David Alfredo
Forum Replies Created
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I’d like to hear how NewBlue got the “green light” from Nvidia since they support the GTX 600 series cards in Titler Pro 2, same for Adobe and their latest builds of After Effects… in my experience an ordinary GTX 660 Ti Kepler card is quite faster than the top of the line Fermi GTX 580 when it comes to editing and rendering with the latest build of Titler Pro 2… also games using PhysX (CUDA-powered phyiscs engine) run way smoother on a Kepler than on a Fermi, you can check this by using simple benchmarking tools like FluidMark 1.5.0 or Direct Compute 2.1
As Matt said, Kepler cards get “magically” fixed when developers license the new SDKs, remaining crippled to all the rest. I fear the Sony Vegas will never get to use Kepler gaming-GPU’s computing power, cheaper cards offering same computing speed as the expensive Quadro line… killing the sales of their overpriced professional cards won’t happen, anyways, as Nvidia commented on this situation, the GTX 600 series is designed for gamers not video professionals, even if the computer power is there it doesn’t mean you have the right to use it how and where you want, something along the lines “you buy our hardware but the way it performs through drivers and SDK still belong to Nvidia”
The one thousand dollar GTX Titan features a revision of the Kepler GPU, specially for the computing architecture, but the backwards compatibility remains broken.
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quality is better rendering with a modern CPU using exclusively its raw power…
in terms of speed
GPU encoding >>> Intel Quicksync encondig >>>>> CPU raw encoding without additional HW accelerators
in terms of visual fidelity and quality (IQ)
raw CPU encoding >>>>>> Intel Qsync >>> GPU
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[Norman Black] “”but this is the point you need to look at, you need software specifically designed to support the new computing architecture found in GTX 600 series Kepler cards… ”
What the heck is this supposed to mean?
it means that the Kepler CUDA architecture is not backwards-compatible with Fermi and older CUDA architectures, apart from a different computing pipeline it features a hardware decoder/encoder not found in previous GPUs… let’s take this example: Folding@Home has been using CUDA acceleration for years, pioneering GPU computing acceleration… but with their standard GPU client the issue was that Kepler cards were only using 25% of their CUDA processors due to Nvidia breaking backwards-compatibility. Solution ? Stanford University had to develop a Kepler-specific CUDA client to use 100% of Kepler CUDA computing power and it did show that, even with the performance crippled, computing was faster than that of the Fermi architecture… same goes to video encoders such as the one built-in in Sony Vegas Pro 11-12, not compatible with Kepler and not accelerating rendering at all. Solution ? Sony will have to update Vegas to GTX 600 cards, no drivers can fix that, only software developers… it’s up to Sony to contemplate whether adding support for GTX 600 series cards is financially viable or not.
[Norman Black]“CUDA and OpenCL are more similar than different in general compute and neither one cares about Fermi/Kepler/GCN or whatever. And they never will. That is the whole point. Hardware independence. ”
sorry but that’s not how it works, even if CUDA and OpenCL are somewhat abstract to hardware configurations the Kepler architecture is a radical change from that of previous Nvidia cards, you really need to update your software to “see” all available computing (CUDA/OpenCL/DirectXCompute) cores in Kepler GPUs, software not optimised for Kepler will only “see” 25% of the cores or none at all, resulting in poor performance or software crashes (Vegas 11-12)
[Norman Black]“though personally I’m not very fond of OpenCL implementation in Vegas…” what does this mean?
it means that I’ve been using a lot of OpenCL and CUDA in Vegas since Vegas Pro 11 with a wide, different array of hardware and CUDA has always yielded better and faster results than OpenCL, I know that Nvidia don’t optimize drivers for OpenCL, they got CUDA and that’s where their R&D money goes, on the other hand AMD/ATI engineers have been tweaking their GPUs for OpenCL computing all these years, resulting in fantastic performance in software which extensively uses all of OpenCL advantages, but in our case, Sony Vegas, Sony engineers started GPU acceleration with CUDA in mind and OpenCL was added later, so it’s only normal that, for now, CUDA works better in Vegas than OpenCL.
Sorry if I’m not making myself clear, I didn’t take English at shcool but German and French, hope that doesn’t annoy you guys much.
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I agree with Norman, the 7950 is a fantastic computing card, specially for OpenCL, the Nvidia GTX 600 series was also so good at computing that Nvidia crippled their performance in order to prevent these cheaper cards to compete against their more expensive Quadro cards… but still when running CUDA-optimised code or DirectCompute instead of OpenCL their performance is higher than that of ATI/AMD cards…
but this is the point you need to look at, you need software specifically designed to support the new computing architecture found in GTX 600 series Kepler cards… and Vegas doesn’t support them yet, I doubt very much we will ever see an update to Vegas taking full advantage of these cards, most probably we will have to wait until Vegas Pro 13.
