OMG! Pro 11 is sooo slow. Pro 9 and 10 were Ok but pro 11 is awful. Any advice?

[Dave Haynie]

A couple of things… probably TMI, but the take-away: GPU isn’t always faster.

I’ve seen the Sony AVC option vanish in VP11 a couple of times. Usually ending VP11 and then starting it up again solves the problem.

Depending on your CPU and GPU, some things can actually run slower with the GPU enabled. The problem seems to be that in GPU mode, you’re going to get your work scheduled on the GPU, but there may not be enough work for the CPU to do. And in fact, oddly enough, on most GPU renders I’ve benchmarked, I see both CPU and GPU doing lots of waiting for things. Maybe it’s just my PCIe bus speed, I don’t know (planning to look into that, I’m still tweaking my system up to optimize for VP11). No matter what you do, there’s going to be a bottleneck somewhere in the system — we’re just used to it being the CPU most of the time.

Some real numbers for ya. Rendering to Main Concept MPEG-2 from a pretty straight forward AVCHD edit with just some contrast correction, I found Vegas 11 to be 20% SLOWER than Vegas 10 with GPU enabled. In this setup, I also found that preview was slower.. I saw 40fps with GPU, 57fps without (720p60 “PH” mode AVCHD source, HMC40 camcorder). However, compared to Vegas 10, the non-GPU Vegas 11 did 9% faster renders to MPEG-2.

On the other hand, rendering to AVC, I found Vegas 11 to run 13% faster than Vegas 10 without GPU, 26% faster with GPU, from the same project. Go figure.

Now, my system has an AMD1090T processor — a really fast i7 might peak at better than twice as fast. On the other hand, my GPU is an AMD HD6970, which I have found to be faster at just about everything, on my system, than the nVidia GTX570 I’ve also been testing. If you have a slower GPU and faster CPU, I think you’ll definitely find a larger number of senarios that render faster with the CPU only.

Best results so far as with lots of PNGs and less video. The published Sony VP11 Benchmark rendered to Sony AVC 118% faster on the HD6970, 52% faster on the GTX570, than non-GPU Vegas 11. Oddly, I saw an average CPU use of 58% and GPU use of 30% for the HD6970 render, 75% CPU and 50% GPU for the nVidia render… still trying to figure that one out.

-Dave

[Dan Lindley]

Thanks Dave! Definitely NOT TMI. I need all the help I can get. I thought I had pro 10 all figured out but these new obstacles are getting the best of me. Is it possible for rendering as AVC (with GPU optimization) that (even though I have a Nvidia GTX560Ti 2Gb) the video card is not really good enough and it may be acting as a bottleneck. It is recognized by Vegas when I choose GPU rendering but maybe that’s irrelevant? Thus, CPU rendering is better on my system? Again, thank you VERY much. Dan…

[Ken Mitchell]

My sandybridge 2600K renders CPU avc at about the same speed as incorporating my GPU GTX560TI

[Carl Britton]

Hi,

I know this thread is a few months old now but I have just com across the same problem. I have just built a rendering PC for use in a school with an Intel i7 3960 @ 4.5GHz, 32GB RAM, nVidia 570GTX and WD Caviar Black OS HDD (1TB)and rendering HDD (2TB).

I was using Vegas Movie Studio 11 HD and downloaded Pro 11 trial to see if it would render any quicker, being 64bit. The same project actually rendered 10 mins slower than the 32bit home version!

Anyone have any ideas why this is?

[Dan Lindley]

Sony has a known problem with the GPU acceleration “feature”. My solution was to toggle OFF the GPU Acceleration feature. I think that’s under Preferences (or Properties?) then the Video tab. Now all is fine and projects render VERY fast! Good luck. Hope that helps.

[Carl Britton]

Hi Dan,

I did what you said and the same project rendered a couple of mins quicker in Pro than in Movie Studio so thanks for the tip. Be nice when Sony sort out the GPU issue. I could have saved myself a couple of hundred £’s and just bought a basic graphics card if I can’t make use of the GPU feature.

Thanks