GTX550Ti vs HD5770 (CUDA vs OPENCL) / Use custom destination folder for “Add Hitfilm Effect”?

[John Rofrano]

[Rick Anvican] “I’m using the 550Ti now in Vegas 12 for both GPU rendering and acceleration and so far everything works fine, after reading some benchmark results I noticed that the HD5770 is somewhat similar to my card, I know that GPU acceleration in Vegas is problematic but I would like to know if there are differences and benefits between using the two architectures (e.g. rendering speeds, compatibility with source videos, preview window speed).”

You should probably read this rather long thread on exactly the same topic (but I will net it out for you here):

“New” graphics card

In which Rich Kutnick declares: “So this is looking more like the best 150 bucks I ever spent!!” When referring to his purchase of an ATI Radeon HD 5870 to replace his NVidia GeForce 560! (the 5870 is more powerful than the 5770 you are asking about)

I did some benchmarks with Vegas Pro 12.0 that can be found in these two posts from that thread:

I did some testing on my ATI Radeon HD 5870

I aslo tested my NVIDIA Quadro 4000 against my ATI Radeon HD 5870

The results showed two things:

1. Vegas Pro makes better use of OpenCL than CUDA
2. The ATI Radeon HD 5870 is the “sweet spot” price performer for taking the best advantage Vegas Pro GPU support.

(Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited by law… yadda, yadda, yadda,… 😉 )

The good news is that now you can answer your own question. Download the Vegas Pro 12.0 project in my first benchmark and run the same tests. Compare the results of your GTX550Ti against my ATI Radeon HD 5870 and see how it does. Download the Sony “Red Car” test (in the second post) and see how your GPU stacks up against a “real world” Vegas Pro render. Then make up your own mind as to whether to not a new GPU card is in your future.

What I found was that the ATI Radeon HD 5870 with a slower CPU with less threads rendered faster than the NVIDIA Quadro 4000 with a faster CPU with more threads in the Red Car project. That’s pretty impressive! I’m convinced the ATI Radeon HD 5870 is a better card for Vegas Pro editing. It would be great if you could run these benchmarks with your GTX550Ti and post your results here. I’d be happy to consolidate this on my web site when we’re all done.

~jr

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

[Rick Anvican]

Hi John,

[John Rofrano] “What I found was that the ATI Radeon HD 5870 with a slower CPU with less threads rendered faster than the NVIDIA Quadro 4000 with a faster CPU with more threads in the Red Car project”
I saw the hd5770 on bargain at a store so I thought it might have performance differences, but I was reluctant because of the actual performance gains with using GPUs being optimised either for gaming or video processing, as well as the “fast CPU + fast GPU” performing any better.

I’ll try to run the benchmarks later in the week because my system drive might be failing, it’s 100% going active time with average 0.5~1MB/s I/O rate for 1/2 hour continuous, possibly write errors.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but when GPU acceleration is enabled, hardware decoding seems to be performed on certain codecs like AVC/AVCHD, for custom-resolution AVC files I tend to get garbled preview/render, with GPUA disabled, those source files played fine.
If the GPU was changed to AMD’s, would the hardware decode differently?

[John Rofrano]

[Rick Anvican] “Correct me if I’m wrong, but when GPU acceleration is enabled, hardware decoding seems to be performed on certain codecs like AVC/AVCHD”

Yes, the GPU acceleration switch under Opens | Preferences | Video accelerates the Timeline playback (i.e., the decoding of certain codecs) and GPU plug-ins from Sony that are GPU accelerated. This is why when people have strange playback issues or issues only with transitions, we usually ask them to turn off GPU acceleration and see if that fixes it.

[Rick Anvican] “…for custom-resolution AVC files I tend to get garbled preview/render, with GPUA disabled, those source files played fine. “

Yea, that points to something in the GPU code not working as expected.

[Rick Anvican] “If the GPU was changed to AMD’s, would the hardware decode differently?”

