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How do I turn on GPU accelerated video processing?
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I didn’t check any of that OpenCL compatibility that you mention, Dave. I’m able to turn GPU acceleration on with the GTS 450 that I bought to take advantage of GPU acceleration, though I only notice an improvement in performance in mpg rendering. I’m not even using Vegas 11 until I reformat my computer, which I’ll do whenever the guy who built it for me gets me the Windows 7 installation disc.
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The GPU acceleration is a spotty thing, what you’ll actually see. I’m not done, but I’m qualifying both HD6970 and GTX570… they’re roughly the same price, and about what I’m willing to spend.
I found, for example, that GPU acceleration could actually slow down preview… I got 57.4fps on AVCHD 720/60p video with Sony’s Bright+Contrast plug-in applied, Vegas 11 (11% faster than Vegas 10… hurray!), but it dropped to 40fps using the HD6970 with GPU acceleration on. Go figure. On the other hand, layering four of these, converted to MXF MPEG-2, with transparency, I dropped to 2.4fps without the GPU. The HD6970 raised this to 5fps. But the GTX570 didn’t change it one bit.
GPUs love special effects and animated stills. On a segment made from a video animation I did awhile back, CPU-only Vegas 11 did 5.1fps, with GPU acceleration and the HD6970, I got 14fps.
On Sony’s VP11 Benchmark project, I see 8fps on plan Vegas 11, 28.5fps on the HD6970, 27.5fps on the GTX570.
Rendering can vary too. On a fairly straight AVCHD render, I saw the HD6970 acceleration slowing MainConcept MPEG-2 by 32%, but speeding up Sony AVC by 14.5%… this it the same project that has preview slowed by 22.5% … go figure. Moving to that layered project, I see a 79.5% improvement on MainConcept MPEG-2, but Sony AVC only improved by 22%. The GTX570 actually crashed on GPU-mode MainConcept MPEG-2, but did 11% improvement on Sony AVC.
Rendering my animation to Sony AVC only improved 25%, despite the fairly dramatic preview speedup. But going to the Sony benchmark, I saw 118% improvement in AVC rendering with the HD6970, which is closer to the speedup I see in preview. The GTX570, which gave nearly the same preview boost, only did 52% improvement in rendering… and that with both CPU and GPU use higher than on the HD6970.
Not quite sure what all this means, only that, while GPU acceleration is real, it’s not perfect, and sometimes not all that significant.
I also ran into a couple of bugs in Vegas 11. I’m getting the “Render stopped… I don’t know why” type message for a number of presets that work just dandy in Vegas 10; in particular, Main Concept MPEG-2 renders at 50Mb/s, which seem to fail instantly. No idea here.
I also ran into one segment that was just unrenderable. This is an an animated slideshow I did yesterday (very rapidly… I found I had one less day to work on, our marketing guy had neglected to mention his deadline). At frame 907, rendering just froze. Didn’t matter what I output to. Preview worked just dandy. GPU was not a factor. I may have preserved this, not sure — again, I was in panic mode at the time, and I still had music to complete. I suffled some stuff around, switched out a transition or two, and it started working.
So I’m convinced, if nothing else, we have a N.X revision product here, and there may yet be bugs to solve.
-Dave
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[Mike Brennan] “Hello Dave. I remember you from back in the Amiga days. Nice to see you on this forum !
“Hi Mike… nice to be remembered for things I did that are way cooler than stuff I’m working on now (video stuff excluded, I am not planning to back to A/B roll editing and manual audio controlled by Scala MM400 and an Amiga 3000).
[Mike Brennan] “Do you have Vegas 10 and 11 both installed on your computer, and is the display so bad that you may find yourself doing the project in vegas 10? Is the display in 11 OK if you turn the GPU acceleration off? Is the acceleration that you get with the nVidia worth the “headache” ;-)”
The display quality is due to the nVidia hardware, not Vegas. As a videohead, I know that you eyes adapt to this stuff quickly enough, so now the nVidia display isn’t giving me a headache anymore, but it’s still pretty obvious. Like in typing this, black-on-white, I’m seeing some analog-like ghosting around the letters. Really something I haven’t seen since going all-digital, it’s kind of disturbing.
Could even be my cables.. but they work just dandy with the AMD card. I’m pretty ready to say the AMD HD6970 is faster enough than the nVidia GTX570 at all things Vegas to justify the slight limits I see with OpenCL only on the AMD vs. OpenCL and CUDA support on the nVidia. For example, the TMPGenc encoder I use sometimes… they claim CUDA accelerated support. But that’s only applied to video filters you add, not the AVC rendering itself. I also hear that the new Neat Video gets about 2x improvement with a fast enough CUDA GPU. But it’s faster anyway in Rev 3.0, and I don’t use this enough for that to be the deciding factor (and now, with an HDSLR added to my camcorder collection, maybe low-light won’t be the problem it once was).
