Radeon R9 290 video card and Vegas Pro 13

[Sergio Cipri]

Following your post, I’ve disabled the Crossfire function. Guess that the AMD work in OpenCl mode without setting specific parameters (that I did not find anywere).
The result is the same: some nomadic call to the card (duration few seconds).

Anyway, I understand from your notes that SONY is late, or – worse – not interested in updating its software in order to take advantage of the new video cards. Frustrating.

Sergio

[John Rofrano]

[Sergio Cipri] ” What is not true is the improvement in performance of Vegas Pro 13 when “GPU acceleration on video processing” is selected in VIDEO Preferencies. “

That’s not my experience. I’ve already posted my results of GPU acceleration and it dramatically improves playback for supported cards. You can download my test project here and see for yourself:

7248_rendertestjr.veg.zip

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 ever frame would need to be rendered during the test. This project requires Vegas Pro 12.0 to open.

Try playing it with GPU Acceleration on and off to see the difference. Note: You need to restart Vegas Pro when turning GPU acceleration on and off.

~jr

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

[Sonic 67]

John, what makes the difference between your result sand ours is that your test has GPU-accelerated effects. Those use the OpenCL (or CUDA) with the newer video cards (like R290).
But the actual encoding is not accelerated with them.

I think is ridiculous that Sony doesn’t do anything about this. Today nVidia released GTX960 with Maxwell 2 core, and it has full hardware HVEC / h265 encoding and decoding included. When it will be included in Vegas? At present development speed, I would say… 4 more years?

[John Rofrano]

[Sorin Nicu] “what makes the difference between your result sand ours is that your test has GPU-accelerated effects. Those use the OpenCL (or CUDA) with the newer video cards (like R290).”

Just to be correct, Sony does not use CUDA to accelerate timeline playback. It only uses OpenCL which is why ATI Radeon’s work better than NVIDIA GeForce because the Geforce cards are forced to use their OpenCL implementation which pales in comparison to the Radeon’s. This is why we recommend Radeon for Vegas Pro timeline GPU Acceleration.

Also almost all of my projects use Levels, Color Corrector, and Color Curves (all GPU accelerated FX) on all of the video tracks so having GPU accelerated FX is really important to my workflow. It significantly reduces render times by processing the timeline faster even if for codecs that don’t have encoding acceleration.

[Sorin Nicu] “But the actual encoding is not accelerated with them.”

Apparently not. The Sony AVC encoder seems to be minimally affected by GPU acceleration even with my Radeon HD 5870 which is old enough to work with the MainConcept AVC encoder. I don’t know why this is.

~jr

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

[Michael Chick]

Hi, I was following your discussion, and came across this comment from Sony’s website:
“…The GTX570/580 will get you the best render performance for the two codecs I mentioned above.
A HD6970 or HD7950 will be almost as fast but also provide better timeline performance with 3rd party plug ins.
A R9 290/290X will give you the best timeline performance but the Mainconcept AVC and Sony AVC codecs don’t support it and your render speed will be as fast as CPU only. On the other hand, MPEG2 encoding is very fast with these cards…”
Taken from here:
https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/Forums/ShowMessage.asp?Forum=4&MessageID=915897

I’m looking to buy a new display card, as my ASUS GTX460 is ready to “give up the ghost”. I’m using older equipment, which is the i7-860, 16Gb RAM, and a P7P55D LE. Can any of you hardware-guru’s please help point me in the correct direction?
I’m contemplating between the
SAPPHIRE R9 280 Dual-X 3GB DDR5 384 -bit, the
SAPPHIRE TRI-X R9 290 4GB DDR5 512 -bit/ and the
SAPPHIRE R9 270X TOXIC 2GB GDDR5 256BIT

Based on spec, the Tri-X looks like the highest spec, but has anyone tried these cards, and what would you recommend? Thank You all for your time.

[Aaron Star]

The 5770, 6970, 7970, R9 270x would probably be your best match for an i7-860. The 860 memory bandwidth, and CPU will not likely keep up with the 290x. That is not to say you will not see benefits over what you have. The older cards come with benefit of still supporting the MC mp4 encoder, but most either just output Sony AVC or use Handbrake.

