Sony Vegas 12 (Build 770, 64-bit) refusing to use GPU

[Dave Osbun]

I don’t use any heavy effects on my clips, and I don’t really have any increase in render speed, or decrease in speed, when I render using Mainconcept. My GPU is the Radeon HD 7850, which does have OpenCL support. Not sure what’s in your project, but my render times are basically the same length as my project timeline.

If you choose the GPU render option, doesn’t it sill utilize some of the CPU (this is for others that might chime in on your question)? What’s the CPU in your system?

[Norman Black]

Mainconcept AVC OpenCL does not support AMD graphics core next GPUs. This is the 7xxx series and the new R9 GPU. It works fine with 6xxx and 5xxx cards. I used to have a 5xxx card.

The Vegas video engine (GPU in video preferences) and Sony AVC both work fine with newer AMD GPUs.

Digging into the MC AVC OpenCL DLL it appears that MC customized the encoder to each AMD architecture. They do not seem to have a “generic” version.

[Stephen Crye]

[Norman Black] “Digging into the MC AVC OpenCL DLL”

Wow … you actually looked at the code? Where did you find it? What language?

Steve

Win7 Pro X64 on Dell T7500, MultiTB SATA, 8GB RAM, nVidia Quadro 2000, Vegas 12, 11, 10, 9 DVDA 6.0 & 5.2(build 135) Sony HDR-CX550V, Panasonic GH3 with LUMIX G X VARIO 12-35mm / F2.8 ASPH, LUMIX G X VARIO 35-100mm / F2.8

[Norman Black]

[Stephen Crye] “Wow … you actually looked at the code? Where did you find it? What language?”

I looked at the symbol table and scanned the string tables. Looking at this there are very clear references to the various AMD architectures MC claims to support (6xxx and lower). No Tahiti which was the first GCN architecture.

Taking this and the fact that my 5850 card worked with MC AVC OpenCL and my new 7950 (Tahiti) does not, and Nvidia cards are not supported by the OpenCL encoder, it is a simple comclusion, albeit minimally informed, that MC hard coded their OpenCL encoder to specific AMD architectures.

One can speculate that MC may have done the same thing with the AVC CUDA encoder. I don’t care so I never looked.

[Stephen Crye]

[Norman Black] “I looked at the symbol table and scanned the string tables.”

May I ask how? GDB under Cygwin? or some other tool?

Thanks,

Steve

Win7 Pro X64 on Dell T7500, MultiTB SATA, 8GB RAM, nVidia Quadro 2000, Vegas 12, 11, 10, 9 DVDA 6.0 & 5.2(build 135) Sony HDR-CX550V, Panasonic GH3 with LUMIX G X VARIO 12-35mm / F2.8 ASPH, LUMIX G X VARIO 35-100mm / F2.8

[Chris Trent]

I had the same problem. Just messing around one day, I found my old,old computer (athlon X2 64, 2.6ghz, 4GB ram, 320GB PATA drive, radeon 5550-like a 59$ card 3 years ago) would render a 1080P internet video 3 times as fast as my main computer (athlon 1090T 6 core 3.2ghz, 8GB ram, radeon 7770, 3TB SATA drive with 240GB SSD working drive).

To render a 4 minute 720 or 1080P video would take 13-15 minutes on my fast computer, but that stupid little old computer did it in 5 minutes. Got me thinking, so swapped my newer 7770 for an old 5770 I had, and it cut my rendering time in my fast computer from 13 minutes to 3, better than real time.

So I did some looking around, and found this on the main concept site. Like the other post said, anything 7xxx or newer will not work and you will not get much benefit for rendering with main concept codecs. With my 7770 the time difference from cpu only to opencl processing would be like 10 seconds faster out of 13 minutes of processing, not even noticeable.

https://www.mainconcept.com/products/sdks/gpu-acceleration/opencltm-h264avc.html

Microsoft Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 (32-bit/64-bit)

Supported ATI Graphics Boards:

AMD Radeon™ HD Graphics
6900 Series (6970, 6950)*, 6800 Series (6870, 6850)*
ATI Radeon™ HD Graphics
5900 Series (5970)**
5800 Series (5870, 5850, 5830)*
5700 Series (5770, 5750), 5600 Series (5670), 5500 Series (5570)
ATI FirePro™ Graphics
V8800*, V7800

* – preferred as tested
** – supported in single-GPU mode

Required drivers:

ATI Catalyst™ 11.2 for Radeon HD cards – “ATI Catalyst™ 11.2” (with OpenCL support, file must have “ocl” suffix in the name)
ATI Catalyst 10.12 (8.801) for FirePro cards (ATI Stream SDK 2.3 have to be installed

[Stephen Crye]

Very interesting, Chris! Was it SVP12 on both systems?

Those links are very telling also for the nVidia crowd:

https://www.mainconcept.com/products/sdks/gpu-acceleration/cuda-h264avc.html

NVIDIA graphics card with CUDA support (Professional – Tesla, Quadro 4000-series, FX, CX, NVS, QuadroPlex; Consumer – GeForce 8, 9, 100, 200, 400-series GPUs – with a minimum of 256 MB of local graphics memory card or 512 MB for 1920x1080p encoding). CUDA compute capability support only up to 1.3 (excludes certain GeForce 8800 models – GTS, Ultra. Compute capability 1.0 works in general for encoding, but has known issues. Boards with Kepler architecture are not supported.

Steve

Win7 Pro X64 on Dell T7500, MultiTB SATA, 8GB RAM, nVidia Quadro 2000, Vegas 12, 11, 10, 9 DVDA 6.0 & 5.2(build 135) Sony HDR-CX550V, Panasonic GH3 with LUMIX G X VARIO 12-35mm / F2.8 ASPH, LUMIX G X VARIO 35-100mm / F2.8