[Clive Mclaughlin]

Interesting John,
My GTX570 smashes everything else on MainConcept, and smashes teh newer card I tried. So I think I’ll stick with it. Probably an upgrade in CPU to something with more cores will probably further improve my GTX 570’s MainCencept speeds.

Out of interest, are you somehow running vegas on your mac? Or have you jumped ship?

[Clive Mclaughlin]

Aaron, whilst I appreciate your efforts, you can surely realise when what you are saying is way over most people’s heads.

I’ve very little idea what most of that means.

Ok, maybe I’m wrong to say it’s a thumbs down for every user. It depends on how much effects etc you might use.

But for me, on my simple wedding edit timelines with occasional cross-fade and light color grading, the R9 390 doesn’t produce rendering as fast as my GTX 570.

Can you tell me something I can do to change that?

If not, then it remains a thumbs down (for those with a similar need to mine).

I appreciate your efforts, but if you are keen to continue helping me here, you may have to dumb it down a little.

I’m a video editor, not a computer scientist!

[Clive Mclaughlin]

Update: On a longer render, I could see that the GPU render had no added effect over ‘CPU only’ in MainConcept, but on Sony/AVC, it had (very) marginal improvement over ‘CPU only’. But nowhere near the GPU acceleration I was enjoying on my GTX 570.

So if anybody comes across this post while researching GPU, it’s a thumbs down for the R9 390 if you are a Vegas Pro user.

John Laird posted earlier than his setup was lightning quick and included an R9 390. I’d like to see his comparisons between CPU only and GPU render. I suspect he may just be enjoying life with a superior CPU and his graphics card has little to do with it.

[Clive Mclaughlin]

I decided to check performance again since I re-installed Vegas. Now I get full playback in ‘Preview’ but the CPU maxes at any ‘Good’ range and playback rate drops dramatically.
CPU upgrade would certainly help that, but in fairness ‘Preview’ is adequate to edit to.

So it’s really just the render speeds now. I was happy with the results on my GTX 570, and the R9 390 will probably go back.

I’ve been testing with the exact same timeline scetion and other components. I’ve uninstalled old drivers. I’ve re-installed drivers.

I checked my parts performance during render testing. Tested at CPU only, and OpenCL, and CUDA. On no occassions did we see the GPU usage rise above 1%, but in every case the CPU usage was in mid to high 90s.

[Clive Mclaughlin]

So I tried a render to Sony AVC and found significantly better render speeds. Which is good. But are there any drawbacks from rendering to this format rather than MainConcept AVC?
But, it’s not that the Sony AVC utilises the GPU better, because the render time is equally as fast when I choose CPU only.

I’ve requested a returns to Amazon a few days ago, and still haven’t posted it back. I want to experiment. Wats the point in returning just to blindly choose another one.

[Clive Mclaughlin]

What other render formats might work better with the R9 390 Aaron??

[Clive Mclaughlin]

So yea, I uninstalled Vegas and re-downloaded and re-installed. Surprisingly The preview is working considerably better. Aaron, you mentioned I maybe wasn’t working with the latest build – so maybe this re-install is a newer build and that’s the solution.

I still feel that at some point I will upgrade to a 4790k (the best i7 I can get that remains compatible with my MB) as the preview still drops to 20ish at times (whichis generally enough to work with – certainly better than 3!)

The r9 390 is still not giving me any rendering acceleration though and so I’m returning it and reverting to my gtx570.

I’ve run all sorts of monitoring and can see nothing causing a bottleneck. My RAM, CPU threads, GPU etc were all still well short of 100% usage. So it looks like something in the software itself had been causing the lag.

Strange. I had seen a guy’s Youtube video at a point where he mentioned re-installing and then disabling updates. At that time, there may have been a bad update. ANd perhaps now the newest builds have rectified it.

Who knows!

[Clive Mclaughlin]

Reading elsewhere that cores are more important than clock speed with CPU in video editing. It’s not surprising that John’s 590x out performs me with 8 cores to my 4 and 16 threads to my 8.

But, is any upgrade going to pointless of I’m not upgrading to more cores? I’ve been spending hours checking motherboard compatibility and comparing benchmark scores.

I wish Sony/Magix could say ‘For our software, here are the devices and specific elements that have most impact’.

Whats the point in me looking at reviews at scores and tests if the GPU or CPU will only make playing some computer game better and won’t change anything n terms of Vegas!

[Clive Mclaughlin]

Thanks John, good to know!
You obviously see some render benefit withCUDA or OpenCL? Yet when, I try them all. I get to benefit over CPU only. It indicates that it’s not being utilised…

As for the preview lag. It surely must be that your 5960x is better than my Xeon® E3-1246 v3 . I’ll check benchmarks.

Just to be clear, I’m not struggling with simply a 4k timeline. But a multicam involving 4k. In fact I even get some lag in 1080 multicams. Just about useable but still not ideal.

[Clive Mclaughlin]

Wow, thanks Aaron, lots of info here to dig through.

Firstly, I’m using Vegas pro 13 (64bit).

I removed old card and put the newer one in it’s slot. I did not uninstall drivers – I will try that now and then look at your other points.