Vegas 12 and GPU

P

prexdealer

Well-known member
Hi,

I am looking to build a reasonable/medium powered system to edit with Sony 12. I have been doing some internet searches and there are a lot of complaints about not really having the benefit of the GPU during rendering. Anyone using Sony 12 disappointed or happy with GPU acceleration? Based on this link http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/gpuacceleration it seems very useful. Do you just need to have a higher end card?

Thanks.
 
Update: The more I have been reading CPU power is needed for editing where GPU seems to be more critical for fx. So it seems if I am not doing any fancy special fx my focus should be on CPU power.
 
I just put together what I would consider a mid-level workstation for Sony Vegas Pro 12. Intel i5 3570K processor, 16gb RAM, ATI Radeon HD 7850 2gb video card, SSD + 1tb 7200rpm hard drives. It seems that the software 'analyzes' your hardware and will use GPU acceleration based on how powerful your CPU and your video card are. When I set render to CPU only, it only took an extra 20 seconds to render an 8 minute clip, when compared to having GPU rendering enabled. I have read users that had long render times with GPU enabled, and when disabled their render was significantly faster. For these users, it seems that their video cards were below the 'happy line' the software likes, since the render was much faster when only using the CPU (and these were i7 CPU systems). My system seems to be right at that 'happy line' since my times are almost equal between GPU enabled or disabled.

If you spend $225+ on a video card, you will probably see decreased render times with GPU enabled. If you have a $125 or less video card, then CPU only will probably give you the fastest render times (as longs as you're using an Intel i5 or better CPU).

Hope this helps!
Dave
 
I'm finding render times to be significantly faster with nVidia cuda enabled than with cpu only. Even on my lower end GTX260 cuda rendering is much faster.


Cheers,

Pete
 
c3hammer said:
I'm finding render times to be significantly faster with nVidia cuda enabled than with cpu only. Even on my lower end GTX260 cuda rendering is much faster.
Click to expand...
Same here with my GT430. But one thing though, from what I've tested, I find the previous version of Vegas (11.0 build 701) to be way more stable than the current build of version 12.0.
And overall, I find the version 11.0 to suffers from less crashes than the version 12.0. I had to turn down the rendering threads to 1 and increase the Dynamic RAM up in order to be able to edit something with version 12.0. Something I never had to do with 11.0.

But, even with a lower-end GPU, it makes a difference, but of course, make sure to check the Cuda-Cores of the card, DDR memory and bits of it. All these can make a significant difference.
 
drapeama said:
...And overall, I find the version 11.0 to suffers from less crashes than the version 12.0...
Click to expand...
That's a bummer !!!

I've got Movie Studio 12 on a Win7 and a Win8 machine and it has not had a single glitch. Renders are almost twice as fast on my Win7 machine than the older version VMS10 I had before.

Cheers,
Pete
 
I run Vegas Pro 12 and have also built up a medium-ish level rig.
AMD fx-8320 (8-core)
Agility 4 128gb SSD for the boot drive/programs
WD Caviar Blue 7200rpm 1tb HDD
16gb Kingston HyperX RAM
Windows 7 professional
AMD Radeon hd6770 1gb GPU
With my GPU, I can render in nearly the exact amount of time as rendering with only the CPU. Renders from my GPU seem to have quite a bit of artifacting that rendering on the CPU does not create, so I always use CPU rendering. Although having a decent enough GPU has definitely helped smooth out video preview in Vegas. I can preview in "Best (Full)" while in fullscreen. The money spent on this rig was instantly justified when I was able to preview any type of HD codec (mainly h.264 from Canon DSLRs and AVCHD from Panasonic AC cams) smoothly. Rendering times aren't a huge issue for what I do, so take my build/opinion with a grain of salt. I'm more than happy to let renders go for a good 30 minutes for a 5+ minute video with the Sony AVC encoder with 2-pass and plenty of effects. Also, GPU accelerated rendering can only be attributed to the Sony AVC encoder and the XDCAM encoder. Any other encoder is exempt from using the GPU for rendering, anyways. Two months ago I was really struggling to spec out a build to solely use Vegas and Adobe After Effects, so I know the pain of finding GPUs and CPU setups that will handle the new features of Vegas 12. There are success stories scattered throughout the internet so I figured I'd share mine. Very very happy with my setup.
tl;dr? Processor power > graphics power for Vegas use
Cheers!
 
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