Best GPUs for Sony Vegas Pro 12.

[Malcolm Matusky]

I had always used “16” rendering threads, as I thought it was CPU setting, not GPU. I set it to 8, the rest of my setting were the same, thank you for the information!

I am thinking of upgrading one of my GPU cards to a GTX6xx or 7xx series with 4gb of Vram for Davinci Resolve.

Cheers,

M

Malcolm
http://www.malcolmproductions.com

[Sonic 67]

Newer cards (nVidia or ATI) won’t work well in Vegas.
See what MainConcept has on their site (well, DivX site, since they bought them):

CUDA Encoder
NVIDIA graphics card with CUDA support (Professional – Tesla, Quadro 4000-series, FX, CX, NVS, QuadroPlex; Consumer – GeForce 8, 9, 100, 200, 400-series GPUs – with a minimum of 256 MB of local graphics memory card or 512 MB for 1920x1080p encoding). CUDA compute capability support only up to 1.3 (excludes certain GeForce 8800 models – GTS, Ultra. Compute capability 1.0 works in general for encoding, but has known issues. Boards with Kepler architecture are not supported.

OpenCL
Please note that the MainConcept OpenCL H.264/AVC Encoder only works with ATI/AMD graphics hardware. For NVIDIA GPU based acceleration, click here for the MainConcept CUDA H.264/AVC Encoder.
Supported ATI Graphics Boards:
AMD Radeon™ HD Graphics
6900 Series (6970, 6950)*, 6800 Series (6870, 6850)*
ATI Radeon™ HD Graphics
5900 Series (5970)**
5800 Series (5870, 5850, 5830)*
5700 Series (5770, 5750), 5600 Series (5670), 5500 Series (5570)
ATI FirePro™ Graphics
V8800*, V7800
* – preferred as tested
** – supported in single-GPU mode

As for the age of MainConcept encoders, see in this folder:
C: Program Files SonyVegas Pro 13.0 FileIO Plug-Ins mcmp4plug2 (or the other folders starting with mc) and check the digital signatures.

[Heinrich Himmel]

I believe OpenCL works better in vegas. The HD 6970 would be the most powerful officially supported GPU. In terms of nVidia, the most powerful officially supported card is the GTX 580 (although I believe the 570 is close). I have the GTX 580 in one of my builds and it works great.

In terms of CUDA performance, I believe that the GTX 780/Ti/Titan and GTX 970/980 are the only ones that will outperform the GTX 570/580. Of those, I would go for the GTX 970.

In terms of OpenCL performance, all AMD mid/high end cards are about equal and well ahead of all nVidia cards. The 970/980 have closed the gap, but are still about 50% slower.

For rendering, you will get the best benefit from an HD 6970 (currently $125). It is hard to say which modern card is above this for timeline performance. I believe HD 7950/R9 270x and above, but I could be mistaken. I have an R9 280x in another build and that works great as well.

[Sonic 67]

[Heinrich Himmel] “In terms of CUDA performance, I believe that the GTX 780/Ti/Titan and GTX 970/980 are the only ones that will outperform the GTX 570/580. Of those, I would go for the GTX 970.”
Probably they won’t work at all with MainConcept encoder, they are not hard encoded in it.
Sure they will work probably with some CUDA effects (and ATI won’t do that), but the encoder was not updated from 2010.

I think the best nVidia is still a Quadro 6000 due to memory size and floating point performance. A Tesla from same Fermi family will probably work the same, but I didn’t have any information on that.

With a quad Xeon CPU I cannot even stress my Quadro 6000 above 25% utilization… CPU cannot “feed” it fast enough.

[Kell Hymer]

Looks like you are right. I have seen all kinds of posts and dialog since this posting and everyone seems to have different findings based on their system. I tested the following GPUs by monitoring frame rate playback in my full res preview: CPU only, Quadro 4000/ Quadro 2000, GTX 660ti, GTX460. Of all of these cards, the Quadro 4000 performed best. However, using CPU only produced a much higher frame rate than any GPU.

I have had similar findings in the past. My CPU utilization rarely reached 60% in any test and I am not sure why Vegas did not tax it more extensively to reach the highest possible frame rate. when I previewed with the Quadro 4000, my CPU utilization was the same or more as previewing with CPU only and the Quadro utilization was very high. Despite using both the CPU and GPU, it STILL played at a lower frame rate than the CPU only. I emailed Sony about this once and they told me it was because my CPU was stronger than my GPU. This finally makes sense now. The only thing that REALLY boosted frame rates was overclocking my CPU. Maybe if I really dove into all of the intricacies between my PC, my Vegas projects, and CUDA/OpenCL I could find the “perfect” GPU…however, I could probably go to med school and become a brain surgeon in half the time it would take to figure out the best GPU. I would love for Sony to make improvement in GPU compatibility. In the mean time, I think I’ll just by a better processor…

Current System: Intel i7 3820 | Asus P9X79 Deluxe | Nvidia Quadro 4000 & 2000 | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)

[Kell Hymer]

Update: So I upgraded to a 4930K and have overclocked it. I have barely got it installed and have yet to test it with Vegas Pro. I have been doing tons of research on GPUs and I realize that there is no good answer. However, depending on the codec, it seems the GTX580 and the R9 290 have the most positive results reported by other users. Rendering is not a concern to me, but a high frame rate on the best preview settings is. From what I gather, Sony Vegas uses OpenCL for real-time previewing/playback. It seems the R9 290 is best for this. However, I am curious to know if anyone has had success with high end Firepro cards. These are expensive, so there is not much information specific to Sony Vegas online. These forums, among many others are flooded with GPU compatibility questions as are the SCS Support tickets. I think it will be only a matter of time before the industry responds. The demand for better NLE/GPU solutions is very apparent. We will see what Vegas Pro 14 brings to the table.

Current System: Intel i7 3930K | Asus P9X79 Deluxe | Nvidia Quadro 4000 & 2000 | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)