On the P55 make sure your GPU slot is running at x16 with GPU-z. USB3 turbo mode on my p55 system steals lanes from the x16 slot dropping it to 8x. With overheads on PCIe, you want the maximum connectivity to your GPU.

Also make sure your RAM is operating at the fastest profile your motherboard supports. In the p55 case ddr3 1333 or PC3-10600. I also believe in 32GB RAM for the windows cache and running background instances of Vegas. Speccy can help determine some of this. RAM timing matter, but I find quantity is often times better performance than less RAM of low latency.

Make sure to uninstall the NVidia driver software before pulling the card, and get the systems back to the windows default driver. Reboot and run CCleaner, shutdown again, then pull the Nvidia card and install the AMD card/drivers.

Luxmark v2 is a good benchmark test for OpenCL, and verifying that your system is working well with opencl.

GPU-z and AMD system monitor are good tools to verify GPU utilization during timeline playback. Test Sony AVC, XDCAM, HDCAM-SR-lite, and XAVC media with effects to verify GPU acceleration in Vegas. Other workflows you will need to determine where the GPU acceleration problems are.

Upgrading over all from the 860 will give you the most bang for the buck. The 4th Gen i7 has improved instruction sets, more memory bandwidth, and PCIe 3 that has more bandwidth and less overhead (means more useable bandwidth.)

[John Rofrano]

[Aaron Star] “The 5770, 6970, 7970, R9 270x would probably be your best match for an i7-860. The 860 memory bandwidth, and CPU will not likely keep up with the 290x.”

+1

It’s important to keep your components balanced. Buying the latest GPU with an older CPU is not going to benefit you as much as buying a GPU that your CPU can keep up with. The R9 270 or HD 7970 is a good match for your CPU.

~jr

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

[Jeff Bauer]

I have the R9 290 running on an X99 platform. With respect to the quote you provide, I can say that I DO see a rendering performance improvement when using GPU acceleration with the SONY AVC codec. I DO NOT see an improvement when using the MainConcept AVC codec however.

Jeff

Vegas Pro 13; Windows 7 64 bit; i7-5960X; ASUS Rampage V Extreme; 32 GB 2133 RAM; Radeon R9 290

[John Rofrano]

[Jeff Bauer] “I DO NOT see an improvement when using the MainConcept AVC codec however.”

That’s to be expected. The MainConcept AVC encoder won’t use any card newer than the Radeon HD 6000 series. My Radeon HD 7950 doesn’t work with it and any R9 2xx will not work with it. My Radeon HD 5870 worked great however.

~jr

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

[Michael Chick]

Thanx for taking time to help out.

Sorry, I made a mistake, I have the i7-870 processor (2.93GHz), and not the i7-860. (marginal difference)
I was hoping to put a few more years into the Motherboard and Processor. The only reason for needing to “upgrade” is that when I first specced out this system, I was running .tod files from my JVC HD-7. So, it was more than sufficient. However, these days, I need to edit in P2, sometimes with 1920×1080 footage. I did click on the “use-proxy”, and it works fine (kinda), but once I start using Magic Bullet Suite-11, and/or Boris Continuum-9, then it displays maybe one frame every 4-6 seconds. CTRL-R helps, but I’m also having problems with color correction. What shows up (even at BEST FULL) is not what the end-render is.

I typically render only at MC 1280×720 mp4 double-pass at 28,000 upper and 14,000 lower.
With zero plugins, it’ll render a 2 minute edit in about 5 minutes, but once all the filters kick in, then it’s something like 2.5hours.

My P7P55D LE does not come with USB 3.0, I had to buy a PCie card to get that going.
On the RAM, this motherboard only supports up to 16Gb, of which I already have at 1600 speed.
I do have a 120Gb SSD, so that’s one less of a problem.

And yes, I plan to do a fresh Windows install once I change the Display Card. I only use a handful of softwares, so it’s not big deal. Plus, the computer always feels more “zippy” whenever I do this.

Last question, the 270X, the 280X or the 290X ?
Of does it matter at all?
(I eventually will change the motherboard and chip, and if I can migrate the display card to the new hardware, then that would be great)

Thank You so much again. You’ve been very helpful.