“New” graphics card

[John Rofrano]

[Rich Kutnick] “I am sure that I am not the ONLY one experiencing these phenomena.”

Indeed you are not. I am considering starting a new thread on the topic, “How much computer power is enough?” This question is based on exactly your observation… If I buy a 3.2 Ghz 6-core computer with an $800 Quadro 4000 graphics card, only to have Vegas Pro use 20% of my CPU and 40% of my GPU, and the timeline still stutters, why did I bother? I’m not getting my money’s worth out of the hardware. I still haven’t received my Quadro 4000 back from PNY and it’s been over week so I’m really unimpressed with their service at this point. I still need to do the benchmarks between my two computers but it’s depressing to see such low utilization levels.

~jr

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

[Rich Kutnick]

It is VERY frustrating, to say the least, when one purchases two video cards (one from each major graphics card manufacturer) that surpass the minimum specs listed by Sony to work on SVP 12, yet observes that the GPUs in these cards are grossly underused. Coupled with a fairly powerful computer, too, on the surface there appears to be not-exactly-true advertising and marketing on Sony’s part. Apparently Sony has not optimized their code for the cards they recommend meet the minimum requirements for compatibility, but only for the listed cards when used in the specific PCs in which they were tested!! While I have quite a bit invested in SVP and a number of its plug-ins (and it is fairly user-friendly and does not have a high learning curve), at this point I do not want to switch NLEs. I do, however, expect that after two years Sony would open up its eyes as big as its bank account and fix what is broken! I know that there are a good number of you who are in the same situation as me–a small business trying to get by who cannot afford to upgrade their hardware every year. There is a certain minimum standard which Sony must meet, yet they have failed in this regard. It is a shame that they have not been able to raise their heads up high, admit their faults and fix what is broken. There is a logical assumption that if one purchases one of the graphics cards listed that it will work as advertised–and neither of mine do!! It surprises me that by now some one (or someones) has not tested Sony’s claims in the legal arena–WAIT, I know the answer (their bank account balance, of course)…and David already beat Goliath a long time ago and the chances of that happening again are…so I only can hope and pray that a solution soon is forthcoming (but I never was that good at holding my breath but I am starting to turn blue without resorting to that). So please, ANYONE from our side of the table who can participate in helping to resolve this problem please do so. And Sony, if you are monitoring this forum, please do fix it soon. We really love your NLE and would hate to give it up due to stupid useability reasons!!

Rich Kutnick
VIDEO IMPRESSIONS

[Dave Haynie]

[Rich Kutnick] “It is VERY frustrating, to say the least, when one purchases two video cards (one from each major graphics card manufacturer) that surpass the minimum specs listed by Sony to work on SVP 12, yet observes that the GPUs in these cards are grossly underused.”

Where a video card actually helps you out is part of this problem. That why I’ve always posted benchmarks based on Sony’s “Red Car” project. For one, that’s a very good way of showing what a GPU can do. Is it typical? Only if that’s the kind of video you’re editing.

I honestly see a falling off the realtime in playback rarely if ever. But that’s dependent on lots of things. Add a bunch of plugins on even a few video tracks — Neat Video for one — and you can push your smooth video into the “going to stuggle no matter what I do” category. GPUs help for rendering, true, but it can be a mild improvement or something profound, depending on how much it helps the compositing and how well the CODEC uses the GPU.

I was actually kind of expecting the GPU to do less for me when I switched from the AMD 1090T to the i7-3930K… after all, I had a much faster CPU now, and the overhead for feeding the GPU has technically not changed. But that’s not what I saw… as mentioned, nearly a 6x speedup rendering the Red Car demo to Main Concept… both Main Concept and Vegas Options set to use OpenCL. So I’d be shocked if the GPU-related performance from the four-core i7 is any different than what I see.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

[Rich Kutnick] “GPU OFF: 4m20s to render. CPU: 25%, GPU 0%

GPU ON: 4m23s to render. CPU: 27%, GPU: 25%

Again, this is a virtual draw!! So what is this highly-touted graphics card that so many of you rave about doing for me? Apparently nothing!! Is there a problem with the card? I doubt it! Is there a problem with SVP 12? More than likely!! So is it just a crap shoot, PC to PC, that in some computers this card works great in while others it suffers in? At least nothing is being slowed down like it was with my Nvidia GTX 560.”

