Graphic Card Benchmark for Sony Vegas Pro 13 or 12 ?

[Graham Bernard]

Does IMPROVED render times equate with IMPROVED Preview FPS?

Grazie

Video Content Creator and Potter
PC 7 64-bit 16gb * Intel® Core™i7-2600k Quad Core 3.40GHz * 2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 Ti
Cameras: Canon XF300 + PowerShot SX50HS Bridge

[Ryan Mcrobb]

Those are some very interesting figures Cedric!
I have always been told that Nvidia cards are superior for video editing; but I think that is just in regard to Adobe products.

My current card, an old AMD Radeon 5870 is faster for SVP than the best Nvidia card.

Which, considering how slow my system is, is quite depressing.

[Dave Haynie]

[Ryan McRobb] “I have always been told that Nvidia cards are superior for video editing; but I think that is just in regard to Adobe products.”

One problem with memes and other things “everyone knows”… they die a hard death.

When GPGPU computing was young (oh so much younger than today), it was pretty much just CUDA. AMD has this thing called Streams that no one supported, and once Adobe figured out how to have the GPU help you out, it made nVidia a clear leader. nVidia was also faster at gaming for the most part, and maybe had an edge in OpenGL, at least from time to time, so no one really questioned this idea.

But looking at least at OpenCL benchmarks, and in particular at Vegas benchmarks, that’s no longer the case. If it ever was. As I’ve mentioned before, I bought both the nVidia GTX570 and the AMD HD6970 right after Vegas 11 came out, did lots of benchmarks, and found the AMD faster at everything, and bugs in some of the OpenCL stuff (non-Vegas) on the nVidia. They cost the same, so this was a no-brainer.

But it’s not just that. Ok, sure, you’d expect the newer AMDs and nVidias to do better — both nVidia’s Kepler architecture and AMD’s GCN architecture were designed from the ground up to do this General Purpose GPU computing, as well as the usual stuff. Look at the latest stuff… the nVidia Titan should, by all rights, be wiping the floor with my 2011-vintage HD6970, like the R9 290 is. But it’s not… the HD6970 is actually beating it on the Sony benchmark.

But here’s the weird part: nVidia hitting the wall. What you’d expect to see is something like the DirectCompute benchmarks (first and last in that linked article)… gradual dropping of performance as you go to older or lesser cards. And sure, there’s that double precision Folding @ Home run that has the Titan pull way out in front of everyone else… the Titan does have the same chip as the Tesla 20X, which is sold specifically for “compute” applications. But look at any of the other OpenCL benchmarks — nVidia just hits a wall. Sure, the HD5870 and HD6970 are most of those benchmarks, but keep in mind, the HD6970 is from 2011; it’s a contemporary of the GTX5xx series. And the HD5870 is from late 2009. They’re not even testing the nVidia GTX5xx or GTX6xx devices form that era.

Hitting a wall like that usually tells you there’s a problem of some kind. No telling if it’s intentional or not, but it would sure be interesting to see a Tesla 20X run those same benchmarks… same chip as the Titan, the Kepler GK110. The Titan is higher clocked, too. But the Kepler’s 3x the price. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Tesla did better on those benchmarks anyway. Could be chip yield, could just be software holding the Titan back. Which never looks good if the other guy isn’t doing that.

-Dave

[John Rofrano]

[Ryan McRobb] “I have always been told that Nvidia cards are superior for video editing; but I think that is just in regard to Adobe products.”

Yes, NVIDIA is only good with products that have bought into their proprietary CUDA architecture. They are not very good, however, with open standards like OpenCL.

[Ryan McRobb] “My current card, an old AMD Radeon 5870 is faster for SVP than the best Nvidia card. Which, considering how slow my system is, is quite depressing.”

How slow your system is may have more to say about your other components than your graphics card. I have the same AMD Radeon 5870 in my 2008 Mac Pro 8-core and it plays back the Sony “Red Car” project at full frame rates which my brand new Core i7-3930K with NVIDIA Quadro 4000 can’t even do! So I don’t consider my 2008 Mac Pro system slow. It’s old… but it’s not slow.

The secret is to balance your components. If you have some really slow CPU then that might be your problem and a new CPU with your old AMD Radeon 5870 may be extremely fast… faster than with an NVIDIA card I would guess.

~jr

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

[Miguel Peraza]

Those results are correct but slightly misleading. If you read the description on the website, the renders were tested with the XDCAM EX format. I bought a 290x mainly to render videos for Youtube, and the best format for Youtube is MainConcept AVC/AAC (.mp4). It compresses videos really well, and minimal loss in quality. If you don’t mind rendering in XDCAM EX, then the 290 cards are perfect. It renders that format fast and it’s high quality. The only problem is that the size of the file will be dramatically bigger; almost twice the size. XDCAM has very little options, and you can only render at two set bitrates. If you are looking to have render acceleration of MainConcept and Sony AVC, then the GTX 570 and the AMD Radeon HD 6850 are still your best options. It’s sad to say, but Sony still hasn’t updated compatibility. Newer cards do help accelerate the preview, but it does not accelerate the render for the most commonly used format.

