Top 5 budget video cards to use with Sony Vegas?

[David Alfredo]

Stanislav,

Sony Vegas Pro 11 / 12 does NOT support The GTX 600 series yet, only preview is accelerated but the cards don’t get any use while rendering it doesn’t matter what output / format you’re aiming for. We don’t know whether an update will fix that or we will have to wait for Vegas Pro 13… I’m thinking of the later.

In my personal experience your best bet for Sony Vegas Pro 11 and 12 is a GTX 570 that you can find rather cheap in ebay. Vegas GPU acceleration was designed around CUDA first and OpenCL later, as of today CUDA cards (Nvidia) offer best performance in Vegas.

[Michael j Toffan]

With all the negative discussions regarding GPU rendering with Sony Vegas Pro, I wanted to add my own personal positive experience with GPU rendering.

I am using SONY VEGAS PRO 12 and I am having good success using my ASUS NIVIDIA GTX 680 GPU during rendering of AVCHD with the Main Concept AVC Internet HD 1080 template.

My current system has a Hex-core i7-3930K 2011 processor on a ASUS P9X79 motherboard with the 680 GPU and 64 GB of RAM. I can run it in both CUDA and OPEN CL as long as I set my Dynamic RAM preview to zero. If I have any Dynamic RAM preview set above zero it will usually crash before completing the render. I usually run it OPEN CL mode which seems to work well.

On my previous system, i7-960 quad core on a P7X58 Premium motherboard the 680 was not very stable so I did not use the 680 GPU while rendering. When I built my new system (described in the paragraph above) I used a test case video with 8 layers of composting, 4 layers of parent/child track motion enable and Neat Video de-noising to validate the speed improvement between my old system and my new system.

For that video I measured the following results:

Old System: i7-960 CPU, P6X58D Premium MB, ASUS NIVIDIA 680 GPU, 24 MB RAM, CPU render only, took 168 minutes render

New System: i7-3930K CPU, P7X79 Deluxe MB, ASUS NIVIDIA 680 GPU, 64 MB RAM, CPU render only, render time improved by about 30% over the i7-960 CPU

New System: i7-3930K CPU, P7X79 Deluxe MB, ASUS NIVIDIA 680 GPU, 64 MB RAM, CPU and GPU rendering, rendering time took only 27 minutes, or a 6X improvement

While I cannot speak for all 600 series GPUs or how they work with different systems, I am quite pleased with the results on my new system. The CPU, MB and RAM, all seem to be very compatible with the 680 series GPU.

For some simple videos with limited plug-ins applied (i.e., no stabilization or de-noising plug-ins applied) I have encountered render times not much longer than double the real time of the track.

[Norman Black]

“OpenCL does not help with your rendering. That is your imagination. What it does is help with OFX manipulation of frames but the actual compression of the video itself is only helped by Cuda in Vegas.”

Excuse me. Only CUDA? What the heck is the Main Concept AVC OpenCL encoder. It is OpenCL, not CUDA. The Sony AVC encoder runs a little faster with GPU allowed. I don’t have CUDA, only OpenCL. These two statements are independent of the Video pref GPU option.

Yes, videos cards do have decoders built-in. DXVA uses them. Some may have an encoder. Intel has Quicksync. Vegas has no encoder option that uses those features for encode. Vegas might use the decoder.

OpenCL does not expose encoder/decoder options and might be implemented in hardware. The is too hardware specific. CUDA does expose these features on applicable hardware. One difference between OpenCL and CUDA. Exposing the texture hardware is another thing CUDA exposes. OpenCL concentrates the GP compute.

[Norman Black]

Thanks,

Norman out.

[Matt Carlson]

Sorry my mistake on the OpenCL rendering. I forgot that Vegas 12 added Intel and OpenCL that 11 did not have.

[David Alfredo]

Michael, take good care of that GTX 680… it seems you have the only consumer-oriented 600 series card in the world that Vegas Pro uses for rendering… pay a visit to Nvidia / Sony Creative forums and every 6XX owner, including the 680’s, is not capable of using CUDA accelerated rendering, only previewing. This or you have a custom-made Vegas Pro build ?

also, we’re derailing this thread a long way off… GTX 680 is nowhere a budget card for Vegas no matter if it works or not… my point regarding the top budget card with the best compatibility and performance in Vegas Pro 11-12 is the Nvidia GTX 570, the card is discontinued since the Kepler parts flooded the market but you can find it for cheap in ebay and related sites.

[Dave Osbun]

I have the HD7850 2GB card in my system, but I have the Ivy Bridge i5-3570k processor. My render times are 1:1 (4 minute clip took 4 minutes to render) and system is perfectly stable.

[Michael j Toffan]

David, you could be right on the rarity of the card. When I started looking for the GPU card last year, I was looking for a 570 and was having a hard time finding it. I eventually stumbled on the 680 from an Amazon vendor and purchased it. It did not really work well with my old system and my early experience with it made me think I made a bad purchase. However, when I built the new system, I thought why not try it again and I was quite surprised at how well it worked with the new system. It is possible that something in my new system is enabling or enhancing that functionality or as you say, maybe the card I got last year was an early model and was not disabled…if they are really doing that. In any case I am very happy with it. I would hope to hear some other folks are having similar good experience with their 600 series cards. BTW, the GPU is rendering very fast in Resolve while doing a SVP to Resolve color grade and return.

[Mark Barton]

It might be because he usually runs OpenCL rather than CUDA and hence avoids the backward compatibility issue. Normally it would be recommended to use CUDA with NVidia, but in the 600 series case with Vegas Pro 12, it might be better to use the OpenCL.