Nvidia vs AMD GPU’s in a Vegas laptop… what do we know…?

[Sonic 67]

None of the newer video cards is supported fully by Vegas. They are stuck in 2010 with their software and they keep raking up the $$$. The best cards that can fully use the Vegas capabilities are the Fermi generation (on nVidia) or HD69xx (on AMD).

Sure John will jump in and say that “AMD all the way” but that is just not fully true. Is just his preference because at some point Apple decided to go AMD for their mainstream computers (though have nVidia upgrades).

In my opinion, stop wasting money on laptops for video editing. Get a decent desktop – it will provide more bang for the buck, it can be upgraded later, and will be a longer term investment than a laptop.

[Norman Black]

[Sorin Nicu] “None of the newer video cards is supported fully by Vegas. They are stuck in 2010 with their software and they keep raking up the $$$. The best cards that can fully use the Vegas capabilities are the Fermi generation (on nVidia) or HD69xx (on AMD).”

One must be specific. The Vegas video engine, effects and compositing support the newer cards just fine.

The Mainconcept AVC encoder is the one that is hard coded to specific GPU architectures. The Sony AVC encoder does get benefit on my newer GPU, but Sony AVC uses the GPU for so little it does not really matter.

I was one who got bitten by the GPU thing a couple of years ago. I had an AMD 5850 and the MC AVC encoder was quite fast. Then I got my current AMD 7950 and MC AVC does not work with it. I had posts in the Sony forum about this. For AMD I dumped the executables and found the hard coded architecture limitation.

As stated, the video engine works very well and things that could not perform fully on my 5850 do perform better on my 7950.

[Nick Mcmahon]

[Sorin Nicu] “n my opinion, stop wasting money on laptops for video editing. Get a decent desktop – it will provide more bang for the buck, it can be upgraded later, and will be a longer term investment than a laptop.”

Your opinion to not bother with a laptop and go desktop is absolutely good advice although in the context of my query is over simplifying and not actually answering the question …. Vegas does work with laptop sized architecture, even if restricted by a variable percentage due to harware configs and current sizing restrictions and although I will eventually be in a position to hang my hat on the same hook every day, currently I can’t do that, so primarily I need a portable solution to allow me to maximise the time I can spend becoming more skilled at editing with Vegas. I don’t view my laptop purchase as an investment… it’s the cost of a tool I need to perform a job and carries no real residual value. The true value for me is measured in the cumulative time I get to use the tool. Time is the most valuable asset I believe we all have and the more time I get to spend using a tool the more real value it accumulates for me…. but now I’m leading into a whole other subject which isn’t relative to this question.

So I just really need to find out from the community here (if possible) in fact this apparent benchmarking of SVP using laptop architecture with the 2 different GPU’s, reported verbally to me today, fits the model of experience from people that might have actually had the opportunity to try both GPU’s with Vegas in a laptop, or if anyone has also read any such information that concurs…?

I guess more specifically, has anyone used the GTX 970M with Vegas which I’ve pre-selected in the above configuration…?

Nick… BASE1268

3…2…1…C ya

[Sonic 67]

I have GTX 960 in my PC. I had Radeon HD7970 GHz Edition (rebadged now as R9 280X), GTX480, Quadro 2000, GTS450.
Sadly only the GTX480, Quadro 2000, GTS450 where used by Vegas fully.
GTX960 has integrated engines for hardware acceleration of video decoding (up to 4K) and encoding (again up to 4K).
Sadly Vegas has no clue about this – it is the only GPU from the above that doesn’t get recognized by Vegas.
For example, CyberLink’s PowerDirector does.

OpenCL? Sure, it works. But to me, the transitions are just minimal time gain, my six core (12 thread) can go trough those very quickly anyway.

The only saving grace might be Intel QuickSync, that seems to be supported by Vegas inside Sony encoder. But my CPU doesn’t have that option (doesn’t have a video integrated) so I cannot report is works or not.

[Dave Haynie]

That’s certainly a beast of a laptop. I have a new one with basically the same processor, a lower-end nVidia GPU, 16GB, PCIe-based SSD (512GB), and the best display on any laptop (4K quantum dot), but only 15.6″. Unfortunately, they seem to have pretty much abandoned 17″ screens. And I wanted to actually have battery life — I have desktops at home and work, so I’m not trying to entirely replace a desktop with a laptop. Because you really can’t, not for anything that needs lots of CPU or lots of screen.

Your GPU is a really fast mobile GPU, don’t worry about that. It’s nVidia’s latest architecture, Maxwell, and with 1280 rendering pipelines, it’s no slouch. In fact, that’s twice the size of mine, and the bus is 192-bit, versus 128-bit on my system.