Yes, it would use OpenCL instead of CUDA. What we concluded in the other thread is that Vegas Pro makes better use of OpenCL than CUDA (or maybe OpenCL is just more efficient than CUDA for video processing) and therefore the ATI cards performed better with Vegas Pro even though their specs were very similar to the NIVIDA card specs. Sony has a very close working relationship with AMD so I’m sure this helps make AMD cards perform better as well. This is why I say that the Radeon HD 5870 seems to be the best card for Vegas Pro.

~jr

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

[Rick Anvican]

I think I was recommended to buy the HD5870 some time ago, but I haven’t been able to find retailers in my area that still sell that GPU, could only find 5450/5570/5770/6450, I’ve heard that more recent GPUs from AMD as well as nVidia don’t perform as well in Vegas as the 5870, what company manufactured your 5870 card (e.g. Sapphire)?

[John Rofrano]

[Rick Anvican] “I think I was recommended to buy the HD5870 some time ago, but I haven’t been able to find retailers in my area that still sell that GPU, could only find 5450/5570/5770/6450”

Try looking for the Radeon HD 6970. It is an updated version of the HD 5870 with lower power consumption and only a slightly slower clock speed. The performance is about the same as the HD 5870.

[Rick Anvican] ” I’ve heard that more recent GPUs from AMD as well as nVidia don’t perform as well in Vegas as the 5870″

That’s correct. The newer cards have an architecture that Vegas Pro doesn’t take advantage of and as a result, they actually perform worse than the older cards.

[Rick Anvican] “what company manufactured your 5870 card (e.g. Sapphire)?”

My HD 5870 is in my 2008 Mac Pro and is made by Apple so it’s the Mac version of the PC card. I’m using it with Windows 7 Pro 64-bit under Apple BootCamp running the latest Catalyst drivers with no problems.

~jr

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

[Rick Anvican]

Yeah, my system HDD is failing in its early stages, but I tried your benchmark anyway,

My system: Intel Core i7 2600k 3.4Ghz(4core/8thread), 8GB RAM, eVGA(nVidia)Geforce GTX550Ti(slightly underclocked core clock), (HDD)1TB(system), 1TB external(for renders)
(CPU not overclocked, left Vegas processes at Normal Priority)

Using test project file: 7248_rendertestjr.veg

Preview: Best(Full) / 1920x1080x32 29.970i Render: Best(Full) / 1920x1080x32 29.970p
Dynamic RAM Preview(max): 200 MB
With GPUA off, preview runs at 0.5fps usually, max would be 0.6fps.
With GPUA on, preview runs at about 12fps, fluctuating between 11 and 13 fps

Rendering: (Best|Full)
Templates-Sony AVC | Internet 1920×1080-30p, MainConcept AVC | Internet HD 1080p
------------------------------------------------
Timeline GPU Acceleration OFF (Playback 0.5fps)
------------------------------------------------
Sony AVC (CPU Only). . . . . . . 1:46
Sony AVC (GPU). . . . . . . . 1:43 (0x)
MainConcept AVC (CPU). . . . . . 2:13
MainConcept AVC (CUDA) . . . . 1:40 (1.3x)
------------------------------------------------
Timeline GPU Acceleration ON (Playback 12.0fps)
------------------------------------------------
Sony AVC (CPU Only). . . . . . . 0:26
Sony AVC (GPU). . . . . . . . 0:30 (-0.1x)
MainConcept AVC (CPU). . . . . . 0:52
MainConcept AVC (CUDA) . . . . 0:29 (1.7x)
System HDD was on 50% highest active time, mainly reading Vegas-related files, not sure if that could have bottlenecked the results, but I didn’t really expect that it could achieve that much with GPUA on since I was working with GPUA off previously when editing custom-resolution sources, also considering the 550Ti’s a bordering mid-range (I was offered the 590 when I bought my system, but it was out of my budget, and I game rarely), you wouldn’t expect significant gains. With GPUA, GPU load was around 90% consistent on previewing and rendering regardless of render codec. With no GPUA, GPU load varied and had intermittent peaks of 20% every 10 or so frames when rendering with CUDA(Mainconcept) compared to Sony AVC(GPU) with intermittent peaks of 30% also every 10 frames or so.

