“New” graphics card

[Malcolm Matusky]

https://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-970-vs-Intel-Core-i7-930

Very interesting website to compare CPU’s. It looks like the difference between the 930 and the 970 is reasonably significant,4 vs 6 cores, but the 980/990 is a bit too expensive based upon ebay used prices.

M

Malcolm
http://www.malcolmproductions.com

[Thayalan Paramasawam]

(Mr.John Rofrano)I’m waiting for my NVIDIA Quadro 4000 to come back from PNY. I’ll post the results when I’m done but the difference is night and day with GPU on and off.

Thanks Mr.John……i am waiting for a good result,so i can switch back to QUADRO

System Details:
Custom Built
Motherboard – Asus M5A99X-EVO,HardDrive1 boot C:SSD Kingston,Processor – Amd FX 8350 4.0/4.2 GHZ,Ram – 16 GB,Graphic Card – Asus Gtx 650 1GB DDR 5,Blu Ray Writer – Plextor PX-B950SA,Operating System – Window 7 Pro 64 Bit and Editing Programe – Sony Vegas Pro 12

[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] “I’ve been doing some benchmarking with an old ATI Radeon HD 5870 that I recently acquired while I’m waiting for my NVIDIA Quadro 4000 to come back from PNY. I’ll post the results when I’m done but the difference is night and day with GPU on and off. I created a little render test with a rotating smtpe bars background and composited animated noise texture and without the GPU it plays back at 0.78fps at Best/Full (that’s less than a frame per second) with the CPU’s at 50%. I turn on the ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPU and it plays back at 29.97 full frame rate all day long. The GPU is at 69% while the CPU’s are at 9%. That is impressive GPU performance.”

That’s pretty much the kind of thing I’ve seen with the HD6970 as well. And again, in my experience with the recent AMD drivers, they are rock solid. Maybe that became a mission after AMD bought ATi, not sure, but it’s really a non-issue these days.

As I mentioned here before, there are issue with Vegas and both AMD and nVidia with newer cards. Main Concept doesn’t support any new cards, not for OpenCL, not for CUDA. Vegas itself does, and I’d expect video get even smoother on newer AMD systems.

There’s a different issue with nVidia. The older Fermi architecture was no problem. But the newer Kepler architecture does not seem to have proper OpenCL support. This isn’t a problem in Vegas, it’s not a matter of Vegas not using new features or anything… OpenCL has basically not changed between Kepler and Fermi (well, there was a new version, OpenCL 2.0 put out last fall or so, it doesn’t impact Vegas). You can find all sorts of discussions of this outside of the scope of Vegas or video.

So the short term wisdom is to get an older AMD HD5xxx or HD6xxx (or the Firepro cards based on the same architecture) or a nVidia Fermi, that’s GeForce GTX5xx, or the “no-K” Quadros. Longer term, it’s going to take new code from nVidia to improve OpenCL performance for the Kepler cards, and a new release of the Main Concept CODEC (which probably means a new version of Vegas) to make AVC rendering fast on the newer cards. Or FASTER… certainly, GPU support in Vegas makes things render faster even when the CODEC doesn’t use the GPU.

As far as speeding up a system, it used to be “buy a faster CPU”, and the GPU was basically just gravy. But since Vegas 12, I don’t really think do. Last summer I wet from a 6-core AMD 1090T to a 6-core Intel i7-3930K. That’s about a 2x performance increase, give or take, depending on the work being done. On that very system, the HD6970 gives me a 4x-6x improvement on edit and render speed, on a complex think the red car demo. You can’t get a CPU that’s anywhere near that much faster… to get a 2x improvement, I’d need the newer 12-core E3 Xeon, which runs around $2500. Just not really an option.

The think is, and it’s correct, that the GPU speeds up only specialized code, the faster CPU speeds up everything. And while that’s true, the alternate view is this: how much of an effect does each have on the things that really NEED speeding up. Clearly, I’ve chosen to do both. But I had the HD6970 there from my last machine. It was still more bang per buck for editing and rendering than any CPU I could have afforded back then.

Even today, that’s a $150 video card (if you can find one) versus a $500 CPU. Or maybe $200… the price of these seems to have gone up in the last year or two, despite being older models (mine is from 2011, it was about $300 new). They apparently can mine bitcoins (or could, before that got switched to FPGAs) 6-8x faster than my i7. And you could put four of these in one box.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Dave Osbun] “The big improvement with i7 processors was when Intel switched from the Sandy Bridge architecture to the Ivy Bridge chips (which are the newer i7’s). If you’re not making that jump the improvement will be negligible.”

It’s actually even more complicated than that, because the i7 LGA2011 chips, the higher end parts, are sort of released in-between Intel’s other releases. So sometimes you hear the i7-39xx called “Sandy Bridge”, sometime “Ivy Bridge”. According to the horse’s mouth, Intel, these are “Sandy Bridge E” parts. The next generation, the i7-49xx, which are actually Ivy Bridge E parts, but sometimes get dubbed Ivy Bridge, sometimes Haswell. In each case, they’re basically a step after the base architecture. But sometimes it’s a pretty good step; the i7-49xx parts are usually only about 5% faster than the i7-39xx series. The i7-26xx are just regular Sandy Bridge, that’s part of the problem.