What that’s telling me is that neither the GPU nor the CPU are the bottleneck in your system. You SHOULD see nearly 100% CPU utilization when you’re rendering without the CPU… maybe a little less with the CPU. But you’re using one of your four CPU cores for that render. That’s a very, very strong suggesting that you have a single threaded plug-in or something that’s blocking any other efforts to run Vegas on all four cores of your system.

Keep in mind that specific plug-ins, hard drive speed (particularly seek speeds), etc. are also potential bottlenecks. When a system is correctly set up, they will not prove to be dominant enough to be bottlenecks in most cases. But they certainly can be. If some other thing is limiting your performance, it’s setting the render time. Nothing you do to your other hardware will have much effect.

So what would I recommend? Try the Red Car demo… that’s not going to use any thread-limited plug-ins; we know this project can run fast on a system with a fast GPU, and that it will run slow otherwise. Make sure you have Vegas set up to use at least 8 threads (four real cores, 8 virtual cores on the i7-3820… if you only see four, you have to enable multithreading in the BIOS). Make sure you’re not running low on RAM during the render… swapping to HDD would be another bottleneck that doesn’t change with your CPU or GPU. Also check that Vegas is the only thing running, you’re not devoting those other CPU cores to something evil (emulators, etc) that could actually take over the whole core. Your CPU use, before launching Vegas, should be low, like around 3% or less.

Try that stuff, report back with some CPU/GPU numbers. Maybe you’ll see some better stats, or maybe the collective Vegas wizards here will have a little more to go on. Your system should be fast.

-Dave

[Rich Kutnick]

I can’t find any switches to turn on OpenCL anywhere in SVP 12–not in the help files or in the owner’s manual. Please advise.

Rich Kutnick
VIDEO IMPRESSIONS

[John Rofrano]

[Rich Kutnick] “I can’t find any switches to turn on OpenCL anywhere in SVP 12–not in the help files or in the owner’s manual. Please advise.”

There is the Options | Preferences | Video | GPU Acceleration switch for the timeline. Vegas Pro uses CUDA for NVDIA cards and OpenCL for ATI cards so one switch toggles whatever you have. Then for the render templates, if you click Customize Template those that have a GPU switch will say “CPU Only”, “CUDA if available”, or “OpenCL if available”. If you go to the System tab, there will be a Check GPU button to test the GPU and it will tell you if it found a CUDA or OpenCL compatible GPU or none. I believe only Sony AVC and MainConcept AVC have this switch.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

I did some testing on my ATI Radeon HD 5870 so I thought I would post the results with and without GPU acceleration:

These results are from my 2008 Mac Pro 2×2.8 GHz Quad Core Xeon E5462 (8 Cores/8 Threads), 16GB memory, ATI Radeon HD 5870, SSD boot, 2TB HDD Raid 0 (which, btw, I picked up for only $740 on eBay!)

The purpose of this test is to measure the difference between GPU acceleration for both timeline playback and rendering. The project is 15 seconds long. It has two tracks:. The lower track contains a Generated Media NTSC Color Bars that rotates 360 degrees in 15 seconds. The upper track had Generated Media Noise Texture with the Progress animated so that it would move. I added Sony Bump Map and Sony Glow (both GPU accelerated FX) to the noise texture and the composite level of the event was dropped to 60% so that the rotating colors bars would show through. Compositing random movement ensures that every frame would need to be rendered during the test. This project requires Vegas Pro 12.0 to open.

Here is the test project file: 7248_rendertestjr.veg.zip

With GPU turned OFF, that project played back at 0.5 fps on my 8-core Mac Pro with Bootcamp (btw, even on my new 6-core/12-thread Intel Core i7-3930K it only played at 0.7 fps with no GPU). With GPU turned ON it plays back at 29.97 fps. So the GPU is giving me a 60x improvement in playback (from 1/2 frame per second to 30 frames per second). That’s pretty amazing.