[John Rofrano]

[Miguel Peraza] “It’s sad to say, but Sony still hasn’t updated compatibility. Newer cards do help accelerate the preview, but it does not accelerate the render for the most commonly used format.”

In fairness to Sony, it’s not under their control. MainConcept as a company has been bought out twice and apparently is not updating their codec to be compatible with the newer cards.

~jr

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

[Dave Haynie]

[Miguel Peraza] “It’s sad to say, but Sony still hasn’t updated compatibility.”

As others have stated, the Main Concept issues are strictly Main Concept. I actually checked their web site, and the H.264 CODEC they’re advertising is exactly what Sony’s shipping today… unchanged since Vegas 11 or so. That’s the problem when you get acquired. When Main Concept was Main Concept, their primary function was developing CODECs to sell, mostly embedded as with Sony, in other folks’ products. When DivX bought them, the focus was certainly shifted, at least in part, to incorporating their CODEC technology in other products. When Rovio bought DivX, even more products, and pretty much zero development on the CODEC. And even with the split off of DivX and Main Concept to Parallax, I wouldn’t hold my breath for improvement.

If you want to fault Sony, go ahead, but the real problem is that they’ve stuck with Main Concept for AVC. They really should find another CODEC provider, and they should fully embrace the use of Windows-standard Direct Show CODECs… much better than Video for Windows, because they can output any format, not just AVI. Or fully document the Sony plug-in interface for CODECs. Or support a built-in frame server. This isn’t uniquely an H.264 problem, since there are a bunch of new CODECs up and coming that may become important son enough.

[Miguel Peraza] ” Newer cards do help accelerate the preview, but it does not accelerate the render for the most commonly used format.”

That’s not strictly true. If you see Vegas speeding up during preview, that same compositing engine is used — and sped up — during rendering. Which doesn’t just feed whatever CODEC you’re using faster, but also frees up more CPU cycles for that CODEC. So no, the GPU doesn’t speed up the rendering CODEC itself, but it does speed up rendering. Try a CPU-only versus OpenCL (as set in video preferences — don’t forget to reboot) to see the effect of the GPU with any un-accelerated CODEC.

And sure, Main Concept does an excellent job of using the GPU for H.264… I see about a 6x speedup over no GPU at all. They’re doing practically everything except entropy encoding on the GPU. But the quality is not as good as the CPU-only version.

-Dave

[Sonam Sherpa]

Does anyone know if Sony Vegas pro 12 or 13 supports NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760M for GPU rendering? I appreciate if someone answers my question.

I am trying to buy an Asus N56JR-S4075H 15,6″ laptop which has NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760M graphic card.

Best regards,

Sonam

[John Rofrano]

[Sonam Sherpa] “Does anyone know if Sony Vegas pro 12 or 13 supports NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760M for GPU rendering? I appreciate if someone answers my question.”

Yes, it “supports” it but the real question is will it make your renders faster or slower? Vegas Pro has two areas that will be accelerated by your GPU. One is timeline playback and the other is encoding while rendering. The MainConcept AVC encoder will not take full advantage of the GTX 760M while rendering but the timeline playback will. However, our testing has found that ATI cards work better for timeline playback as they have a better implementation of OpenCL which Vegas Pro uses for timeline playback GPU acceleration. So the GTX 760M will work, just not as good as other GPU’s.

~jr

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

[Quincy Berry]

I figure I use this thread instead of creating a new one. I did a search and found this here. So my issue is I was using a Geforce GTX 260 and I used the Kuda cores from it to render and it was if I recall 3 x faster than the CPU. I since upgraded (so i thought) to a Geforce GTX 750Ti But it seems that it doesn’t take advantage of Kuda cores at all. There is no difference when using the CPU vs KUDA if available.

with the GTX 260 I had 192 Kuda Cores
with the GTX 750Ti I have 640 Kuda cores

To do basic 720p rendering of a 20 min video that was from my lumix gh3 it takes 45 minutes using CPU

I find this very frustrating. There is no crazy effects or anything. Why is the rendering so long? over twice the time of the actual length of footage.

My Specs

AMD FX 83-20 Eight Core Processor 3.5ghz (maybe i should of went intel?)
16 GB RAM DDR3 ram
GTX 750ti
OCZ Vertex2 SSD drive OS and NLE on it
3 TB USB 3.0 segate output files to this.

I don’t have a beast or anything, but I thought it would be decent enough for basic editing and rendering.

I guess I am not sure what to do. use the old video card for getting faster rendering speeds. But then I can’t play 1080p youtube videos etc.

I am kinda bummed out 🙁