Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

We need someone with the time to create a list of facts and common issues with this GPU thing and to create a sticky, maybe, complete with links to the manufacturer websites, Sony websites, and a list of FAQs or something.

For example, if the "enable GPU rendering" cannot be checked or is greyed out or whatever, it means your card is not up to spec.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

Bill, well done, thanks for your effort and the excellent specific information. We need to refer those who are having trouble to your post, for sure.

Do you know if the amount of RAM affects things much beyond 512MB? For example my card has 1 or 2GB of ram, I forget. I'm not seriously thinking about ditching my card, it's a new card with around 200 bitstreams or whatever they are called, and it would be frivolous for me to do so. I have an i7 980 processor, so I don't know how much more a $400 or $500 card would help.

If Adam is correct in his discussion of the diminishing returns, it would seem in my case I'm OK where I'm at.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

I have no idea - I am in the same boat as most folks here. I have an ATI 6670 Series card with 1 GB of memory. I like the x670 series because they don't require an auxiliary power connector and don't turn my desktop into a space heater.

But how well it performs - or if - I won't know until I test it, probably later this week.
I do know that on my Core 2 Quad Q6600 AVCHD/MPEG-4 encoding to almost any HD format is so slow that I don't. If I need to do an encode to HD, I use MPEG-2.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

how do u know if the GPU is recognized?

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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?

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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...

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.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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?

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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

Cheers

Grazie

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

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

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

Early days, but so far everything I throw at it is previewing in real time. Haven't tried rendering yet (nothing to compare it with, as the 'old' system bricked literally thirty minutes after the new system arrived - how's that for timing?! Perhaps it was suicide).

Just for fun I dropped some mts clips on a track, added randomly selected fx at track level - Color Curves, Lens Flare, Levels, Mirror, Glow, Gaussian Blur, Saturation Adjust, Bump Map, and Black and White - and got real time preview at Best/Full. It was even real time on the production monitor through the Intensity Pro.

Adding a Median filter in slowed things up, as you would expect. I was surprised that Gaussian Blur didn't, to be honest. Dropping to Best/Half returned me to real time preview speeds with minimal loss of quality on the production monitor (which displays in SD).

I haven't reinstalled NewBlue, MB Looks, Neat Video etc yet, but when I do I'll give them all a good bashing and see how they perform. Similarly, I can't test it on a real life multi track project because most of them use one or more of the aforementioned plugins, which are awaiting installation.

Needless to say, overkill or not, I am outrageously happy with my new system (i980, 12GB RAM, GeForce GTX580). As Grazie said elsewhere, back in the early Vegas days (and I only go back to the tail end of V2, beginning of V3), we could only dream of this kind of performance.

Not trying to rub up the wrong way anyone who isn't having much success with GPU acceleration, but this has actually resulted in me being excited again about sitting in front of Vegas, rather than just regarding it as a means to an end. Haven't felt like that for a few years . . .

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

I meant to add, this is with the project set to 32 bit fp (video levels or full range). Never been able to do that before.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

Ian what type are your source files, and are you talking multicamera or single?

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

Jeff, they're AVCHD 1920 x 1080 clips from a lowly Panasonic HDC-SD60 (holiday stuff). All single camera.

As I say, it was just for fun with fx picked at random just to see how far I could push it. For work related editing I am working no 'higher' than HDV so I think there's some headroom still!

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

I think I'm happy.

With a lowly Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz Q6600 and AMD Radeon HD6670 Card:

I've plugged in a 1 hour 2 minute project I finished not long ago.
Footage is from three Canon HF-S200 cameras.
Filters are overwhelmingly Levels, Color Correction, Color Curves, Brightness and Contrast.

Preview performance is very noticably more fluid.

Under Vegas 10 with no GPU accelleration, the 7.5 Mbps CBR DVD video render took about 1 hour 45 minutes.

Under Vegas 11 with GPU accelleration, the render to a 21 Mbps AVCHD 1920x1080i video stream is about three hours 50 minutes. I can live with that. The time required used to be come back tomarrow. Or the day after.

I'm using GPU-Z 0.5.5 to monitor the GPU. I note that the GPU Load is higher if I do NOT run the preview window while rendering. Under those conditions the card is running at 44%. And the GPU Temp goes up from a low of 40C to 44C under load.

