Vegas 10d ATI GPU render accel..

[Mike McKay]

So I have 5770 that everything I can find seems to suggest it supports openCL. I downloaded latest driver that even says it includes openCL driver, but when I render SonyAVC and I click the CheckGPU button, it says 'No GPU'.
Is there some other setting buried in Vegas or is this card just not supported? Seems like it should be? Would be nice to benefit from this new fangled ATI gpu accel support in 10d.

[Dale Guthormsen]

do not know the answer, but if Vegas doesn't use graphic card memory can it actually do an gl accelerated render?

[Randall Leong]

Mike,

Which version of the ATi/AMD Catalyst driver are you using? There is a known compatibility issue with the two latest driver versions, 11.3 and 11.4. At this present time the OpenCL acceleration works only with driver version 11.2 installed - and no other driver version (older or newer).

Here are the links to the 11.2 drivers:

Windows 7/Vista 32-bit
Windows 7/Vista 64-bit

[Mike Kujbida]

Mike, the only help I can offer is what was in the release notes for 10d.

GPU-accelerated AVC encoding support expanded to AMD.
In addition to the existing nVidia CUDA support, Vegas Pro 10.0d adds support for users with AMD ATI graphics chipsets that support OpenCL to use the Sony AVC encoder for faster project rendering.

NVIDIA GPUs
GPU-accelerated AVC rendering requires a CUDA-enabled GPU and NVIDIA driver 185.xx or later with a GeForce GT 2xx Series or newer GPU.
For more information about CUDA-enabled GPUs, please see CUDA GPUs

ATI GPUs
OpenCL GPU-accelerated rendering requires an OpenCL-enabled ATI GPU and AMD Radeon Catalyst driver 11.2 or later with an ATI Radeon HD 57xx or newer GPU (please see Known Issues regarding an incompatibility with driver versions 11.3 and 11.4). If using an ATI FirePro GPU, FirePro unified driver 8.773 or later is required.

For more information about OpenCL-enabled GPUs, please see AMD Radeon? Graphics for Desktop PCs | AMD

GPU-accelerated rendering performance will vary depending on your specific hardware configuration. If you have an older CPU and a newer GPU, rendering using the GPU may improve render times.

[Mike McKay]

Yeah I'm using newest 11.5 driver. I thought I read that is says 11.2 or newer with compatibility issues with 11.3 and 11.4 so I figured 11.5 was maybe a fix, but I guess not.
I will revert to 11.2 and see what happens.
Thanks for the ideas.

[Mike McKay]

Well this is pretty ridiculous, I just downgraded to 11.2 drivers and sure enough when I click 'check gpu' it now pops up as 'openCL avail' rather than 'no gpu'. Got excited about lowering my rendering times using SonyAVC, used my test project of 1:44 and it took 5:32 to encode, I could hear my fan slowly ramping up on my gpu and saw the fan rpm and temps go up which has never happened before. All well and good, except that with 11.5 drivers and no GPU activity at all, I repeatedly encoded the same project in 3:58, over a minute and a half faster??
Early tests of this enhanced render acceleration are dissapointing to say the least. I can't even fathom how could it be so much slower....I mean it's adding more processing power, right? Over a long project render that is going to be no good at all. I don't know if there's settings that need to be changed somewhere but I can't find any.
Using a Corei5 overclocked to 3.4ghz, 8GbRAM, Win7 64bit, 64bit Vegas, never bothered testing 32bit.

[Jay Allen]

I always get faster render times in 32 bit vs 64 bit with mp4, mp2
The 64 bit starts out fast and slows way down after a bit. This happens on all three systems I have.
So for now it's 32bit for me.

I7 980 extrreme with 24 gig ram and gtx 470

[Allen Vodi]

For anyone using ATI graphics cards : there is an excellent downloadable application from AMD for realtime monitoring of both CPU and GPU (ATI = only) resources found at :
AMD System Monitor Version 1.0.5

I am not a Vegas user, however with my Win 7-64 bit editor the GPU reduces rendering substantially with frequently better video quality results.

[Mike McKay]

I just tested 32bit Vegas and it's significantly slower rendering than 64bit?

[Gints Klimanis]

Originally Posted by Mike Kujbida

GPU-accelerated rendering performance will vary depending on your specific hardware configuration. If you have an older CPU and a newer GPU, rendering using the GPU may improve render times.

Mike, do you have opinions on the GPU level? I see a linear improvement in rendering times with an overclocked, overcooled Core i7 980x when I overclock from 3.33 GHz to 4.4 GHz. Will the nVidia GPUs help other pipeline effect render times? Is a top card needed to see a respectable improvement?

[Mike Kujbida]

Gints, I have a 4 year old system and have never bothered taking the time to experiment to find out if my render times are any different.
Also, it's my understanding that this feature is primarily for mp4 files and I very rarely render to that format.

[Bill Koehler]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

Here are the links to the 11.2 drivers:

Windows 7/Vista 32-bit
Windows 7/Vista 64-bit

Thank you for that info and these links, Randall. Much appreciated.