Does a video card have much impact on rendering

[Scott Francis]

Right now Vegas Pro 9 does not use the video card for anything, other than multiple monitors. Preview is totally CPU based and unfortunately only uses one core on a multiple core system. Sony Movie Studio 10 does use CUDA based video cards to help with some of the task. Again with rendering, nothing to do with the video card again. Be sure to go into the preferences before you render a video and set you RAM amount used for Dynamic Ram Preview to 0, this will free up that ram for rendering. I personally hope that when Vegas 10 comes out, that Sony starts to use GPU’s to aid in preview as well, the low frame rate that occurs during preview can be frustrating for some of us…hope this helps!!

Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[Frederic Baumann]

Thanks Scott,

if I understand correctly, you say that on Movie Studio, CUDA only helps for the preview, but NOT for rendering.

Could you please confirm that I understand correctly?

(I was considering to buy a PC with a big nVidia card to speed up the rendering, but it seems that it would not help at all)

Thanks,
Frédéric

—
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[Scott Francis]

I do not use the Movie Studio, so I cannot tell you from experience one way or the other on rendering, only what I have read. I PERSONALLY HOPE that the next version of Vegas with utilize the GPU, but that waits to be seen. Someone else on the forum may know, or you can check on the Sony website for details
https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/

Good Luck!

Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[John Rofrano]

if I understand correctly, you say that on Movie Studio, CUDA only helps for the preview, but NOT for rendering.

Actually it’s the other way around. CUDA is used for rendering AVC and not for preview.

But does the video card have any influence on rendering or does it help the preview?

Vegas Pro 10 will support CUDA rendering of AVC content so be sure to buy a “beefy” GPU because you’ll need it.

~jr

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

[Stephen Mann]

This is interesting because it’s been my understanding that NO NLE used the GPU for rendering. those that are tied to a graphics card (like Final Cut, Premiere and Avid) only use the GPU for preview.

Is my information incorrect?

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

[Matt Crowley]

Movie Studio HD 10 can use CUDA video cards for rendering AVC. You need an nVidia GeForce 9 series or later card (ie beefy recent gaming cards) to get any benefit though, and ATi cards are not supported at all. I have a GeForce 8800GT and it’s about the same speed as CPU-only AVC rendering on my Core2 duo E8400 (3GHz).

[Ron Bakker]

Very interesting, never heard of cuda before, had to do a quick bit of home work. From what i could understand is the gpu needs cuda as part of it’s driver software but you also would need vegas9 designed to benefit from it, which it isn’t.
Thank you for your replies.

[Matt Crowley]

Yeah, Vegas Pro doesn’t currently appear to support GPU assisted rendering. I guess the next major release will since Movie Studio already has it. CUDA is just nVidia’s version of GPU-assisted number-crunching, which is useful for computationally intensive tasks like physics and medical sciences simulations, and of course video encoding/decoding. ATi uses a different support framework for GPU computation which isn’t compatible with CUDA and doesn’t work in Movie Studio.

I realised after I’d posted about CUDA that my GPU probably isn’t doing anything in VMS HD 10 anyway because it’s not a Geforce 9 series card, hence the similar render times (ie all my renders are CPU-only)…