As other have mentioned, you’re not going to get Main Concept AVC fast rendering with that chip. Maxwell architecture is replacing Kepler, Kepler replaced Fermi — which is the last architecture Main Concept supported. Now, keep in mind that whey they did here was pretty evil. The whole point of the CUDA or OpenCL interfaces is that the GPGPU computing doesn’t count on the specific GPU.

But Main Concept hard-wired these in, basically to give them leverage over companies like Sony. Then they were bought by DivX, then Rovi, and basically ignored the product. At least based on what they’re showing on their web site, Sony has the latest version — they just pretty much abandoned new GPU support.

The rest of Vegas, like some plug-ins, compositing, etc. will benefit from the GPU. You need to use the latest OpenCL drivers from nVidia, and unfortunately, they haven’t been as good with OpenCL as they are with their proprietary CUDA. And of course, you have to enable the use of OpenCL in the “Video” tab of the preferences dialog.

Just looking at basic benchmarks, the 850M in my laptop will beat my desktop AMD HD6970 on maybe half of the published benchmarks.. the HD6970 may be the fastest GPU for Main Concept rendering. But it’s a 2010 card… things evolve. So that’s one of the fastest GPUs you can get in a laptop without going to SLI. Try using the “Red Car” benchmark from Sony, that’ll definitely take advantage of GPU compositing, even if the AVC rendering is the same. Just rendering to Main Concept from any single video source, you’re counting on the AVC acceleration only. Which you aren’t going to get.

-Dave

[Nick Mcmahon]

[Sorin Nicu] “Sadly only the GTX480, Quadro 2000, GTS450 where used by Vegas fully.”

Now we’re getting somewhere… thanks Sorin… Are you of the opinion that the 480M chip will give greater Vegas performance than the 970M….?

https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-480M.30196.0.html

https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-970M.126694.0.html

Nick… BASE1268

3…2…1…C ya

[Nick Mcmahon]

[Dave Haynie] “As other have mentioned, you’re not going to get Main Concept AVC fast rendering with that chip.”

Many thanks for your input Dave… real world experience having used both Nvidia and AMD in a laptop with SVP which is exactly what I was hoping to hear about.

I’m liking the idea of Frameserving to render in x264 and Norman is very nicely giving me a heads up on his system to use ffmpeg. This for me is based purely on the suggestion of better quality output but apparently it’s also a faster process.

Nick… BASE1268

3…2…1…C ya

[John Rofrano]

[Sorin Nicu] “The best cards that can fully use the Vegas capabilities are the Fermi generation (on nVidia) or HD69xx (on AMD). Sure John will jump in and say that “AMD all the way” but that is just not fully true.”

My statement is based on the fact that (1) Vegas Pro uses Open CL for GPU Acceleration (I’m talking about Options | Preferences | GPU Acceleration) and (2) AMD Provides better Open CL support than NVIDIA. Numerous Vegas Pro users who once owned NVIDIA cards and now have AMD cards have validated that the switch has increased timeline playback. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use NVIDIA GPU’s, just that the AMD’s seem to perform better with Vegas Pro.

Note that the limitation of using older cards only affects the encoders like MainConcept that are quite old. Don’t confuse timeline GPU acceleration that will take advantage of the latest GPU’s with encoder GPU acceleration that in some cases is locked to older GPU’s.

~jr

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

[Nick Mcmahon]

[John Rofrano] “Note that the limitation of using older cards only affects the encoders like MainConcept that are quite old. Don’t confuse timeline GPU acceleration that will take advantage of the latest GPU’s with encoder GPU acceleration that in some cases is locked to older GPU’s.”

That is an important aspect to consider… thanks for establishing that John.

So…. with that in mind how does all this relevant information differ with the ‘M’ version of GPU’s designed to be small and fit inside a laptop…?

Does the reduction in size and relative performance actually reduce their differences to a level one can’t distinguish in real terms while using SVP…? (for instance the GTX 970M is rated to run at 80% of the performance of it’s desktop big brother the 970…?)

This claim made by the guys at https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ is that their tests with Vegas shows no difference between the Nvidia and the AMD GPU’s. I’ll go back and get all the detail I can about the in-house tests they claim to have run using Vegas with both different GPU’s (sorry I didn’t ask which version of SVP… DOH !)

Nick… BASE1268

3…2…1…C ya

[John Rofrano]

[Nick McMahon] “This claim made by the guys at https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ is that their tests with Vegas shows no difference between the Nvidia and the AMD GPU’s. I’ll go back and get all the detail I can about the in-house tests they claim to have run using Vegas with both different GPU’s (sorry I didn’t ask which version of SVP… DOH !)”

I’d be interested in understanding their findings. Vegas Pro supported GPU rendering before it supported GPU Timeline acceleration so make sure it was a version that supported both.

~jr

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