Vegas Pro 12 rendering boost – should I upgrade my video card, add a second video card, and/or add SSD’s?

[John Rofrano]

[James Fullerton] “Reading around there is a ton of information about video cards, drivers, Sony not utilizing Cuda cores, and other stuff, and I have come to the conclusion that perhaps the GTX670 is not the greatest card for video rendering. I keep seeing people saying the GTX570 is superior, as well as other cards like the Quadro.”

You read correctly. NVIDIA pulled a “fast one” with the 600 series Kepler cards and Vegas Pro (and other applications that are not re-written for the Kepler API) can only use 1/4 of the CUDA cores so you are much better off with a 500 series Fermi card at the moment. I have a Quadro 4000 card (Fermi) and it works quite well.

[James Fullerton] “So given this build, what is the general consensus on how to get the biggest rendering performance increase in Vegas 12? I have these scenarios, but perhaps you have something better?”

1. Add a second GTC670 FTW+ and go SLI

Vegas does not use SLI so that’s a waste of money

2. Get the GTX570 or GTX580, perhaps two?

This is probably your best option right now

3. Get a single more powerful video card, maybe a GTX … 690? Quadro?

Getting a faster card that only uses 1/4 or the power doesn’t make sense. Getting a Quadro will add stability but they actually have less CUDA cores than the game cards so this will not improve your rendering speed unless you buy a more powerful Quadro than the GeForce you have now.

4. Change to a different brand of video card, but I am not sure which … 7970? Then the same questions – 1 or 2?

Sony has worked very closely with AMD to make sure that their cards work well so switching to an ATI card is certainly another choice. I never would because I hate ATI’s drivers and a lot of my other software requires CUDA which ATI doesn’t support but if all you want to do is make Vegas Pro faster, this might be a good option as well.

5. Upgrade to 4 SSD’s in RAID 0, using an LSI logic RAID / SATA 3 / SAS controller?

This will make no difference since your renders are CPU bound and not I/O bound so faster I/O will not help.

6. Something else?”

Get a 12 core Mac Pro? 😉 (actually I would hold off on this because the Mac Pro line is about to be refreshhed but the single most significant change you can make is more CPU cores)

~jr

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

[David Alfredo]

your specs are good enough for a smooth Vegas experience… but unfortunately the 6XX series are not supported for every codec yet, you should be fine rendering to Sony AVC though, as long as you’re under the 314.22 WHQL drivers… personally I use a 660 Ti for Titler Pro 2 rendering sice NewBlue make good use of the superior Kepler performance, but for everything else I turn the power on for the GTX 570 in my system.

[James Fullerton]

Thank you for the detailed reply.

That really changes my approach on this. Granted the current setup works pretty well, I want to future-proof my build as much as possible.

Is there any way to guesstimate what kind of performance increase I will see if I go to the 580 card? 5%? 50%? 100%?

Is there any indication that Sony is going to provide updates to Vegas to utilize the 6XX series cards? It is a little concerning to think about the fact that the GTX670 FTW+ has 1344 Cuda cores (of which Vegas is only using 336) whereas the GTX580 has 512, but what happens in the future? Will Sony add support to the 6XX series cards, and then I lose out on the 1344 Cuda cores in the long run, for essentially the same price?

[James Fullerton]

Hi David,

Yes, I am using the current drivers, so that is something. What kind of performance do you see with the 570? Can you give me an example of a format, clip length, and the resulting approximate rendering time?

[Dave Osbun]

What the others have posted (especially John) are 100% correct. The only option that hasn’t been discussed is overclocking your processor and adding a liquid cooling system (for the CPU) to your system. Keep in mind that as you go higher with overclock values, you increase the risk of poor system stability.

I do believe that the better Intel Xeon processors will speed up your renders, but you’d have to replace your motherboard. This will fit in your budget quite nicely, though.

So if I were in your shoes and needed to do something, i’d change to dual Xeon processors and a nice workstation motherboard that supports the dual Xeons. I believe the memory channels are compatible, so you will not need to replace any other hardware.

Dave

[David Alfredo]

[James Fullerton] “hat kind of performance do you see with the 570? Can you give me an example of a format, clip length, and the resulting approximate rendering time?”

Intel 3770K + 16 GB RAM + GTX 570

I get 1:1 rendering times for 1080p 30 fps high profile – best quality Sony AVC templates using GPU, but depending on the video effects I use and their compatibility with GPU usually I get renders faster than realtime playing, the 3770K is “only” 4 physical cores + 4 extra logical cores (hyper-threading) but its single-core performance is unmatched until the new 4770K rolls out.

Titler Pro 2 on the other hand takes 2x times to render compared to previewing using a 660 Ti while the 570 takes 3x-4x, in this case the Kepler architecture is put to good use, if only the whole Sony Vegas software would fully support the Kepler cards and not only certain parts of it….

[David Alfredo]

[James Fullerton] “Is there any way to guesstimate what kind of performance increase I will see if I go to the 580 card? 5%? 50%? 100%?

Is there any indication that Sony is going to provide updates to Vegas to utilize the 6XX series cards? It is a little concerning to think about the fact that the GTX670 FTW+ has 1344 Cuda cores (of which Vegas is only using 336) whereas the GTX580 has 512, but what happens in the future? Will Sony add support to the 6XX series cards, and then I lose out on the 1344 Cuda cores in the long run, for essentially the same price?”

performance gains depend on the video effects compatibility with GPU rendering and your desired output, using Sony AVC I’d say the performance gain with a fully supported GPU such as a 570/580 is certainly above 100%, if you have the RAM and CPU not bottlenecking your GPU you will see improvements up to 5x faster rendering times with optimal templates, codecs and effects.

as for the 6XX series, look the new 7XX series due this summer are based on the same architecture but with further performance tweaks, so in order to support them Vegas will be supporting the 6XX at the same time, of course when fully supported a relatively cheap 660 Ti is a more sensible buy than whatever 570-580 you could find due to better performance, way less power consumption and heat, the Kepler GPUs are a superb when it comes to power efficiency.

Also don’t forget the 6XX series have a hardware encoder/decoder separate from the CUDA cores, NVENC, if this gets support by Sony the rendering times could be improved dramatically, again… when fully supported, something we don’t know for sure it will happen or not, but as I said it will happen eventually since the 7XX is based on the same architecture.

[James Fullerton]

Wow, with all this information I have half a mind to just start a website that tests various video cards against software and post benchmarks. I can’t keep up… haha.

I guess I will test a few cards and see what happens. I think the Quadro 4000 will be first, and then who knows what. I’ll post up details for sure.

[David Alfredo]

[James Fullerton] “I guess I will test a few cards and see what happens. I think the Quadro 4000 will be first, and then who knows what. I’ll post up details for sure.”

I got Quadro at work which makes things easier, but at home where I try to stay away from work (impossible !) I have several AMD and Nvidia cards lying around, I would suggest to avoid AMD for now since OpenCL support is not as refined as CUDA, when it comes to Vegas Pro, even if AMD cards are faster computing hardware we don’t have actual software taking advantage of them so… Nvidia it is, and for now if you’re not using OpenGL video FX such as the ones from NewBlue, 570/580 are the cards to buy until 6XX – 7XX series are fully supported in next Pro 12 builds or Pro 13.

[Thayalan Paramasawam]

Hi Mr.David,

I am also AMD user.I am using the latest pro…FX8350.My motherboard support Gtx cards,so i am using ASUS GTX650 and its working very well.

Thank You
Thayalan Paramasawam