With this said I’d go with either some cheap NVIDIA GTX 570 if you can find one or ATI/AMD 7950 instead, using CUDA for the former and OpenCL for the later… though personally I’m not very fond of OpenCL implementation in Vegas… perhaps I’d seek that GTX 570 for maximum compatibility and performance in Vegas 11-12.
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have you tried to run stress-tests to both your CPU and GPU to check whether they’re being properly powered? (specially your GPU) I’d suggest giving a go to FurMark, post your results, if it runs ok for 10+ minutes then there’s nothing wrong with your PC build…
Download Furmark stress test tool (freeware)
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yes I know it’s a third party plugin and thus separate from the host software, but you still have to use Vegas to render whatever you have created in Titler Pro 2, Vegas refuses to use the GTX 600 series for rendering no matter what drivers you try, in a sunny day the software will just use the CPU and ignore the 600 series card, on the odd day it will crash repeatedly and force you to disable GPU acceleration…
they’re simply unsupported cars, so that’s why I’m surprised that rendering Titler Pro 2 media through Vegas is flawless and fast, using 100% of the GPU resources available. I mean, 600 series are supported in other plugins for Vegas but when you try rendering they still crash… it would be awesome if NewBlue FX engineers could pay a visit to Sony/Nvidia and help sort this “no news on GTX 600 series support” depressing situation… ok good job with Titler Pro 2, never had issues with it at my workplace or at home. It gets the job done and offers a lot of “creativity opportunities” for artists.
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[Edward Troxel] “And, no, Titler Pro cannot run CPU only. It does require a supported GPU to run. The key is a supported GPU/driver. For example, it will not run on an Intel HD series card. It also will not work with a “Mobile” card when it is low powered mode. So forcing the Mobile card to stay in full powered mode when Vegas is running has resolved issues for many more people.”
so Titler Pro requires a supported GPU to run? well I’m puzzled as to why Titler Pro 2 (OFX plugin for Vegas Pro 12) works for me with an unsupported Vegas GTX 600 series card… of course I welcome it, but the host can’t even “see” the card installed (even if it’s listed in the drop-down Video preferences menu)… how in Earth is Titler Pro working flawlessly and so fast with a GTX 600 series in a host that crash as soon as you try rendering anything with them ? (latest drivers, original software, latest Windows and Vegas builds, updated, clean etc ect…)
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GPU-Z shows GPU processing usage in general, it doesn’t show the software using the GPU or what parts of it (directDraw, direct3D, OpenGL, CUDA Shaders, Computing units… future revisions of GPU-Z will show what is being used by who, but that’s not an easy task for a software aimed mostly for quickly showing and logging basic GPU real-time stats with very low CPU usage).
Even if you’re not using GPU for encoding, as long as you have your GPU enabled in Vegas 11-12 it will be used to accelerate previewing while editing/rendering, that’s what you’re seeing in GPU-Z when the GPU is not rendering but just accelerating previews and sharing its VRAM with VEGAS since a sizable bit of the GPU VRAM is used as cache and scratch memory. We do know Vegas doesn’t support consumer-oriented Kepler cards for rendering (GTX 600 series) but still they do accelerate previewing quite a bit and their VRAM used for scratch and cache memory…
As for the performance issues, well, look in Control Panel – Add/Remove installed software – Show Windows Updates -> look for update “KB2670838”, if it’s installed… uninstall it, it downgrades performance and causes random crashes in OpenGL and DirectDraw-3D software.
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amazing post Stephen, I’ve been puzzled by Windows and its different performance issues with the page file through all these years, Microsoft is not clear about it… but as you said in recent versions of Windows it doesn’t matter if you have 4 or 32 GB of RAM, Windows NEEDS some GB of drive space for a paging file, I think it’s legacy programming, software and Windows itself should be rewritten for them to ignore the paging file, not happening anytime soon.
you NEED a page file for 100% stability and best performance, don’t ever install your page file in a drive slower than the drive where Windows is installed, for reference I have a 64 GB RAM workstation at my workplace and Windows still crash if you don’t set up a proper paging file… that’s with a couple of Solid State Drives and as I said 64 GB. Software want something “physical” instead of RAM to write temp files, that’s it, don’t mess with the page file !!
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the problem being that these new API libraries are conflicting with existing GPU drivers, performance issues and software crashes are being reported to GPU manufactures when the fact is Microsoft is the one to blame… now both Nvidia and AMD/ATI will have to optimize their drivers for the update or just ask Microsoft to rewrite their APIs so they don’t clash with drivers’ stability and performance. I can’t believe all this for Internet Explorer 10, which I tested thoroughly and is still way, way behind Chrome and other browsers regarding speed, memory efficiency and security.