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GPU recommendations for a machine with Vegas, Premiere, and AE
COWs,
My I.T. department is looking to replace my GPU. I’m a Vegas Pro user with Vegas, Premiere Pro, and AE on my machine (I’ve only recently been licensed for Adobe CC to bring me into the company’s fold).
What I’d like to optimize over anything else is timeline playback performance as this is often my bottleneck. Realizing that Vegas uses OpenCL for timeline playback while Premiere Pro uses CUDA for the same (correct?), what GPU would you guys/gals recommend?
And please point me in the right direction if there’s something else I need to consider for timeline playback optimization.
Respectfully,
Rob -
15 Replies
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I believe the Adobe Creative Cloud supports AMD and OpenCL now so it may be safe to get an AMD Radeon R9 290X for Vegas Pro and not have to worry about Premiere Pro and CUDA. I’m pretty sure only the older Adobe CS6 and earlier requires CUDA.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
CS5 only supports CUDA. The Mercury engine in CS6 and later support CUDA and OpenCL.
https://blogs.adobe.com/premierepro/2011/02/cuda-mercury-playback-engine-and-adobe-premiere-pro.html
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[Norman Black] “The Mercury engine in CS6 and later support CUDA and OpenCL.”
Ah! I didn’t realize that CS6 also supported OpenCL. That’s good to know.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Thanks so much, John.
Just a couple more things so that I can properly inform I.T.:
How important for timeline playback are other items like the number of CPU cores and CPU speed, RAM, and hard drive speeds and arrays?
Just a little background on my aforementioned “bottleneck.” Timeline playback performance in Vegas alone has been acceptable, even with multiple filters applied. It gets dicey when I begin using Boris RED as a plugin. On my last project for which I used Boris RED for all animations (see vid below), it would take minutes for a single frame to render on the timeline in Preview mode, in both the Vegas timeline and in RED’s.
I.T.’s solution was to give me 4GB more of RAM. At the time of producing the video below, my machine had dual Xeon quad-cores, two drives, 4GB RAM, and an AMD FirePro W7000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYSLcNL6__4
I may have an opportunity to get a new workstation instead of just getting a new GPU if I can make a valid argument for one. Do you think there would be a substantial improvement with an all-around better workstation or would I get what I’m looking for with a new Radeon GPU as you’ve recommended?
Btw, the new workstation that I’ve spec’d out has dual hex cores, a RAID 0 array with a solid state boot drive, 32GB RAM, and would have the Radeam R9 that you’ve recommended.
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Thanks for the info, Norman! Btw, please do take a stab at my following question if you have some time. Just trying to give I.T. the best recommendation.
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i recommend to take nvidia gtx 660 or better. it supports hw acceleration in all mentioned software(very well in adobe cc series and sony vegas pro starting from v11) and have some bonus for video editorial. it’s called shadowplay function, when you can do screen capture not using a cpu resources. and some more for video streaming.
brArturas Bojarunas
PenkiTV(IPTV)
Vilnius, Lithuania -
[Robert Jefferson] “At the time of producing the video below, my machine had dual Xeon quad-cores, two drives, 4GB RAM, and an AMD FirePro W7000.”
A properly configured workstation should have 2GB of RAM for every physical CPU core. Since you have 8 cores you should have 16GB of RAM. For example, I run Vegas Pro on a 2010 Mac Pro 12-core with 24GB of RAM. So 4GB of RAM was woefully inadequate for the CPU power that you have.
You should still have been getting pretty good performance with the FirePro W7000 which is the equivalent of the Radeon R9 270. One thing to note, is that Boris RED doesn’t seem to work well with AMD cards. In my experience, it works much better with NVIDIA cards. 🙁
[Robert Jefferson] “Btw, the new workstation that I’ve spec’d out has dual hex cores, a RAID 0 array with a solid state boot drive, 32GB RAM, and would have the Radeam R9 that you’ve recommended.”
I would get the new workstation. I assume the CPU’s are a newer class which will give you more rendering power. With each update Intel CPU’s just get better and better at video rendering. The R9 280 or 280x will be slightly better than the FirePro W7000 while the R9 290 or 290X should be much better. Still, I wouldn’t expect a lot from Boris RED. As I said, it does not perform as well on my Radeon HD 7950 as it did on my NVIDIA Quadro 4000.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Thanks Arturus. I’ll look into it!
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Again, thanks much John for your help!
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John and all concerned,
After having settled on the Radeon R9 295X2, I wanted to find out from Boris if RED 5 had tested the card since I didn’t see it on their list of supported GPUs, and I found this out:
Firstly, they haven’t tested that particular GPU, so they’re not sure.
Secondly, unless you use one of the OpenGL filters in RED, a GPU will not affect timeline playback while using RED as a plugin for Sony Vegas Pro. “Once you go back into Sony Vegas’ timeline, RED will preview and render purely via the CPU, rather than the GPU.”
Just thought you guys would like to know.
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