Best PC Config for GPU Acceleration Benefits

[John Rofrano]

[Ron Pereira] “So… to my question. Any advice on the best computer and, most importantly graphics card in order to make GPU Acceleration happy? Sony only says to follow their suggestions on their websit… which I did with the HP and that got me nowhere.”

I just built a new Intel Core i7-3930K workstation and it absolutely ROCKS! I completed some new Boris TV training with it and it didn’t hiccup even once and rendered at an incredible speed (the 20 minute tutorial took only 8 minutes to render to AVC/H.264).

My graphics card is an NVIDIA Quadro 4000. I prefer NVIDIA over AMD/ATI and you really should use a card from their professional series not a game card. This is a case where you get what you pay for.

~jr

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

[Stephen Mann]

If your motherboard supports EFI, then there is no reason why Vegas won’t install to it.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/235088/everything_you_need_to_know_about_3tb_hard_drives.html

Only one hard drive?? You want two drives. Put the OS and Vegas on a 1Tb drive (C) and all of your projects and media files on the second drive. (Not a separate partition of the one hard drive – you gain nothing).

I can’t help you with the GPU since I replaced my last Radeon card months ago. (Last, being the operative word).

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

[Stewart Bourke]

Excellent – some new borix videos – when might we hope to see them?

[John Rofrano]

[Stewart Bourke] “Excellent – some new borix videos – when might we hope to see them?”

It’s available now: 🙂

Episode #157: Create Broadcast Graphics in Sony Vegas Pro

~jr

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

[Mike Hinkel]

John, this tutorial comes up as private.

[John Rofrano]

[Mike Hinkel] “John, this tutorial comes up as private.”

Thanks, I’ve notified the folks at Boris FX and they will look into it.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

It’s public now.

~jr

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

[Dave Haynie]

[Ron Pereira] “After a few hours on the phone with Sony Tech Support I was told there was nothing I could do except disable GPU Acceleration in the render profile… disabling it in Preferences didn’t help.”

The HD7570 is pretty new. Do you have the very latest OpenCL drivers for it? If so, sounds like it’s not really ready for GPGPU computing yet. If not, get ’em… and don’t trust every graphics driver update to update the OpenCL stuff. You can get that as a separate update on the AMD site.

[Ron Pereira] “• 3TB 7200 rpm SATA hard drive”

Weird about the Vegas 10 installer.. sounds like they’re using 32-bit signed math to guess the amount of free space on your boot drive. Good thing I didn’t try to put it on my 8TB RAID 🙂

You’ll probably hear some people tell you to get a second HDD… that’s a good idea, but the reasons have largely changed. Back in the bad old days, the C: drive was where your apps lived and where your virtual memory swap partition lived. When you have too little memory, data is swapped back to HDD, app code is unloaded and then reloaded from HDD, DLLs are loaded and then kicked out of memory. Because of all this, and particularly, back before video was possible and everyone tuned for realtime audio, a single drive could lead to disc thrashing (the heads seeking back and forth, trying to do two or three jobs at the same time) and a total destruction of any realtime preformance.

Most that just isn’t an issue anymore… things load into memory and stay there, for the most part. But you’ll still want that second drive if you do any non-trivial video work. The problem now is that you have multiple HD video streams, still photos, a rendering going out, etc. And a very fast processor. The HDD is very fast, but it’s a muscle car: good in a straight line, bad at cornering. Loading a few video files, photos, and rendering back to the same drive, you’ll get lots of seeking… very possibly a full-on thrashing situation. That means that the straight-line disc performance is failing, the seeks are dominating, and your render won’t be maintained at full speed. Even something as simple as sending the output to a flash drive can get you back up to full speed, even on the single C: drive.

The other thing… if you’re doing serious video, 3TB will look small in no time at all. I have a pair of SATA drive bays, one holds a 3.5″ drive, one holds two 2.5″ drives (you can find these on Amazon or NewEgg for about $20-$30). You get full speed SATA, but you can pop out one drive, load up the next (backup, project, archive, etc). So I have all major projects (weddings, corporate videos, etc) on separate drives, as well as a C: drive for boot and a 3TB D: drive for “regular stuff”… and the RAID on FW800. Balancing project loads, I pretty much always get 95%-ish out of each processor on my AMD 1090T. Your CPUs are probably close to twice as fast, so you’ll be even more subject to other things becoming the bottleneck on a project of any complexity. And with just that one drive, that’ll be the first bottleneck you hit.

-Dave