Then I set RAM Preview to default 200MB so there would be no caching to skew the results and rendered to Sony AVC | Internet 1920×1080-30p and MainConcept AVC | Internet HD 1080p both with and without the timeline GPU and with and without the Render template GPU. Here are the results:
------------------------------------------------
Timeline GPU Acceleration OFF (Playback 0.5fps)
------------------------------------------------
Sony AVC (CPU Only). . . . . . . 1:34
Sony SVC (OpenCL). . . . . . . . 1:30 (0x)
MainConcept AVC (CPU). . . . . . 2:40
MainConcept AVC (OpenCL) . . . . 1:23 (2x)

------------------------------------------------
Timeline GPU Acceleration ON (Playback 29.97fps)
------------------------------------------------
Sony AVC (CPU Only). . . . . . . 0:31
Sony SVC (OpenCL). . . . . . . . 0:29 (0x)
MainConcept AVC (CPU). . . . . . 0:54
MainConcept AVC (OpenCL) . . . . 0:15 (3.6x)
Apparently, Sony AVC does not take advantage of OpenCL with this card even though the Sony site clearly states that it supports the 5770 or better (which the 5870 is better). There was no appreciable improvement (just a few seconds) between CPU Only and Use OpenCL. Maybe if I make the test project longer (like one minute) but the GPU Load meter did not show the Sony encoder using the GPU at all (maybe one or two spikes).

MainConcept was another story entirely. The difference with MainConcept AVC GPU is incredible. MainConcept AVC saw a 3.6x improvement for GPU rendering and 10x overall between no GPU for timeline or render (2:40) and only 0:15 with both turned on!!! On the MainConcept AVC render my CPU was about 29% and my GPU was about 71% utilized. That is closer to what I expected.

At no time did the GPU slow things down. It’s important to note that the CPU and GPU are pretty evenly matched. They are both circa 2008/2009 so they compliment each other well. They are also parts that are matched by Apple (i.e., it’s the Mac version of the Radeon HD 5870) so I’m not sure how much having the CPU/GPU combination evenly matched adds to the performance boost. I did use the latest Catalyst drivers from AMD and not the older Apple drivers.

Obviously this was an artificial test. Generated Media is uncompressed in Vegas Pro so I eliminated any lag due to decoding video on the timeline. But it did isolate just the timeline GPU acceleration and rendering GPU acceleration in a project that doesn’t play back smoothly without it on any PC.

BTW, Sony’s “Red Car” project plays back at full frame rates 29.97 Best(Full) all the way through using this CPU/GPU combination. I’m really impressed with it and for $740 I got a whole 8-core/16GB Mac Pro with Radeon HD 5870 for less than my $800 Quadro 4000 that’s still in the shop at PNY! I will never waste my money on a Quadro card again. I am so done with them (it’s been in the shop for over week now)!

~jr

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

[Thayalan Paramasawam]

Hi sir (Mr.John Rofrano)Here is the test project file: 7248_rendertestjr.veg.zip

Thank you very much for the project file

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

[Rich Kutnick]

Got ’em, John! While I am familiar with all of these options, I did not know that these were the referenced items in other threads of this post. Thanks for lining up the answers to the specific questions. Now on to the next step…

Rich Kutnick
VIDEO IMPRESSIONS

[John Rofrano]

[Rich Kutnick] “While I am familiar with all of these options, I did not know that these were the referenced items in other threads of this post.”

Yea, the key thing to understand is that Vegas Pro has implemented GPU acceleration in two different areas. Timeline playback acceleration is turned on and off under Options | Preferences | Video | GPU Acceleration and Encoding acceleration is only implemented in some of the encoders and you turn it on and off in the template of the encoder. The tricky part is that rendering involves both playing back the timeline and encoding the video to a particular format. This is why I tried to separate out both.

I’d be interested to see what timings you get since your CPU is newer than mine by at least two generations but your GPU is the same age as mine. I’m going to guess that you’re not going to see as big a boost in GPU performance because your CPU is a lot faster but we’ll see what you get.

~jr

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