Note that my GPU’s core clock was underclocked from factory 980Mhz to 900Mhz to keep MAX temperature under 60 degrees C, because for some reason higher temperatures tends to invite problems like driver stalls and unlikely but possible BSODs. The drivers I used were dated 2 months ago, GPU does seem more stable than when I bought the system.

Well this means no Quadro then, just need some insight on FirePro, but otherwise 5870 is pretty good I have to admit. I thought my GPU wouldn’t have done significantly much in the first place, and I already got used to non-realtime preview and expected sluggish rendering times because of how many effects/transitions I use in a project, but at least I know my GPU does try its best to assist rendering, got to save up then – these GPUs’ prices can be quite hefty.

(I tried to setup Vegas’ parameters as close as possible to yours, if I did miss out any parameters that were supposed to be controlled, please let me know.)

I have an older CPU than yours, based on your theory about matching CPU+GPU as a complimentary pair, would the HD5870 fit with my CPU? (from what I know the HD5870 is a 2009 model, right? My CPU was 2011)
What other GPUs would have worked with my CPU?

[John Rofrano]

[Rick Anvican] “(I tried to setup Vegas’ parameters as close as possible to yours, if I did miss out any parameters that were supposed to be controlled, please let me know.)”

That was perfect and pretty much what I expected. Your GTX550 is a little more powerful than my Quadro 4000 (which sacrifices performance for stability). The amazing thing is that the MainConcept encoder is 2x as fast using OpenCL than CUDA whereas the Sony encoder was about the same. A lot of what I do is delivering AVC/H.264 MP4 so this card paired with the MainConcept AVC encoder cuts my rendering time in half compared to my Quadro 4000! That’s significant to me.

[Rick Anvican] “I have an older CPU than yours, based on your theory about matching CPU+GPU as a complimentary pair, would the HD5870 fit with my CPU? (from what I know the HD5870 is a 2009 model, right? My CPU was 2011) What other GPUs would have worked with my CPU?”

Yes, the Radeon HD 5870 is from 2009 and it’s in my 2008 Mac Pro so it’s an upgrade to that system but still pretty close in age. I’d say the HD 5870 should work great with your 2011 CPU as well.

~jr

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

[Rick Anvican]

Who knew that video cards optimized for video processing won’t perform as good as cards optimized for gaming? I’m hoping that the HD5870 GPUs remain in production, now that we know that GPUA actually accelerates rendering, next thing to do is try the GPU with some of my projects and see if there’s a real performance gain. Thanks for sharing the info John, in the meantime I will be migrating my OS to a replacement system HDD but I’ll see if I could try the Vegas benchmark.

[John Rofrano]

[Rick Anvican] “…next thing to do is try the GPU with some of my projects and see if there’s a real performance gain. “

That’s why I also downloaded the Sony “red car” test at the bottom of the GPU acceleration page. That’s real AVCHD and Sony MXF files with lots of FX and track motion etc. My HD 5870 was faster than my Quadro 4000! What’s even more impressive is that the HD 5870 is on a slower CPU with less threads. This was the other indicator that the right GPU really does make a huge difference.

[Rick Anvican] “Thanks for sharing the info John, in the meantime I will be migrating my OS to a replacement system HDD but I’ll see if I could try the Vegas benchmark.”

You’re welcome. Good luck with the HDD swap.

~jr

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

[Rick Anvican]

Just a small update: apparently in Vegas 12 I am able to use custom-resolution source AVCHD with timeline GPUA on without the garbled preview or render, interesting…

Oh, do you have tearing on your Vegas preview? I’m pretty sure I switched Wait for vertical sync on but I get the occasional occurence during playback on virtually any project resolution.