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Video Graphics Card Selection
Hi all. I am running vegas 9 pro and recently upgraded to Win 7 pro. The pc currently has:
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
4 gigs of ram
1.8ghz Intel Core Duo
Board: ASUSTeK Computer INC. P5W DH Deluxe Rev 1.xx
Bus Clock: 266 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. 1901 01/24/2007I would like to upgrade to a 1gig video card but have no idea what is best for vegas 9.0 and possibly a future upgrade to 10.
When I look at the numerous choices I have no idea how much is to little and how much is to much. Would like to start in the $250 to $300 dollar range. Anybody have a specific brand or model they use that will give me some confidence in selection?
Thanks
JG
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6 Replies
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You would get a lot more bang for the buck with a faster processor.
Sony Vegas will work just as well with a $10 display adapter as with a $200 card. No difference.
Version 10 does have CUDA support, and then only when encoding Sony AVCHD, and then it’s only useful for a pathetically slow processor. Even though a dual-core processor was state of the art – ten years ago – it’s still likely that CPU only encoding would be faster than GPU assisted.
There is no preview advantage to the GPU. In my opinion, Vegas doesn’t need it and the architecture of Vegas makes it unlikely that it ever will. (If it were easy, Sony would have done it long ago).
The only consideration would be the requirements of any plug-ins that you may purchase that do use the CUDA processors in the display adapter. Boris Continuum Complete (BCC7) for example uses the CUDA cores if it finds them. Go to their website (https://www.borisfx.com) and see what cards they recommend.
I strongly recommend that you buy a dual-head video card and a second monitor. Once you edit with two monitors, you won’t want to go back to one. (I have four).
Hope This Helps.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Thanks for the info. The current video adaptor is a dual vga, I agree with you, I will never be without 2 monitors.
Let me add one thing. With Vegas 7 and XP my time line preview was fine and in sync with audio.
Currently same hardware, now with Vegas 9 on Windows 7 my preview looks fine but video lags behind the audio as the cursor moves across the timeline.
The processor is unchanged but I assumed the graphic demand of Win 7 had gone up and was screwing with my time line. Still go with the processor upgrade only?
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BCC doesn’t use CUDA, it used OpenGL. Stephen probably knows this, but I figured I’d explain it all to the group, since this is a point of confusion.
There are actually several different programming interfaces a graphics card presents.
The oldest is the “standard” 3D graphics interface. And on Windows machines, there are actually two of these, Microsoft’s DirectX graphics interface, and the OpenGL (Open Graphics Language) API defined in the 80s largely by Silicon Graphics. DirectX is more often used for gaming (though some games use OpenGL), OpenGL is considered more precise, and thus is used for 3D video or 3D CAD rendering.
The next is video playback acceleration. Like graphics, this is another very graphics specific API. Microsoft added their interface, DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) way back, to standardize the fact that video cards were starting to support video acceleration in hardware. This was greatly improved under DXVA 2.0 in Vista, but being Vista, most folks didn’t know about this until Windows 7.
On my 6-core AMD processor, playing back a 1080//60p video (kind of the worst-case these days) will run around 50% CPU (all six) playing unaccelerated in a program like VLC. When run it plain old Windows Media Player, which uses Microsoft’s accelerated H.264/AVC decoder, I see only 7-8% CPU being used.
So far, this hasn’t been used in a video NLE. I believe it could be used, but it would be pretty complex, since the goal of this is delivering a decoded image to video memory, not to system memory.
The final set of graphics card APIs fall under the banner of GPGPU compuing: General Purpose GPU computing. The idea here is, why not make those 100’s of graphics processors do any kind of work. This idea has also kind of co-evolved with the GPUs themselves… the latest GPUs do things like 64-bit floating point, which isn’t necessarily all that useful just for graphics rendering.
There are several different programming interfaces for these. Not surprisingly, the graphics chip companies started this whole thing, so there’s the CUDA interface, from nVidia, which only works on nVidia processors, and the Streams interface, now depricated, which used to run on the AMD/ATi chips. These allow a programmer to break a math problem down into many parallel chunks and use the GPU to compute it, which is a good thing. The bad part — as you get faster match engine architectures, they’re harder to use in a natural way.
So coders started first with plain old floating point math, very easy but only runs in parallel if you have a CPU with several floating point pipelines and a runtime scheduler. Next came the SIMD instructions: one instruction runs on several chunks of data… this is also called small vector math. This is MMX and the various SSE levels… much harder to code, but much faster once you do.
There are other GPGPU APIs. One probably already on most systems is OpenCL (Open Computer Language), an effort to make GPGPU run independently of GPU type. nVidia supports OpenCL in CUDA these days, and AMD/ATi now supports OpenCL as their primary interface. It’s only really been solid for less than a year now… Sony added OpenCL support in recent versions of Vegas 10, just for Sony AVC rendering, as with the CUDA support before.
The main reason Sony hasn’t integrated this for other kinds of acceleration, I believe, is that it’s a very big job. You’re not just re-designing the video decoding, rendering engine, and other internals around GPGPU, you’re adding this to any non-trivial plug-in, or the effect is muted. Other companies made edit-time GPU acceleration a major selling point of this year’s releases, particularly Adobe and Grass Valley. Sony’s major new feature was stereoscopic support, perhaps the new plug-in engine, and apparently, some major under-the-hood re-architecting.
