Right ...

My Specs are:

i7 3770k
16GB 1600mhz Ram
256gb SSD
2TB Hd
Gigabyte Z77 Mobo

I've been recently making complex timelines in Vegas and my GTX 470 (MSI Twin Frozr Edition) has been struggling to render my multi-layered timelines of about an hour. And usually crashes halfway. So I have been rendering with the "GPU - Off" ... which then renders successfully but takes about 2 hour 30 mins to 3 hours in total.

Even that felt a little long to me ...

So I went and purchased a R9 270X Sapphire OC Edition (1050mhz / 1100mhz boost).

Awful, awful, awful graphics card !!!

With the ATi GPU selected rather than switched off in Vegas, it's even worse than my ancient GTX 470 !?!? Whats going on ? It takes 6 hours 30 mins to render.

And now even if I select "GPU - Off", when I render this 1 hour video it takes 6 hours 30 mins to render !!! Almost as if Sony Vegas doesn't switch it off. How do I know this? well I been monitoring the temps using Core Temp. With the GPU - Off but with the GTX 470 installed, I would see all the cores maxed out and hard at work, which meant the CPU was doing all the leg work ... hence 2-3 hours render time. But now with this Ati card installed and the GPU - Off ... the cores don't max out. Almost as if Sony Vegas is still using the graphics card to render the video.

Regardless of which card I use the ram is always maxed out at 94% so I have purchased an additional 16GB of Ram.

What is going on though ??? I thought the new R9 cards are supposed to be good !?

When you switch to off (gpu) you must restart the computer to take effect. Sound like you have driver issue. Perhaps, try a different driver?

Hi Bruce

I'm running the latest drivers (are you suggesting I install older ones or ?). And yes I do restart Vegas as prompted prior to re-rendering.

You certainly can give that a try. I am running an old AMD card Radeon HD 6970 2gb and it is awesome, I am running amd driver 13.8 old driver and I have not try any other new driver because this driver works really well on my system and I have no desired to try new driver. I am running this card with my i7 3930K overclocked @ 5.0Ghz 64gb ddr 3 memory, and I don't have any problem with Vegas at all. I am using Vegas Pro 11 and 12.

I should mention I received the R9 270X yesterday.

I have just selected "Open CL if available" ... where as before I was rendering with "CUDA if available" which is for nVidia.

The rendering time has improved a little ...

It now takes 5hours to render via GPU ... still doesn't explain why I can't render using CPU only within 2.30 to 3 hours like before.

I receive an additional 16GB memory tomorrow, so i'll see what happens then.

Hey James

Have you maybe tried a simple render with just a single track on your timeline?? My i7 usually will do a single track render to MPEG2 in around one third of realtime! so a 6 minute clip should render in 2 minutes.

One other thought? Have any tracks had any Magic Bullet effects added or have any got Neat Video on them?? That absolutely kills Vegas!!

Is this wedding? I always split my clips for weddings ...no clip is ever longer than 15 odd minutes max! ..that way if any track has any issues it's easy to fault find rather than troll thru 60 minutes of video

Hope you sort it out!

Chris

you've checked there's no 'opacity' track setting by mistake?

CORRECT LESLIE.

I had the opacity levels at 99% on the track and it wasn't visible....

Render time now? 2 HOURS with GPU.

Very happy!

@Chris

Hi ! All my clips have Magic Bullet Looks applied so I can match my FS100 to my second camera mans 5D MK2 so that wasn't the issue.

If you install Excalibur (http://www.jetdv.com/excalibur), it comes with a free bonus Project Inspector (http://www.jetdv.com/excalibur/new6.php) plugin that will check for some of these "invisible" errors.