Recommendation Video Card that Vegas 10 utilizes

[John Rofrano]

[Don Cobble] “Looking for a video card that is an advantage with Vegas 10 playback /rendering – Is there such a card?
Is CUDA advantageous for vegas? ( I don’t even know what CUDA is) just heard it is good.”

CUDA is the only thing Vegas uses so YES… CUDA is advantageous for Vegas. 😉 CUDA is the architecture used by nVidia. That means that Vegas will only take advantage of nVidia cards so whatever you do, don’t buy an ATI card!

You currently have an Nvidia Quadro FX 580 Video Card which is the Quadro equivalent of the GeForce 9500GT which has only 32 CUDA cores. Unfortunately, this is the lowest of the low end. 🙁

I have an old QuadCore 2.67Ghz CPU and it renders as fast as my GeForce 9800GT which has 112 CUDA cores! You have a Core i7 2.8Ghz which is a lot faster than my QuadCore because the i7 architecture is better so you will definitely need a more powerful graphics card than I have to see any difference in rendering speed (since I don’t).

The GeForce GTX 285 has 240 CUDA cores. The GeForce GTX 470 has 448 CUDA cores. If you wanted to stay with the Quadro line the Quadro 4000 with 254 CUDA cores should perform very well. It’s up to you if you want to spend the extra money for the Quadro cards or not when the GeForce cards work just as well for less. Since I don’t own a Quadro card it’s safe to say that I haven’t been convinced to spend the extra money yet. Your mileage may vary. 😉

~jr

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

[Don Cobble]

Sir John
Thank U
Don

PC
I7 2.8 Ghz 8GB Ram
Vista 64bit OS
Nvidia FX 580 Video Card
3-4 TB HD
Vegas Pro 9 32bit & Vegas Pro 9 64bit & Vegas 10 32bit & Vegas 10 64Bit

Camera
Sony EX1 shoot in 1920×1080 30P

[Dave Haynie]

CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is one of several technologies for GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) computing. In short, it means that, rather than use your GPU for 3D graphics rendering, applications can, via some GPGPU interface, use the GPU for any old sort of math.

Why would you want to do this? Well, largely because, while you may have 2, 4, even 6 CPU cores on your PC, you can easily have hundreds of processing elements on your GPU. Suitable work for a GPU can’t be simple stuff.. your CPU is better at one-after-another computing. But if you have work that’s easily done in parallel (like, say, graphics or video), the GPU may be a big help. Or, in the case of Vegas 10 benchmarks, a rather small help, but a help nonetheless.

CUDA is nVidia’s proprietary GPGPU interface.. it only works with nVidia cards. AMD has their own too, called Streams, but it’s not as well supported. Either kind of card can be supported by the general purpose OpenCL.

-Dave

[Don Cobble]

Will this technology also help my ability to view my editing in full frame or at least half frame setting when editing 1920×1080 30P. At the moment I have to set the setting on 1/4 frame rate to be able view at a relatively normal flow. but I cant read my graphics so I have to stop look at a still frame in high to see
!
I bought a Nvidia GFX 470 with great Cuda cores 430+ but it still would not handle my ability to edit and watch so I returned it and ordered the Nvidia Quadro 4000, a little more money but was told it would handle the editing. I only has approx 200 CUDA cores, I hope this works, don’t know if my viewing is a vegas problem or a card problem. Its getting expensive to find out.
what do you think?
Thank You for the explanation
Don

PC
I7 2.8 Ghz 8GB Ram
Vista 64bit OS
Nvidia GTX 470 Video Card
BM Intensity Pro
3-4 TB HD
Vegas Pro 9 32bit & Vegas Pro 9 64bit & Vegas 10 32bit & Vegas 10 64Bit

Camera
Sony EX1 shoot in 1920×1080 30P

[John Rofrano]

[Don Cobble] “Will this technology also help my ability to view my editing in full frame or at least half frame setting when editing 1920×1080 30P.”

No, absolutely not! Vegas only uses CUDA for rendering Sony AVC format. That’s it. What we really need is GPU accelerated preview but Vegas doesn’t do that. 🙁

Too bad you didn’t do some rendering benchmarks before you send the GeForce card back… I’d love to see how it compares to the Quadro 4000.