Given that most NLEs these days, like Adobe, have largely copied Sony’s modern behavior (no re-rendering of input video, realtime on-screen editing, etc), I don’t believe GPU acceleration for editing is impossible. Given the level of support Sony seems to devote to new releases over companies like Adobe, I’m also not holding my breath.
But hey, at least Vegas isn’t going backwards like Apple did with FCP X. In truth, while the 3D stuff wasn’t all that useful to me, overall, proper support of BCC plug-ins via the OFX standard has proven more useful to me than accelerated editing.
-Dave
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You are correct, I am mistaken about the processes used by BCC.
For the OP, here is the link to the Boris recommended video cards:
https://www.borisfx.com/sony/bccsvp/Graphics-Cards.phpPersonally, and this is just me, I avoid ATI because of driver issues that I have personally experienced.
[Dave Haynie] “The main reason Sony hasn’t integrated this for other kinds of acceleration, I believe, is that it’s a very big job. You’re not just re-designing the video decoding, rendering engine, and other internals around GPGPU, you’re adding this to any non-trivial plug-in, or the effect is muted.”
I’ve essentially been saying this for a while. As I see it, the architecture of Vegas would take more time to prepare a frame for the display GPU to finish processing than just doing it all in the CPU in the first place. If it were easy, SCS would have done it a long time ago.
Steve Mann
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
[Stephen Mann] “Personally, and this is just me, I avoid ATI because of driver issues that I have personally experienced.
“I’ve flip-flopped a few times. Way back when, you had to get a Matrox card if you ran a hires screen… nVidia, ATi, and some of the earlier companies just had crap video DACs, in the days of analog.
Then we got to the start of 3D acceleration. I had a nVidia RIVA128 card, their second generation, and it was good. For awhile. But again, DAC issues.. and it got worse.
Replaced that with an ATi, and I did ATi for a generation or two more, because they had finally done high quality output. But, like you, I ran into insurmountable driver issues… I think they had problems with memory over a GB or two, and this spanned at least two generations of cards. So I went to nVidia, where I remain.
And my 8800GT is getting long in the tooth — very hot for the performance it delivers, there are much better graphics cards for not all that much money. But I don’t have a specific direction for myself, so it’s hard to recommend a specific board to others. But certainly, for me, a list from Boris for BCC7 would be a great place to start.
[Stephen Mann] “[Dave Haynie] “The main reason Sony hasn’t integrated this for other kinds of acceleration, I believe, is that it’s a very big job. You’re not just re-designing the video decoding, rendering engine, and other internals around GPGPU, you’re adding this to any non-trivial plug-in, or the effect is muted.”
I’ve essentially been saying this for a while. As I see it, the architecture of Vegas would take more time to prepare a frame for the display GPU to finish processing than just doing it all in the CPU in the first place. If it were easy, SCS would have done it a long time ago.”
That’s demonstrably untrue. Take AVC decoding, for example. Using the GPU in the frame buffer, my system can decode 14 AVC frames in less time than it takes to decode two on the CPU alone. And there are existence proofs — Adobe, in particular, it already doing this. And there’s nothing in Premiere Pro that would suggest it’s otherwise limited because of this, versus Vegas.
No, it’s not easy. But I also disagree about the assertion that “it would have been done long ago”. GPGPU as a general purpose thing has only really become viable in 2011. Some companies saw this coming, but even with those out, Adobe and Grass Valley at least, they’re CUDA based. They’ll eventually have to re-work it for OpenCL. And those are applications release in the first half of 2011, which means they planned for this in early 2010. That was about the first time any major NLE company could have really started thinking about this as a viable next move.
And Sony looked at it, for sure… thus, the ever-so-slightly accelerated AVC rendering on GPGPU equipped systems. But they decided 3D support, another very large project, was more important. For new NLE features, while there are certainly multiple programmers at each company, there’s always going to be a priority list.
I’m not claiming Vegas 11 will have general GPU acceleration. I am absolutely certain it can be done, and will provide similar performance enhancements as those seen in Premiere Pro. I also believe that Sony will be at a significant competitive disadvantage if they don’t extend Vegas to use more GPGPU computing. And on the other hand, given their use of OpenCL in 10e (the first use of OpenCL on the PC platform in an NLE that I know of), they could actually be leading on this. I think it’s highly unlikely that they spent the effort to learn CUDA, then OpenCL, and apply it only for the slight gains they’re showing the current OpenCL encoder.
Even for rendering, Sony’s only taken baby steps here. MainConcept’s performance charts on their (separate) CUDA and OpenCL AVC encoders are showing a better than 3x performance boost, over CPU-only. See here: https://www.mainconcept.com/fileadmin/user_upload/download/product_sheets/CUDA-Sheets_06-2010.pdf and here: https://www.mainconcept.com/fileadmin/user_upload/download/product_sheets/ATI_Speed_Results.pdf. Now, sure, you’d expect that just maybe, a company concerned just with encoding might do a little better than Sony, with many irons in the fire. But this is a place to look, to see the kind of results from programmers who have really studied the GPGPU model.
-Dave
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[Stephen Mann] “For the OP, here is the link to the Boris recommended video cards:
https://www.borisfx.com/sony/bccsvp/Graphics-Cards.php“Oh, hey… I didn’t look at those closely, either. But that list is like years and years out of date. The top end nVidia card on the list is the 8800. My 8800GT was one of the later in the series, and it came out in 2007. You’d kind of hope they would update this at least yearly.
I’m not certain you can still buy any card on that list.-Dave
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