GPU ‘upgrade’ not an upgrade?

[Clive Mclaughlin]

Wow, thanks Aaron, lots of info here to dig through.

Firstly, I’m using Vegas pro 13 (64bit).

I removed old card and put the newer one in it’s slot. I did not uninstall drivers – I will try that now and then look at your other points.

[John Laird]

I just built a new computer for 4K editing using an Asus X99 A 2 Motherboard, 32 Gb of ddr 4 memory an Asus R9 390 along with an intel 5960 x. The hard drive is a Samsung 1 tb ssd, and it plays back any 4 K footage I have put on the timeline without s stutter along with any transitions I have used. The render times are better than real time as well. To say I am more than satisfied with this system would be a gross understatement. I also have the ability to scroll around the timeline in full resolution using 4K settings on everything. I also decided to go with windows 7 Pro and haven’t had any issues. When rendering and going into task manager it is awesome to see 16 threads running at 116 percent or better…. WOO WOO WOO!!!!!! It took about three hours to put together and during the burn in process the power supply failed. After replacing the power supply the system has been awesome.

John

To respond to the thread the GPU works just great with this System.

J

[Clive Mclaughlin]

Thanks John, good to know!
You obviously see some render benefit withCUDA or OpenCL? Yet when, I try them all. I get to benefit over CPU only. It indicates that it’s not being utilised…

As for the preview lag. It surely must be that your 5960x is better than my Xeon® E3-1246 v3 . I’ll check benchmarks.

Just to be clear, I’m not struggling with simply a 4k timeline. But a multicam involving 4k. In fact I even get some lag in 1080 multicams. Just about useable but still not ideal.

[Clive Mclaughlin]

Reading elsewhere that cores are more important than clock speed with CPU in video editing. It’s not surprising that John’s 590x out performs me with 8 cores to my 4 and 16 threads to my 8.

But, is any upgrade going to pointless of I’m not upgrading to more cores? I’ve been spending hours checking motherboard compatibility and comparing benchmark scores.

I wish Sony/Magix could say ‘For our software, here are the devices and specific elements that have most impact’.

Whats the point in me looking at reviews at scores and tests if the GPU or CPU will only make playing some computer game better and won’t change anything n terms of Vegas!

[Aaron Star]

The Intel® Xeon® E3-1246 is more like a Gen3 i7 and pretty much meant to be a server chip for 1U rack systems. The 5960x is more like a dual proc xeon with the way the x99 chipset is laid out. The comparison is apples and oranges.

Intel® Xeon® E3-1246
16 lanes of PCI 3.0
2 channels of DDR3

vs

5960x
40 lanes of pci 3.0
4 channels of DDR4

Even with 32GB of ram on the Intel® Xeon® E3-1246 the memory bandwitdth is likely half or less of the 5960x/x99. The reduced amount of of PCI lanes on the E3 cpu is why you have to make sure the GPU has full bandwidth, and not sharing pci lanes with other motherboard devices. Latency on the system, like memory freq, x16 on the GPU, and no bad drivers causeing DPC issues is a must with reduced hardware.

Keep in mind that Vegas operates in RGB space, so all footage is converted from .264 to uncompressed RGB, multicam and this is of course 4x the bandwidth needed. 4K uncompressed 8-bit RGB is somewhere around 750MB/s, times 4x streams, so your CPU/Mem/GPU need to be able to maintain those rates in a very solid fashion.

“Winsat mem” from an admin command console will give you the memory bandwitdh that windows/vegas sees.

My guess is your GPU driver set and Opencl may not be functioning correctly, and so not getting the benifits of the GPU for playback. Keep in mind that with the way OpenCL works, you are sharing the GPU with general display bandwidth capabilites. Here again the 5960x has more PCI lanes, and so a dual GPU with one for display and another dedicated for compute would be optimal.

Also sounds like you may not be running the latest build of VP13-453.

It is unlikely an i7-gen4 or less system hardware will ever push enough decompression of h.264 encoded content, then mux it, and stream the results to monitor in a smooth fashion. If you look under the hood, Vegas would like 8 threads for AVC decompression alone, and another 16 for rendering, vegas itself will run around 70+ threads. All that in contention with the other software you have running in the background on your system, and only 8 CPU threads to service them all in a time share fashion.

[Clive Mclaughlin]

So yea, I uninstalled Vegas and re-downloaded and re-installed. Surprisingly The preview is working considerably better. Aaron, you mentioned I maybe wasn’t working with the latest build – so maybe this re-install is a newer build and that’s the solution.

I still feel that at some point I will upgrade to a 4790k (the best i7 I can get that remains compatible with my MB) as the preview still drops to 20ish at times (whichis generally enough to work with – certainly better than 3!)

The r9 390 is still not giving me any rendering acceleration though and so I’m returning it and reverting to my gtx570.

I’ve run all sorts of monitoring and can see nothing causing a bottleneck. My RAM, CPU threads, GPU etc were all still well short of 100% usage. So it looks like something in the software itself had been causing the lag.

Strange. I had seen a guy’s Youtube video at a point where he mentioned re-installing and then disabling updates. At that time, there may have been a bad update. ANd perhaps now the newest builds have rectified it.

Who knows!

[John Laird]

Clive..

When rendering try going into task manager and seeing how much of your resources are being used to and that might give you an idea of where your bottleneck is.

Here is a short video I shot to test the DJI Osmo It was shot in 4K and rendered down to 1920 by 1080 in less than 2 min. I also did the same output in Full 4K and that also rendered out in less than 2.min. I also Toshiba 4K P55tB52 laptop as a mobile device and find it does a very good job of rendering and playing back 4K footage. The only problem I have with the 15 in screen is the scaling issues with on the 4K screen.

https://www.movingmoment.net/Parktest.mp4

John

[Aaron Star]

Well you can go back to the 570, but you are trading a GPU cabable of 5000 GFLOPs vs 1400 GFLOPs. OpenCL in Vegas would like the 5000 over the 1400 for sure. But if your only goal is to use MC mp4 encoder with GPU, it makes sense.

[Clive Mclaughlin]

What other render formats might work better with the R9 390 Aaron??

[Aaron Star]

For detailed help, posting a screen shot of Speccy overview, and details of your workflow.

Workflow would mean

Project settings screen shots.
“Media info” (its an app) details on your source material
Then render settings, along with what your final purpose is for the output.

Redering to Sony AVC, or what others have been doing the frame sever thing to handbrake would be aternatives. Mainly with SonyAVC, your GPU will help with decoding source material, timeline frame work, and then a very light amount of calculations with the encoder. The source frame decoding depends on the source codec however.