than other similar apps, IMHO. Graham has some good info in his post that I second. However, I've found that moving to *one* monitor seems to help a great deal. What a pain. Also, as I've stated elsewhere, I have found that rendering all my graphics on a separate project, taking them out to the same format as the master timeline (ie. mxf), and then reimporting them into the project helps enormously. If I had to guess, something is buggy with the integration APIs that Vegas has shared with the 3rd party community. New Blue has had a lot of problems on my machine, even with upgrading to the newer versions, which have reduced the number of crashes. Boris has been more stable. I'm a big fan of Boris, but do like the titling capabilities of NB. Be sure to upgrade your NB to the latest version, which it sounds like you have done. I also close the project down first, and then close Vegas. I do not automatically load the last project by turning that off in the preferences. Gerald's idea of matched monitors is not something I've thought of but will likely move to. Eliminating all variables is always a good idea.

As far as preview speed and smoothness, you should be getting good playback on one monitor using AVCHD at higher resolutions. I have no problem playing back Canon C100 AVCHD on my machine with the 570 and 4 GBs of RAM.

I have moved onto Adobe for all new long form projects, but still use Vegas for "legacy" project updates, and occasionally when I need to do a fast and dirty simple interview style project since Vegas is by far the easiest product to work on in the 'professional' category. Since I've invested in it and have a sunk cost I don't feel like totally abandoning it. And since the first major update to 12, it seems to be better, though 11 was about as stable as the latest rev of 12.

I'm running a GTX 570 and using driver 311.06, which with one monitor has proven *more* stable with Vegas than before. I can usually edit a substantial timeline of one or two cameras, with no crashes. When I add the efx like NB is when the problems start happening. It has no problems running Adobe on the same machine. Adobe's biggest issues come from their handoff to their media encoder, which is very tempermental and can crash especially if you are switching between apps, or trying to start a second project. Whatever you do, on either application, I recommend stripping *everything* off the box you use, and do not run Chrome or other browsers while working. There seems to be something with memory management when I'm running Chrome and I find that there are more crashes on Vegas. Maybe it's a fluke, but repeatable enough to make me more cautious. I also make sure that all nonessential apps are shut down, including their stubs, via the task manager. I do run a anti virus app, but it's Microsoft's security essentials, which seems to be the least intrusive. I also turn off all automatic updates and update alerts. I have used my second monitor to run my other machine with all my 'office apps" like email and browsing on it. A ridiculous thing, given that my Mac doesn't ever experience this kind of issue. Oh well.

One last thing. I found that it appears that somewhere along the line, I had a corrupted user profile. I created a new one and loaded Vegas onto that new UP. This also seems to have helped but not eliminated crashes. If you are rebuilding your machine regularly, try just creating a new profile. It saves time. (G).