The CPU, rather than running 100% all the time (Vegas 10) varies between 70% - 77% (Vegas 11).

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

Ian, 1080 is still 1080! Congrats! Bill you have seen a huge improvement, nice.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

I may have found a problem.

I normally have my cameras set to shoot NTSC 29.97 progressive, 1920 x 1080.
1. In poor lighting this allows the camera to find more light.
2. It all but eliminates the interlace motion artifacts.
3. It allows me to pull better pictures from video to use as cover art for the DVD menus, DVD, & enclosing package.

When I render for DVD using the GPU I am seeing a lot of interlace motion artifacts.
I just got done disabling the GPU and redoing the render using only the CPU.
Yes it takes longer but the interlace motion artifacts are now gone.
Could someone else confirm or prove me wrong? I'd like to be wrong.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

Anyone try acceleration with an XFX - ATI Radeon HD5770? From reading the specs it does appear to support acceleration but I'll probably need to update the driver.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

I had a crash when it prompted that my GPU drivers are not the latest. After updating it worked like magic.

Dell XPS studio 2010 desktop
Nvidia GTX260 (time to upgrade may be)
4min 12 tracks with CC, levels, pro titler text, sfx,
5D2 mov native, mxf, mp3
Render to avc mp4 (8,000,000 bps aver)

V11 - 5.01min
V10 - 8.51min

I'm happy! Now to test my MBP 2011...

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

Sean,

Can you tell me how did you able to get GPU to enabled in V11? I am using the same old card as your GTX260. Under reference> video tap I can not not change GPU to ON. It is shown OFF only. I am uding 260.99 driver.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

Bruce, from Sony's website:

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.

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.


Looks like you need to update your video driver to 270.xx instead of 260.xx

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

Actually, he needs a new video card. VP 11 only supports CUDA v. 2.0 and up. As listed at | NVIDIA Developer Zone, the GTX280 only supports CUDA 1.3 and below.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

To me, it seems that GPU accelerated Rendering may work with the GT(X) 2XX cards, because it was introduced in Pro 10!

Only GPU accelerated PREVIEW doesn´t work, this is why I ordered a new Radeon 6950 yersterday and will receive it tomorrow.
The Radeons seem to boost preview and plugin perfomance most, while nvidia cards help rendering a bit more (depending on the amount of plugins).

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

Yikes its off for my GTX260! But guess what, i have seen an almost 2x increment in rendering speed to mp4. Wonder how does that work!? Bruce, just do a test and you should see the difference. Anyway I'm set to upgrade to a Asus 560ti probably. Anything above is way too exp for me now.

My 2011 MBP works with the GPU. Its using a ati radeon card =) old 2009 MBP doesnt work thou. Now to pass it to my wife!

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

Anybody having problems rendering with GPU acceleration but preview with GPU works fine? I'm using an ATI 5770 and the preview acceleration seems to work great, but as soon as I try to render MainConcept AVC/AAC I get the message "An error occurred while creating the media file ... The reason for the error could not be determined." If I change the encode mode to "Render using CPU only" the file renders fine. I am using Catalyst 11.9 drivers.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

hola,

eay question: would i notice this improvements on my Xp32 OS? I have a quadro fx3600 but running just XP32.....

many thanks

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

Vegas 11 doesn't support XP.

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

Hi guys. I've got a problem.
While rendering (usually at 3 or 4% of the project) the monitor blacks out and after a second or two it comes back up and windows says "Display driver crashed and recovered"


After that Vegas seems to continue render but it doesn't. It just stacks.
In order to render i had to un check the "enable cpu acceleration" tab.

Any ideas?

System
Asus Samertooth X58, i7 960, 24GBram, ATI Radeon 6790 1GB ddr5, catalyst driver 11.9
Win7 64, Vegas 11 64

Thanks

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

Stefanos, you are lucky you can render at all. I cannot render 720p for Bluray even after unchecking GPU, and I have about 20 projects shot in 720p to do. I'm stuck with V10. Can't use 11 at all. I have to wait and see if the first update fixes the issue. It probably will, but who knows?

Re: GPU acceleration in Pro 11
 

I found the problem, I was using a render template from V10, V11 doesn't like it. I made a new template in V11, runs great. Problem solved.