GPU acceleration in Pro 11

[Ian Stark]

Jeff, re RAM, the advice I was given was that you'll only really see the benefit of vast amounts of RAM in the gaming world, pretty much as Adam mentioned earlier. The 3GB in my card is waaay overkill, but as it was a free upgrade I wasn't going to complain . . . and then there's Flight Simulator . . . :-)

At what point beyond 512 the extra RAM becomes unnecessary (in Vegas) I'm not sure. Adam seems to be the font of knowledge in this regard.

[Ian Stark]

Sean, in options/preferences/video there is a drop down list. If the only option is OFF, your card is not recognised.

[Jeff Harper]

If you can use GPU acceleration setting, turn it on and off, then your good. If not you can't.

[Jeff Harper]

Thanks Ian. It would seem that as Adam says it's the number of bitstream processors that's most important.

The Microcenter guy essentially told me that is what would affect things when I bought the card a few months ago, and it looks like he was correct.

The next step up from my GTX 460SE card was substatianlly more in cost as I recall, so the 460 seemed to be the best value. Hopefully I was right.

[Jeff Harper]

With my GTX 460SE I saved 3.5 minutes or so on a 5 minute project. 15 minutes with 10 versus 12 minutes with Vegas 11.

Respectable, but playback performance appears to be affected little. I do not render AVC for bluray, so the benefits are slim to me. A few minute saved on web renders, that's about it.

All in all, nothing to be excited about, but I'm not knocking it. It's a move in the right direction for sure.

Is the upgrade worth it? I don't know. If you have $150 why not? I'm hesitant to save projects with it for fear of some unknown bugs.

[Nicholas de Kock]

Should have done this ages ago, three monitors to edit on is awesome.

[Jeff Harper]

Your three monitor setup looks very cool, good for you, congrats.

I personally like to have one 30" and a 24" for internet and opening folder.

I have a 27" and 24". I bought 30" and it was bad so to save money I sent the 30" back and got a 27", what a mistake. 30" is just SO nice, and the size difference is so large. You can have a full preview window and still have all you lines of video and audio showing below. I hate turning my head.

Anyway, very nice, Nick.

[Nicholas de Kock]

I have a 4th monitor but no space on table, hehe, my neck is feeling it, wouldn't mind a 30" myself. I wonder how a 42" LED TV would work?

[Andreas Neubert]

Below, I´ve posted the german version - It wouldn´t be Sony if they hadn´t screwed the info totally up when translating the site...

Originally Posted by Bill Koehler

From the Sony Creative Software website here:

Vegas Pro 11 GPU acceleration

Supported cards for GPU-acceleration:
To take full advantage of the GPU-acceleration in Vegas Pro 11, you will need a supported card with at least 512 MB of GPU memory.

GPU-accelerated AVC rendering:
NVIDIA: GPU-accelerated AVC rendering requires a CUDA-enabled GPU and NVIDIA driver 270.xx or later with a GeForce GTX 4xx Series or newer GPU.

ATI: OpenCL GPU-accelerated rendering requires an OpenCL-enabled ATI GPU and AMD Radeon Catalyst driver 11.7 or later with an AMD Radeon HD 57xx or newer GPU. AMD FirePro GPU should have 8.85 or newer.

GPU-accelerated video processing:
NVIDIA: GPU-accelerated video processing requires an OpenCL-enabled GPU and NVIDIA driver 270.xx or later with a GeForce GTX 4xx Series or newer GPU.

AMD: OpenCL GPU-accelerated video processing requires an OpenCL-enabled AMD GPU and AMD Radeon Catalyst driver 11.7 or later with an AMD Radeon HD 57xx or newer GPU. AMD FirePro GPU should have 8.85 or newer.

Unterstützte NVIDIA- oder ATI-Karten für die GPU-Beschleunigung

GPU-beschleunigtes AVC-Rendering/Videobearbeitung erfordert eine CUDA-fähige GPU und den NVIDIA-Treiber 185.xx oder später mit einer GeForce GT 2xx oder einer neueren GPU.

Open GL GPU-beschleunigtes AVC-Rendering/Videobearbeitung erfordert eine OpenCL-fähige ATI GPU und den AMD Radeon Catalyst-Treiber 11.2 oder später mit einer ATI Radeon HD 57xx oder einer neueren GPU. Bei der Verwendung einer ATI FirePro-GPU ist der universelle FirePro-Treiber 8.773 oder später erforderlich.

[John Woo]

Originally Posted by Ian Stark

Sean, in options/preferences/video there is a drop down list. If the only option is OFF, your card is not recognised.

My obervation so far. vegas 11 did not recognise my Dell Vostro notebook network card Geforce 310M, I fired up GPU shark before render, GPU usage hover around 2 to 5%. When render starts, it shot up to 50-60%. Does this means GPU acceleration works?

[Graham Bernard]

Originally Posted by John Woo

My obervation so far. vegas 11 did not recognise my Dell Vostro notebook network card Geforce 310M, I fired up GPU shark before render, GPU usage hover around 2 to 5%. When render starts, it shot up to 50-60%. Does this means GPU acceleration works?

John, yours and Adam's testing, have distilled what are highlighting the development the guys at SONY have/are developing for us. Your observation raises an important and worthy bit of reality-checking: On the one hand no GPU Accel, on the other hand there is.

Fascinating.

Grazie

[Graham Bernard]

John, inform SCS. I really do think it is that important.

Cheers

Grazie

[Victor Wilcox]

The GPU CUDA is available for rendering but not accelerated timeline playback on the 310M. Same problem with my 330M. Disappointing, but not unexpected.

[Joe Kollee]

Ok I tried some more experiments. I tried to use similar settings Nicholas used, with the vegas "Glow" I picked the first preset. White soft Glow. 32bit floating. Matched footage. Best quality. Disabled optimal playback 10e, grayed out in 11.
Canon 7D native footage 1080 30p
Rendered a one min clip to the desktop on all tests. MainConcept blueray 1920-1080 60i 25mbps
Nvidia 560Ti
Dual X5650 ( typo in my last post...it was late..much like now...boy time flies )
64bit win 7, 12gb ram, all hdds are mirrored 7200 2tb seagate drives

Playback with vegas 11 external monitor was so smooth, live, with the Best Full setting. ( 560Ti enabled )
Playback with vegas 10e external monitor about 1 frame per second. Really not editable. (would have to go to 8bit to edit )

Vegas 11 Rendered 1 min clip in 1:32 (560Ti ) 12% cpu usage
Vegas 10e Rendered 1 min clip in 4:49 72% cpu usage

I was able to get the cpu usage up to 24%, by opening up two vegas 11 projects. ( both at the same ) and rendering the same setup on both at the same time. I did render to separate hdds, ( one to the windows desktop and another to another internal drive. 2:05 secs and 1:55 so 10seconds slower for the desktop render.

This generated a 178mb file. Both versions were the same size and I could not find any differences between them quality wise.

Looks good so far, will keep testing.

[Nicholas de Kock]

Joe that's a pretty impressive performance gain, seems like Vegas 11 is working very well with the current generation of graphics cards.