Upgrade question!

[Stephen Mann]

Vegas benefits most from processor power. Lots of it. If you can, upgrade the PC.

The better graphics card wouldn’t add as much as the processor upgrade. Remember, GPU support is just that – support. I think it was added to improve performance of marginal PC’s, and when you get into the i7 and dual-processor Xeon’s, the processor can render the frames itself faster than the GPU. In other words, at some point you pass a line of diminishing returns.

I run 3 monitors on two of my systems. On one I have two GPU cards, and on the other I use a USB display adapter. If you go with two GPU cards, make them the same card, or at least the same family. DO NOT mix brands of video cards. Doing so requires two different video drivers and possibly adds problems that are difficult to diagnose. If you install two identical video cards then Windows only needs one driver. If you go with the USB video adapter, note that it does work just fine for text and static images, but it would never keep up with the frame rate of video.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Dave Osbun]

Personally, I would not spend my money buying a new Intel i7 processor that is the Sandy Bridge architecture. The newer i7 Ivy Bridge processors are considerably more powerful. I another thread I posted a chart that showed render comparison times and the i5 Ivy Bridge processors are faster than the i7 Sandy Bridge processors. The price differences are quite small.

Also, since you are upgrading your system- install an SSD hard drive as your system drive. They are WELL WORTH the money. If you want the best one, it’s the Samsung 840 Pro. If you want to stay within a budget, get the Crucial M4 (which I use).

[Nigel O’neill]

Your old specs look good. I actually started with that setup about 18 months ago, and upgraded the CPU to a 970. I upgraded my video card from a GT2000 to a GTX 570 and was sorely disappointed at the lack of improvement in preview performance. I spent $700 for what appeared to be next to no improvement in preview performance. I was expecting my preview to blaze along. What a let down.

I jumped off Vista 64 Ultimate as soon as Windows 7 Ultimate was released, and followed the upgrade path. I have not regretted that decision one iota. Vista 64 was a slow, unstable resource hog.

You might benefit from a faster graphics card, but with SVP11 and SVP12, a lot of stability and rendering issues have been resolving by switching off GPU acceleration in Vegas. Kinda defeats the purpose of those 1024 CUDA cores on your graphics card just sitting idle. Go figure :-).

Having said that, I have so far found SVP12 to be the most stable release of Vegas since version 10c. It has not crashed on me yet. SVP11 used to crash all the time. I still have SVP9 thru to SVP12 on my system.

With SVP12 there appears to be the odd issue, but it appears the testers and the coders are on a roll with the latest build. Finally, after 3 years!

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 11 (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6