As I almost discovered yesterday, going to the brand new Vegas can be a risk on a new project. Sony’s strict issue with .veg files not being backward compatible makes it a problem to regress to Vegas 10, if I need to. You can start the project in Vegas 10, of course. And more than half the video work I do is not for significant pay, so the deadlines are usually less of an issue (yesterday’s video was for “the day job”, but fortunately I found a work-around for the one real bug I ran into).
-Dave
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How many “go figures” can Sony throw our away before it’s unacceptable? I got delayed by about 12 hours trying to edit a big show when I switched to Vegas 11 (a mistake on my part). I’m editing on Vegas 10a because that seems to be the most reliable between 10 and 11, though at some point I may try running 9 again.
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Very frustrating … here is the info for NVIDIA Cards (if this is wrong, and somebody from Sony wants to jump in …).
It appears that Vegas Pro 11 wants to have CUDA Compute Capability 2.0. If I fake that out on my Quadro FX2700M, playback doesn’t work. So Vegas does require something that’s only in CUDA Compute Capability 2.0. I had tried 280 and 285 drivers from NVIDIA. Works fine with a Quadro 5000.
There is the wiki that tells you which GPU hence is supported: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus. So in a nutshell unless you have a FERMI type GPU this is not gonna work, despite Sony claiming otherwise …
Hope that helps. Hope that Sony fixes this and allows CUDA Compute Capability 1.1 …
Couple of other observations. I did a trial run with the MainConcept MP4 code of a short 720p clip, 1:13 in length, no effects just a few cuts. Anyway, on a Quadro FX2700M it takes 2:17, on a Quadro 5000 it takes 1:35. CPU only MainConcept takes for the same clip on the CPU took 9:03, while SonyAVC took 3:35. The host was kind of slow, either a 2.8GHz Core2 for the FX2700M or a 2.66GHz Core for the Quadro 5000. Video playback on the Quadro 5000 was somewhat stuttery as compared to the FX2700M, which I’d attribute to the GPU usage …
– Thomas
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[Thomas Roell] “It appears that Vegas Pro 11 wants to have CUDA Compute Capability 2.0.”
I think that’s exactly what they said, albeit in different words. The GPU requirements page says:
requires a CUDA-enabled GPU and NVIDIA driver 270.xx or later with
a GeForce GTX 4xx Series or newer GPU.I would claim that GTX 4xx series or newer, while not as scientifically descriptive as “CUDA Compute Capability 2.0”, is saying precisely the same thing. I think Adobe’s GPU support has very similar requirements.
-Dave
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Everyone knows a new release risks bugs… it’s the nature of the beast. This is why businesses typically don’t update Windows until the SP1 level (if that).
And yeah, some of us take the risk. I KNEW I was taking a risk using Vegas 11 for my video completed yesterday, and I was nearly burned by it. Software is a complex things, and it’s not as if Sony rushed this out or anything, just that certain bugs aren’t always caught during the testing process.
The reason I’ve trusted Sony/Sonic Foundry all these years is because they do superior job of finding problems before a release, and a great job of fixing the product after the release. I’ve dealt with a number of companies who release a product too buggy to be useful, and then they’re off working on the next major release, no bugs to be fixed. You don’t always hear about them years later — this isn’t the kind of thing you can get away with for long.
As for Vegas, I found the “10” releases each an improvement.. 10e was to the point where I really didn’t see bugs in general use. It may depend on what you do… Vegas 10-10d was always a failure with Cineform, and that was a big part of my workflow (and may yet be again, if they’ve really fixed it, but I’ve been using MXF instead recently).
-Dave
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How cool is that, Sony 😉 I could swear up and down that the web-page said GT2xx on the weekend. I just checked the manual, and on page 19 it says GT2xx …
Also I disagree that saying GTX 460 is good enough. There is the GT 440, which is a total lowend card, but still would work with Vegas … Or how does a Quadro 2000 correlate there ?
What’s even more frustrating is that the NVIDIA web page is in a few cases wrong as well, where a card is listed with 2.0, but is only 1.2 … Quite a mess I’d say.
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I just e-mailed Sony about the same think, in VP11 help it does say the 2xx series will work, but on-line it’s 4xx series, probably correct on -line! Naturally I have a GTX250 card and was hoping it would work, not available in the drop down box even with updating all the drivers and the NVDIA software. Figures, more stuff to buy.
Malcolm
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As I suggested, I think Sony’s GPU spec is confusing… I just didn’t realize they were saying different things in different places. If they’re sensitive to nVidia spec like Compute Capability, that’s exactly the spec they should be quoting. I have absolutely no idea how to relate consumer models (GeForce) to pro-models. I know how to look it up, on a unit by unit basis, but after all, nVidia does publish a nice chart of capbilities. Sony ought to point to that chart and say something like, “we support every card above this line” or “with this value or greater in that column”.
Of course, if nVidia themselves doesn’t understand what their chips will or won’t do, that’s not going to make things any easier…
-Dave
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