[Rick Anvican]

I understand that calibration using the human eye is not entirely trustworthy because of our perceptions with optical illusions, especially color-based ones, thanks for clearing that up.

My mistake, forgot to check your posts in the other thread.

Thanks for helping out for the Uprez testing, I’m going to be using it occasionally so I just want to know if the HD5870 can maintain full or close to full framerate during preview. Of course, I wouldn’t expect that multiple effects (CPU only or GPU accelerated) on one event could be previewed in realtime, but it’s helpful to see the Uprez-ed events in one go.

EDIT: BCC Uprez is not in the GPU Accelerated folder but uses OpenGL, I used an AVCHD source to check and it showed that GPU load was around 20-30% during preview regardless if the event had Uprez applied or not.

Also, I experienced that when I have Dynamic RAM Preview max set to 1024MB instead of default 200MB, I noticed some occurrences where smooth playback of individual events were possible. Note that I did not build a Dynamic RAM Preview at all or pre-rendered any part of the project. A myth to me – does Vegas cache previews in the background while working on a project or can it only be done by the user’s command?

[Rick Anvican]

Do you know any software monitor calibrators that work well? I don’t expect accuracy like the Spyder, but otherwise I’m stuck with the factory preset profiles my monitor has, using sRGB most of the time, but I do want to preview on a secondary monitor like a CRT TV or professional monitor.

Can you post your benchmarking results for the Vegas “Red Car” project? I’ll try to get my results soon, following the same method of your generated media test project.

I’m playing around with BCC Uprez and trying to improve realtime preview framerate on Best|Full (mine plays at 10fps), if you used Uprez on a video event using 1920×1080@23.976p source encoded with Lagarith, would the HD5870 be able to play full framerate or close?

[Rick Anvican]

Are you using an ASUS ProArt monitor as the secondary monitor? I’m using the Dell Ultrasharp U2410 as my main monitor, I think it might be its low framerate (max 60Hz) that causes the tearing but I’m not too sure…

[Rick Anvican]

Just a small update: apparently in Vegas 12 I am able to use custom-resolution source AVCHD with timeline GPUA on without the garbled preview or render, interesting…

Oh, do you have tearing on your Vegas preview? I’m pretty sure I switched Wait for vertical sync on but I get the occasional occurence during playback on virtually any project resolution.

[Rick Anvican]

Who knew that video cards optimized for video processing won’t perform as good as cards optimized for gaming? I’m hoping that the HD5870 GPUs remain in production, now that we know that GPUA actually accelerates rendering, next thing to do is try the GPU with some of my projects and see if there’s a real performance gain. Thanks for sharing the info John, in the meantime I will be migrating my OS to a replacement system HDD but I’ll see if I could try the Vegas benchmark.

[Rick Anvican]

Yeah, my system HDD is failing in its early stages, but I tried your benchmark anyway,

My system: Intel Core i7 2600k 3.4Ghz(4core/8thread), 8GB RAM, eVGA(nVidia)Geforce GTX550Ti(slightly underclocked core clock), (HDD)1TB(system), 1TB external(for renders)
(CPU not overclocked, left Vegas processes at Normal Priority)

Using test project file: 7248_rendertestjr.veg

Preview: Best(Full) / 1920x1080x32 29.970i Render: Best(Full) / 1920x1080x32 29.970p
Dynamic RAM Preview(max): 200 MB
With GPUA off, preview runs at 0.5fps usually, max would be 0.6fps.
With GPUA on, preview runs at about 12fps, fluctuating between 11 and 13 fps

Rendering: (Best|Full)
Templates-Sony AVC | Internet 1920×1080-30p, MainConcept AVC | Internet HD 1080p
------------------------------------------------
Timeline GPU Acceleration OFF (Playback 0.5fps)
------------------------------------------------
Sony AVC (CPU Only). . . . . . . 1:46
Sony AVC (GPU). . . . . . . . 1:43 (0x)
MainConcept AVC (CPU). . . . . . 2:13
MainConcept AVC (CUDA) . . . . 1:40 (1.3x)
------------------------------------------------
Timeline GPU Acceleration ON (Playback 12.0fps)
------------------------------------------------
Sony AVC (CPU Only). . . . . . . 0:26
Sony AVC (GPU). . . . . . . . 0:30 (-0.1x)
MainConcept AVC (CPU). . . . . . 0:52
MainConcept AVC (CUDA) . . . . 0:29 (1.7x)
System HDD was on 50% highest active time, mainly reading Vegas-related files, not sure if that could have bottlenecked the results, but I didn’t really expect that it could achieve that much with GPUA on since I was working with GPUA off previously when editing custom-resolution sources, also considering the 550Ti’s a bordering mid-range (I was offered the 590 when I bought my system, but it was out of my budget, and I game rarely), you wouldn’t expect significant gains. With GPUA, GPU load was around 90% consistent on previewing and rendering regardless of render codec. With no GPUA, GPU load varied and had intermittent peaks of 20% every 10 or so frames when rendering with CUDA(Mainconcept) compared to Sony AVC(GPU) with intermittent peaks of 30% also every 10 frames or so.

