GPU acceleration, when does it work? does it? & on what formatts, MAYBE NOT ALL?

[Dave Edwards]

I have a similar setup to yours and my machine struggles to cope with previewing HD formats unless I drop monitoring down to Draft or Preview. Add in 3D and things really start to hit the fan.

There seems to be just too much data for the program to handle on even a moderately powerful PC. It appears that the only crucial element in the system which will help is raw CPU power as GPU acceleration appears currently to be aimed at certain transitions and effects rather than viewing what you’re editing.

Solutions seem to involve swapping out HD for SD footage for editing perhaps using VAAST’s Gearshift program or Cineform.

I took a look at Media Composer 6 with this issue in mind because it seemed to shuttle HD well but as soon as your begin to add in FX or extra tracks it too starts to slow down.

We may have to wait for the next generation of supercomputer..

[Shawn Bossick]

Thanks dave for your reply!
I don’t have any effects running, I’m in preview mode & I cannot get one track to play without skipping frames HARDCORE, I really feel I must be missing something! I’ve been working with Vegas now for 8 years

Maybe I’m not asking the right question here, my old graphic card the Radeon 4670 had no GPU capability, I was able to edit & work in HD with .mts files uncompressed AVCHD, I upgraded my operating system windows 7 64 bit, & had it installed on a FAST solid state hard drive, I upgraded my graphic card to a card that has GPU acceleration the Radeon 6950, this new card SHOULD be far better then my old card, however now vegas stutters, drops frames & I cannot get 1 track to playback smoothly
WHAT HAPPENED? how can I resolve this? this is also the second card I have put into the system in the last few days, the first card I tried was the GTX 570, when it skipped like crazy I thought maybe I bought the wrong card so I bought the Radeon, but it skips too

Any suggestions? what functions should I be looking at, there must be something I am doing wrong!

Thanks all!!

[Dave Edwards]

Hi Shawn: I’m not sure I can do more than offer dumb thoughts like getting the very latest drivers for your hardware, particularly the graphics card, which on the face of it looks to be the guilty party.

[John Rofrano]

What version of Vegas are you using? (you didn’t say)

What is the format of your source footage? (you didn’t say although I heard the term “uncomopressed AVCHD” used which doesn’t exist because uncompressed implies no compression and AVCHD is compression… so please be as accurate as you can)

I have an old (5 years old) Core 2 Quad (no where near as powerful as your Core i7) and I have no problems with HD playback of AVCHD. I have an NVIDIA Quadro 4000 and GPU acceleration in Vegas Pro 11.0 seems to be working well.

~jr

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

[Jim Greene]

The quality of playback in Vegas is predominately based on a fast CPU, even with CUDA GPU acceleration. It doesn’t even care so much about SSD vs. some other hard drive interface (I have SSD, and not much difference between SATA & even USB, believe it or not).

I have the Core I7 3930k CPU with Win7, and it handles raw AVCHD well. I also have the GTX570 GPU and based on my rough tests, it does improve playback, but is only noticeable when doing multi-cam with 3-4 streams. Playback studders a bit on new events, around 10-20fps, then smooths out to 24fps. If I disable GPU acceleration it crawls at around 5-10fps.

Also, the key is to go to the NVIDIA website and have it detect your card and current driver and upgrade from there. The Win7 update gets it all wrong for that card.

-Jim.

[Stephen Crye]

Hi All;

We all suffer with less than perfect preview in Vegas. One thing that I find helpful is to install Process Explorer from SysInternals.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653

There is no install, just extract and copy somewhere – I use c:toolssysinternals . Put it in your startup folder so it is always running.

Aside from being the slickest piece of geeky wonderfulness ever invented for Windows, the little icons in the systray that keep track of CPU load, I/O RAM, etc. are invaluable. (You will have to turn then on after you start the program).

Watching the little CPU meter will tell you a lot about what Vegas is doing. I notice that if CPU is anything above ~ 80% the preview will be choppy. When that happens I know to change something.

BTW I rarely am able to set the preview higher than Good (auto). Check out my system specs below.

Steve

Win7 Pro X64 on Dell T3400, MultiTB SATA, 8GB RAM, nVidea FX 570, Vegas 10e (and 11) x64 DVDA 5.2(build 133) Sony HDR-CX550V