Anyone have any Quadro Rendering Comparisons?

[Danny Hays]

I believe the Cuda cores only help when rendering AVCHD. What format are you using?

[John Rofrano]

[Alex Kidd] “What I want to know though, is if those bigger Quadros, like the recent 6GB 6000, really boost the time, or if it’s still pretty negligible.”

I have Quadro 4000 and I saw the same results. My old original quad core was significantly faster than the Quadro 4000 with 256 CUDA cores and 2GB of memory. Luckily, I didn’t buy it just for Vegas or I would have been very disappointed.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Stephen Mann]

“With Vegas 10 I was excited to see Sony finally embrace the Cuda architecture to finally allow for a little GPU help, but at least in my case the improvement isn’t quite what’s to be expected.”

I can’t locate the quote on the Sony website, but the CUDA support will only help when you are editing AVCHD with a seriously underpowered processor. Most of us have at least a quad-core processor, and many who depend on Vegas to make a living have upgraded to hex-core processors which will be so much faster than the most expensive CUDA core GPU’s.

I do not believe that GPU support in Vegas will *ever* be the panacea that you expect. In my opinion – only because no one with intimate inside-Sony knowledge has said otherwise – the way Vegas handles video rendering and encoding is optimized for processor power. It would take *longer* for Vegas to prepare data to send to the GPU than it would for Vegas to just do the render of the video in the processor in the first place.

If it were as easy as some think, then Sony would have done it long ago since it is one of the leading criticisms of Vegas.

My opinion.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[John Rofrano]

[Stephen Mann] “I do not believe that GPU support in Vegas will *ever* be the panacea that you expect”

I believe the operative word in that sentence is “in Vegas” because I have seen a demo of a CUDA supported add-on for with Adobe Media Encoder and it is wicked fast. Way faster than your quad core by a long shot. The Mercury Playback Engine is also very impressive in Premiere Pro for real-time playback on the timeline and GPU accelerated FX are equally fast. So there are significant gains to be made… just not with Vegas yet. I do hope Sony figures it out. I’ve got 256 CUDA cores just waiting for something to do. 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Greg Estes]

Right – others have posted as well, but just to confirm: Sony Vegas takes advantage of the NVIDIA CUDA architecture to accelerate encoding only at this time, so an AVC encode will go faster but you won’t see a dramatic acceleration of any effects. Other editing applications such as Adobe Premiere Pro do take advantage of CUDA to accelerate effects; while still other applications such as Avid Media Composer take a different technical approach and use OpenGL to accelerate effects on Quadro.

Other examples of media applications that take advantage of CUDA are Assimilate Scratch, GenArts Sapphire, Davinci Resolve, Mari from The Foundry – many others. How much acceleration you will see, and what aspects of the workflow are accelerated will vary by how each software vendor chooses to write their software, so it’s not as straightforward as n number of CUDA cores = x amount of acceleration.

GE

[John Rofrano]

[Greg Estes] ” while still other applications such as Avid Media Composer take a different technical approach and use OpenGL to accelerate effects on Quadro.”

It’s probably good to point out that Boris RED and Boris Continuum Complete for Vegas Pro also use OpenGL for accelerating effects in Vegas. So there are advantages to having a good graphics card with Vegas if you use accelerated 3rd part plug-ins.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com