Video card selection for Vegas 12

[Stephen Mann]

Personally I avoid ATI because of a personal history of driver problems. But that’s just me.
Also, I see a lot more support from nVidia than ATI.
More CUDA cores is better, but how much it helps is really subjective. If you have a really fast processors on the motherboard, then GPU support won’t add much.

Here’s the best bang for the buck, in performance order:
1. FAST processor.
2. Lots of RAM
3. Lots of CUDA cores
4. Separate hard disk for your video assets.

What’s most troubling are those who screw up their PC and blame Sony for their problems. If you install games on your PC, expect problems. If you install a CODEC pack, expect problems. If you have only the minimum hardware requirements, expect problems.

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

[Katana Puffin]

I have a new GTX 670 and a powerful hardware but i have a lot of problem with vegas 12… (details in my topic if you are interested).
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/958106

[Brent Keller]

Has anyone spoke with Sony about this and got some explanation? Some posters say GPU acceleration only function with ‘some ‘ portions of the work flow.

I see…
Other people have my same problem…seem to be a nvidia problem (?)
… seen a lot.

Some ATIs too, but many like this link (Vegas Pro 11): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFY1VDv7XfY

Below is from the Sony Vegas official web site…
NVIDIA
Requires a CUDA-enabled GPU and driver 270.xx or later. GeForce GPUs:
GeForce GTX 4xx Series or higher (or GeForce GT 2xx Series or higher with driver 285.62 or later).
Quadro GPUs: Quadro 600 or higher (or Quadro FX 1700 or higher with driver 285.62 or later).
NVIDIA recommends NVIDIA Quadro for professional applications and recommends use of the latest boards based on the Fermi architecture.

AMD/ATI
Requires an OpenCL-enabled GPU and Catalyst driver 11.7 or later with a Radeon HD 57xx or higher GPU. If using a FirePro GPU, FirePro unified driver 8.85 or later is required.

Best I can figure is, sometimes GPU acceleration works, and sometimes not.

Thank you,

Brent

[Stephen Mann]

Best I can figure is, sometimes GPU acceleration works, and sometimes not.

GPU support helps with some encoded formats such as AVCHD or MP4. It does nothing for MOV encoded files, AVI rendered, or any uncompressed format. (Incidentally, AVI is the only rendered video format available in Vegas. All others are encoded – notwithstanding that they are all in the “Render As” menu).

Events with a lot of F/X require a lot of processor power, so the GPU would be little use for those frames.

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

[Stephen Mann]

Running FRAPS?

Let’s assume that you aren’t running the games on your editing PC.
I have never seen a Vegas installation run well with FRAPS files.
From what I read, FRAPS (like codec packs) installs codecs that overwrite the otherwise good codecs installed by Vegas.

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

[Katana Puffin]

I’ve always used fraps with sony vegas but I’ve never had any problems until windows 7 and ati 5850 with fraps … I have another friend who uses fraps and sony vegas without problems!
I think that the problems arise because you have a reference GPU not overclocked.
When I bought the Gainward GTX 670’s I have not had the rendering of high quality that I did with the ATI 5850: both on Win7 Win8 that …. so beware!

[Malcolm Matusky]

I’m looking to “upgrade” my card as well, looking at the Quadro 2000. Anyone have experience with this card and VP 11/12? John Roffano uses a Quadro card, I think the 4000, but the 2000 is more in my price bracket $400. The 4000 is $800.

Next step is a 10 bit monitor, so I’m only interested in 10 bit cards now.

Malcolm
http://www.malcolmproductions.com

[Brent Keller]

I bought a Quadro 2000… and was not very impressed. Sold it and went back to a Quadro 4500. A previous post by Stephen Mann pointed out that not all Vegas functions can use GPU cores. I did not know this when the quadro 2000 was in the machine. May of influenced my opinion some. I have always been a Quadro fan, but I have had a very positive experience on my Mac Pro running an ATI 5770 slicing through FCP7. As mentioned before, it seems there are more positive reports with ATI GPU. There are some post where people have purchased the exact nVidia GPU recommend by Sony to find it fell well short of published numbers.

The main turn off for the Quadro 2000 was a sluggish preview window when scrubbing or just wanting to review an edit in real time without rendering (absent multiple FX inputs).

[Brent Keller]

No FRAPS here

[Myron Hobizal]

I have an ATI 69xx series card, and I can concur that not all of the workflow in Vegas is GPU accelerated. Sony still has a long ways to go. I tried the demo of the newest Adobe Premiere on my system, and everything, including the Preview window was super smooth and ran at the frame rate of the video. Even with effects applied. The same can’t be said about Vegas 12.

Another issue I found with Vegas, if I have to set the Preview Cache and Audio Cache to 0. Any other values cause rendering to freeze up, with the time display still counting.