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Setup advice for new gear
Hi guys – thank you all for your help in the past with Sony Vegas.
Taking some advice here and taking advantage of an amazing Black Friday sale, I was able to get a GTX 660 TI card for just $250, which is rather insanely great (Gigabyte card, good reviews.) Performance is actually very close to the GTX 670 and it uses much less power so I’m pleased.
I was also able to upgrade my RAM and am receiving 32GB of DDR3 1600 RAM, which is quite a bit faster than the 16GB 10666 and the cost of the swap will also be small. While you don’t usually need that much RAM, I don’t see it as a negative to have it. I can always create a RAM Disk, etc.
I’m not quite sure of the optimal way to take advantage of my new hardware in my ASRock Gen3 Extreme4 mobo with an i7-2600 CPU, which seems to be more than enough horsepower to do some fine video editing work. I’m using an SSD for my apps and have a spare as well which I can use as a disk to pull effects from, e.g. sound, video so that there is minimal latency. Perhaps some of you experienced guys can give me an idea of how to optimize my rig with Vegas 12 to be able to minimize my rendering and processing times. If you’ve also got some general advice on setup, it would also be appreciated since I assume many of you work with more powerful machines. (I’ve already heard to use the extra RAM for a RAMDISK and use it to store scratch, e.g. temporary Internet files, etc.) Thanks in advance – quite exciting!
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4 Replies
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[Michael West] ” I was able to get a GTX 660 TI “
I’m not sure that Vegas Pro 12.0 supports the GTX600 series yet. This is the new Kepler architecture which is different from the Fermi architecture of the GTX 500/400 series. I’m sure Sony will be adding support but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t take advantage of it at first. You might be just a bit ahead of the curve.
[Michael West] “I’m using an SSD for my apps and have a spare as well which I can use as a disk to pull effects from, e.g. sound, video so that there is minimal latency. “
That’s really key. Keep the OS and Apps on an SSD and use a second HDD for your projects. This will keep the I/O bottlenecks to a minimum.
A RAM Disk for temp/scratch files is probably a good idea. I have 16GB of memory with 6 cores/12 threads and it rarely gets used so with 32GB you have more than enough.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
John – thanks for the reply. I bought the GTX 600 architecture because – for the price – I got almost 3 times the CUDA cores for almost $40 less than a GTX 570 card! The raw power of the card seemed to be so much higher for less money that I figured the investment in the future was well worth it. The Sony website says GXT 4xx or higher and shows examples of the GTX 570 – so I guess technically it’s wrong.
I’ve done some searching on the Internet and was surprised to find only a few posts stating that Vegas 11 doesn’t even see the GPU acceleration and I’m assuming the same with Vegas 12. Even Pinnacle’s Studio 16 (I have 15 because of a product I bought) supports the GTX 6xx series and I’d really rather not use it for that purpose!
I’m going to start experimenting with using RAM disks. I probably didn’t need to upgrade the 16GB I had in the machine but this RAM is the fastest for my motherboard by far and having the extra RAM may also allow me to get rid of the virtual disk settings altogether. I’m curious to see whether read/write times would benefit by using RAM and copying them over to permanent storage will make a significant difference.
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https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=833258
Apparently the 6xx series is now supported although one should expect bugs to require being worked out for a while. I’ll stick with the card even though I was tempted to think about returning it. I’m not happy about possible issues, as well as plugins also not being completely compatible from what I hear. I was tempted to think about buying the special for New Blue Video Essentials but it’s still a lot of money and the compatibility issue is one that could make using it a ways off. Will give me a chance to see what else is out there too.
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EDIT: Supposedly the Radeon cards are much faster than the nVidia cards, which apparently went for gaming performance and the new Kepler architecture supposedly removed a great deal of the “power” for rendering. The CUDA cores are now no longer comparable – having twice as many cores as the 570 doesn’t make the 660 ti any faster – at least that’s what I read.
Regarding compatibility, even this is open ended and a big question mark. I honestly am more confused than I have ever been and am not even sure what to say except it’s anyone’s guess what’s going on in this industry except too many of these companies are trying to cut corners to fool consumers with misleading and incomparable numbers that supposedly describe a standard.
Thanks everyone for trying to help. I want to get something to significantly improve rendering time over my i7-2600 but it seems that it’s a huge toss up right now. Thank you.
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