Note that my GPU’s core clock was underclocked from factory 980Mhz to 900Mhz to keep MAX temperature under 60 degrees C, because for some reason higher temperatures tends to invite problems like driver stalls and unlikely but possible BSODs. The drivers I used were dated 2 months ago, GPU does seem more stable than when I bought the system.

Well this means no Quadro then, just need some insight on FirePro, but otherwise 5870 is pretty good I have to admit. I thought my GPU wouldn’t have done significantly much in the first place, and I already got used to non-realtime preview and expected sluggish rendering times because of how many effects/transitions I use in a project, but at least I know my GPU does try its best to assist rendering, got to save up then – these GPUs’ prices can be quite hefty.

(I tried to setup Vegas’ parameters as close as possible to yours, if I did miss out any parameters that were supposed to be controlled, please let me know.)

I have an older CPU than yours, based on your theory about matching CPU+GPU as a complimentary pair, would the HD5870 fit with my CPU? (from what I know the HD5870 is a 2009 model, right? My CPU was 2011)
What other GPUs would have worked with my CPU?

[Rick Anvican]

I think I was recommended to buy the HD5870 some time ago, but I haven’t been able to find retailers in my area that still sell that GPU, could only find 5450/5570/5770/6450, I’ve heard that more recent GPUs from AMD as well as nVidia don’t perform as well in Vegas as the 5870, what company manufactured your 5870 card (e.g. Sapphire)?

[Rick Anvican]

Hi John,

[John Rofrano] “What I found was that the ATI Radeon HD 5870 with a slower CPU with less threads rendered faster than the NVIDIA Quadro 4000 with a faster CPU with more threads in the Red Car project”
I saw the hd5770 on bargain at a store so I thought it might have performance differences, but I was reluctant because of the actual performance gains with using GPUs being optimised either for gaming or video processing, as well as the “fast CPU + fast GPU” performing any better.

I’ll try to run the benchmarks later in the week because my system drive might be failing, it’s 100% going active time with average 0.5~1MB/s I/O rate for 1/2 hour continuous, possibly write errors.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but when GPU acceleration is enabled, hardware decoding seems to be performed on certain codecs like AVC/AVCHD, for custom-resolution AVC files I tend to get garbled preview/render, with GPUA disabled, those source files played fine.
If the GPU was changed to AMD’s, would the hardware decode differently?

[Rick Anvican]

Hi Edward,
thanks for your method, I’ve trying your method now but I’m suspecting that some other DirectX plugin may be causing this but I’m not sure which one because the faulting module is always KERNELBASE.dll (which the dll is not corrupted when checked through SFC), but I’ve read from another thread concerning Vegas 12 crashing when initializing DirectX plugins and it was the Newblue plugins that were causing crashes.

EDIT: Apparently, Newblue Titler Pro 2 was causing problems, the other Newblue plugins were fine, Vegas 12 now loads up and is usable, although after I uninstalled and reinstalled Titler Pro, it presents me with a message saying “Titler can’t work due to low GPU capabilities” in both Vegas 11 and 12, I’m using Geforce GTX550Ti, used to previously work without problems on Vegas 11.

EDIT: Reinstalled Titler and now working, thanks Edward, also thanks to others who responded.

[Rick Anvican]

Hi Norman,
Thanks for bringing that up, I’ll check later, but considering that Vegas 12 crashed when it was loading DirectX plugins, and the faulting modules were specifically the Newblue plugins, I’ll see how Vegas goes anyway after uninstalling them.

EDIT: I only had the DirectX version installed (v1.0), I uninstalled it and now Vegas 12 crashes because of KERNELBASE.dll.