~jr

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

[Don Cobble]

How does anyone view editing in Vegas with loaded effects & Chromakey on two tracks and get any visual fidelity? does vegas just say yes now you can edit MP4 files, but you just can see what your doing? 🙂

I have two hurdles I am trying to over come, one is visual. I didn’t read a lot because I don’t understand all the terminology, but I did call nvidia and explained the issues to the techs and they said the Quadro 4000 would visually preform better, though it didn’t have as much CUDA cores, but because it has a different process all together? So we will see soon as I get it. I know It will not render as well as the 430 CUDAs, but I get vertigo trying to edit with a x10 blur factor just so my footage will animate instead of jumping 90 frames a picture. The only thing I can think of is I have some setting off that cause the poor visual response?
I will let you know about the Quadro 4000 and how it preforms
Thank U as always
don

PC
I7 2.8 Ghz 8GB Ram
Vista 64bit OS
Nvidia GTX 470 Video Card
BM Intensity Pro
3-4 TB HD
Vegas Pro 9 32bit & Vegas Pro 9 64bit & Vegas 10 32bit & Vegas 10 64Bit

Camera
Sony EX1 shoot in 1920×1080 30P

[John Rofrano]

[Don Cobble] “How does anyone view editing in Vegas with loaded effects & Chromakey on two tracks and get any visual fidelity? does vegas just say yes now you can edit MP4 files, but you just can see what your doing? :-)”

There are several things you can do:

I use Boris Continuum Complete (BCC7) for Chroma Key and BCC7 uses the GPU for acceleration so while Vegas doesn’t accelerate it’s preview, BCC7 does. I can playback chroma keyed footage at full frame rates with BCC7 without any problems.

You can also work with proxy files. VASST GearShift was designed specifically for this purpose. It converts your HD into DV Widescreen proxies which can playback smoothly on even the most anemic computers. You do all of your editing in DV and then before you render you swap the proxies out for the original HD files and you get full HD renders. GearShift does this for you at the push of a button. You can switch back and forth as many times as you’d like during the edit session to check you work.

You can use Digital Intermediaries like Cineform which perform much better than MP4 because they use an intraframe compression instead of interframe compression. You can stack lots of tracks of Cineform in Vegas and maintain full frame rates with a QuadCore computer like yours.

Finally, you can pre-render. Take your chroma keyed footage and render it to Quicktime Animation format with an alpha channel and use that in your Vegas project. That eliminates the chroma key from the FX pipeline and should increase playback performance.

[Don Cobble] “but I did call nvidia and explained the issues to the techs and they said the Quadro 4000 would visually preform better, though it didn’t have as much CUDA cores, but because it has a different process all together?”

They were making that blanket statement assuming that the application you were using had GPU acceleration for preview. Vegas does not so their statement doesn’t apply to Vegas.

~jr

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

[Dave Haynie]

There is a complexity level on ANY PC that will have you wanting to pre-render sections to see things work.

I did a video last year without over 40 layers of green screen and other visual effects. This was initially shot in AVCHD, but I did at some point in the project render to one of the uncompressed formats (for a short project, that’s sometimes reasonable, otherwise, I use Cineform when needed). I could handle about 20 layers, mostly chroma keyed, before it got too unwieldy. So I had two main projects, and the result from the first was the foundation for the second. This video is here (it didn’t win.. spent too much time on the video, didn’t kiss enough butt in the song): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNmfm-BAwzs. This was done entirely in Vegas. I have some of the Boris tools (and I’m evaluating BCC now) for the next one 🙂

This did take over three hours to render, on my 2.83GHz Core2 Quad PC. Pretty crazy for two minutes of final product.

AVC decoding can be greatly improved using the GPU… it’s over half my system devoted to decoding a 1080/60p video, but add in the GPU via DVXA 2.0, and it’s down to under 12%. Adding something like that wouldn’t on its own accelerate compositing and other stuff, but it would sure seem to put AVC on par with most other video formats, instead of stressing the system.

-Dave

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[Bill Mash]

User sighs as he learns that XP doesn’t support CUDA and DirectCompute:-(

~Just because you can doesn’t mean you should~

[John Rofrano]

[Bill Mash] “User sighs as he learns that XP doesn’t support CUDA and DirectCompute:-(“

What makes you think that? CUDA is in the display drivers and works fine on XP.

~jr

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