But anyway, check out this benchmark series:
https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Haswell-Review-Intel-Core-i7-4770K-Performance-and-Architecture/Clock-Clock-Sandy

They didn’t get the names right, but the progression from i7-26xx to i7-39xx and i7-49xx is steady, but not amazing. And probably not worth spending much on; you’re talking 4-10% improvement, depending on the jump. And you may not be able to update, but I’ll cover that in another note.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Rich Kutnick] “Dave, my PC has an i7-3820 processor @3.6GHZ. I assume that this is an older chip, for the PC now is 2.5 years old (UGH!). I don’t even know if I could replace this chip on my motherboard with a newer Ivy Bridge processor. “

That is a Sandy Bridge E series processor, which people sometimes confuse for Ivy Bridge. Anyway, you could almost certainly replace that with an i7-39xx processor, which gets you a 6-core Sandy Bridge E system. That’s going to be a 50% improvement on multithreaded stuff, give or take any clock speed differences. It’s not clear if you could upgrade to an Ivy Bridge E chip, i7-49xx, because that depends on which version of the LGA2011 socket you have. Yup, there are at least three versions. So it’s a main board thing, you have to check with the PCB vendor and see what they support. Later chips in the LGA2011 form factor have more pins!

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Well, MAYBE you can’t upgrade. It depends on the main board. Rick could upgrade to an LGA2011 six core Sandy Bridge E chip like your (and mine) i7-3930K, one of the other 39xx chips. He’s going from a four core Sandy Bride E to a six core in that case.

So there’s the Sandy Bridge EP version of the LGA2011, the Ivy Bridge EP version, the Ivy Bridge XP version, and the Haswell XP version. The first two are physically compatible, the next two are not, either with the first two or with each other. See here:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/7773/intels-three-versions-of-socket-2011-not-compatible

Now, it’s technically possible for a motherboard to support chips from more than one of these. But particularly for an older main board, don’t count on it. It’s particularly annoying given that all LGA2011 systems use the X79 chipset (so far), so there’s no special reason they couldn’t have made this universal. Or are there different Intel chips all called “X79”.

In short, check with your motherboard maker and see what chips they support in the latest BIOS. That’s your shopping list, if you’re looking to upgrade just the CPU. I checked my Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4 motherboard… if I have Rev 1.0, it supports Sandy Brige E, EP, and Ivy Bridge E chips.. but not Ivy Bridge EP. If I have Rev 1.1, it supports the Ivy Bridge EP chips as well. Presumably, Rev 1.1 added those extra pins. I have no idea right now which I’ve got. The Xeon E5 v2 chips are the Ivy Bridge EP.

The good news is that going from 4 core to 6 core is a pretty nice boost. Going from Sandy Bridge E to Ivy Bridge E, that’s going to be 4-6% on most things, given the same configuration (clocks/cores).

-Dave

[Rich Kutnick]

I’m still a bit confused. With an i7-3820 processor and X-79 chipset (16GB RAM), my Nvidia GTX 560 actually slows the rendering down and causes some New Blue add-ons to crash (I do not see any difference in video smoothness when editing, though). Given my equipment then, would an ATI HD6970 video card offer a significant improvement for me (in ANY way–video smothness, rendering speeds, etc.)? I ask this since you ALSO mentioned in “short term wisdom” upgrading to a “GeForce GTX5xx”, which is what I already own and really not doing a thing to help my Vegas editing.

I am sorry to keep asking the same questions, but every time there is a new thread this issue keeps getting more “what if”. I am looking for the short term solution, not wanting to upgrade my PC for at least a few more years (as it is blazing fast for everything EXCEPT video editing/rendering). So, will replacing my Nvidia GTX 560 with the ATI HD6970 do me enough justice (in your opinions) to outlay around $230 (Amazon price for a new card)? As always, I appreciate everyone’s efforts to help out!

Rich Kutnick
VIDEO IMPRESSIONS

[John Rofrano]

[Rich Kutnick] “I ask this since you ALSO mentioned in “short term wisdom” upgrading to a “GeForce GTX5xx”, which is what I already own and really not doing a thing to help my Vegas editing.”

Yea, I was going to ask that same question. You have a GTX 560 but Sony used the GTX 570 in their GPU tests. Is the 570 that much faster than the 560? I think what we’re saying is to get the most powerful Fermi based card but don’t get a Kepler card.

Your GTX 560 has 336 CUDA cores. The GTX 570 has 480, the GTX 580 has 512, and the GTX 590 has a wapping 1024 CUDA cores compared to your 336 (that’s more than 3x CUDA cores). The question is, would buying a GTX 590 significantly boost your Vegas performance? There are two ways to find out… (1) Find someone who has a GTX 590 and your motherboard/CPU combination and ask them, or… (2) buy one at a store that a allows returns and see for yourself. If it doesn’t perform bring it back for a refund.

~jr

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

[Rich Kutnick]

Thanks. I will check in to purchasing a GTX 590. I am curious, though, John, why you suggest going the Nvidia route as opposed to the ATI HD6970? Is this just a six of one, half dozen of the other, or are you more confident of the Nvidia GTX series?

Rich Kutnick
VIDEO IMPRESSIONS

[Rich Kutnick]

John, I can buy a NEW ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB CYPRESS XT GDDR5 DP HDMI STKD_DVI Video Graphics Card for $149 (shipped) on EBay with a 14-day money back guarantee. What do you think?

Rich Kutnick
VIDEO IMPRESSIONS