Building a new SuperComputer for Vegas Pro 11!

[Peter Siamidis]

I did a clean install of the newest driver, which for NVidia drivers means it uninstalls the old drivers then installs the new ones. I didn't use any driver sweep software though, never really used those.

EDIT: Just saw this posted on the Sony forum regarding NVidia 670 and the newest NVidia drivers: "yup. still sees the 670 card but will not make use of GPU render under mp4 settings.". So looks like there is an issue for now, have to wait this one out.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Peter Siamidis

I did a clean install of the newest driver, which for NVidia drivers means it uninstalls the old drivers then installs the new ones. I didn't use any driver sweep software though, never really used those.

EDIT: Just saw this posted on the Sony forum regarding NVidia 670 and the newest NVidia drivers: "yup. still sees the 670 card but will not make use of GPU render under mp4 settings.". So looks like there is an issue for now, have to wait this one out.

Honestly, I would not use GPU rendering in Vegas if video quality is important because GPU rendering sacrifices quality for performance. I much, much prefer CPU-only rendering with this software regardless of the GPU used. Here's why:

First, all GPUs are clocked far slower than most really cheapo CPUs to begin with. Second, very few GPUs have a total data throughput that matches even that of a mediocre-performing CPU. And third, most GPUs idle much hotter than most CPUs. Put all three of them together, and GPU rendering is just not ready for prime-time right now.

[Jeff Harper]

I completely agree with Randall, I do not like using GPU acceleration for rendering, never have liked it. The time savings is not worth the quality loss. Besides, Sony AVC takes a stupidly long time to render anyway, and is not superior to MPEG 2 and I just don't see the attraction to it.

My only draw to the GPU acceleration feature is playback performance.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

I completely agree with Randall, I do not like using GPU acceleration for rendering, never have liked it. The time savings is not worth the quality loss. Besides, Sony AVC takes a stupidly long time to render anyway, and is not superior to MPEG 2 and I just don't see the attraction to it.

My only draw to the GPU acceleration feature is playback performance.

I have to admit that GPU rendering can be useful if it's correctly implemented (such as in Adobe Premiere Pro, which uses GPU acceleration for certain effects and scaling/resizing operations but performs all of the encoding entirely on the CPU). Unfortunately, Vegas and a few other NLEs also use GPU acceleration for encoding whenever the feature is enabled - and it is the GPU-based encoding that I really meant to criticize.

And yes, Sony AVC is artificially restricted to such low bitrates (16 Mbps or lower) that you might as well lock Vegas to MPEG-2 for all DVD and Blu-ray encodes.

[Peter Siamidis]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

I completely agree with Randall, I do not like using GPU acceleration for rendering, never have liked it. The time savings is not worth the quality loss. Besides, Sony AVC takes a stupidly long time to render anyway, and is not superior to MPEG 2 and I just don't see the attraction to it.

My only draw to the GPU acceleration feature is playback performance.

I agree that in general that is true as I've tried dozens of gpu encoders and they all sucked, but I find Vegas 11 to be an exception, the quality of the gpu encodes looks the same as the cpu encodes to me. So far Vegas 11 is the only program I've ever encountered that doesn't sacrifice qualtiy for speed. I really looked at them back to back for a while as did others and we could not notice any quality difference, hence I've been using gpu encodes for quite some time now. The ~4x faster encode time has really helped my business as well, I can take on many more projects which has been fantastic.

Do you really see a quality difference when doing an a/b comparison of Vegas 11 cpu/gpu encodes? I mean a bunch of us looked and looked, we spent a few days comparing the Mainconcept AVC encoder on both cpu only and gpu and we just can't see any difference in the quality. I don't know about the Sony AVC encoder as I never use that one, I only use the Mainconcept AVC encoder. As far as our eyes can tell after much examiniation, the cpu and gpu encodes are equally good. I ask if you can really see the difference because I realize that historically gpu encodes have always sucked so that prevailing thought of not using the gpu on encodes remains, I was the same way for ages, but Vegas 11 finally changed my opinion on that.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Peter Siamidis

I agree that in general that is true as I've tried dozens of gpu encoders and they all sucked, but I find Vegas 11 to be an exception, the quality of the gpu encodes looks the same as the cpu encodes to me. So far Vegas 11 is the only program I've ever encountered that doesn't sacrifice qualtiy for speed. I really looked at them back to back for a while as did others and we could not notice any quality difference, hence I've been using gpu encodes for quite some time now. The ~4x faster encode time has really helped my business as well, I can take on many more projects which has been fantastic.

Do you really see a quality difference when doing an a/b comparison of Vegas 11 cpu/gpu encodes? I mean a bunch of us looked and looked, we spent a few days comparing the Mainconcept AVC encoder on both cpu only and gpu and we just can't see any difference in the quality. I don't know about the Sony AVC encoder as I never use that one, I only use the Mainconcept AVC encoder. As far as our eyes can tell after much examiniation, the cpu and gpu encodes are equally good. I ask if you can really see the difference because I realize that historically gpu encodes have always sucked so that prevailing thought of not using the gpu on encodes remains, I was the same way for ages, but Vegas 11 finally changed my opinion on that.

True unless you're authoring Blu-rays with DVD Architect. The HD content "rendered" using the Vegas MainConcept AVC encoder is not compliant with the Blu-ray spec, and thus DVD Architect must re-compress this material, destroying video quality in the process.

[Peter Siamidis]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

True unless you're authoring Blu-rays with DVD Architect. The HD content "rendered" using the Vegas MainConcept AVC encoder is not compliant with the Blu-ray spec, and thus DVD Architect must re-compress this material, destroying video quality in the process.

Ah ok that makes sense, I don't author for Bluray so I don't encounter that. How about the Sony AVC encoder, I think it supports gpu as well. Does it produce lower quality encodes when using gpu compared to when using cpu? I've never really tested that one.

[Gints Klimanis]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

I completely agree with Randall, I do not like using GPU acceleration for rendering, never have liked it. The time savings is not worth the quality loss.

Jeff, would you be able to describe how to create a render in which there is a visible difference between GPU and CPU rendering? I'm not seeing a difference with Sony XDCAM 35 Mbps MPEG2 source files (Sony EX1 camera) and either MainConcept or Sony AVC render to MP4 with/without GPU acceleration.

From what I've read, GPU rendering by MainConcept uses the CPU for part of the encoding and the GPU for the rest. Much of the criticism is that many companies use nVidia's reference CUDA GPU encoder source code and for their GPU-accelerated product, and a different implementation for the CPU encoder. A GPU is like a CPU with thousands of processor registers and tons more floating-point engines. GPUs will be much, much faster on highly iterative data that fits in the register file but not as fast on problems that are dependent on memory bandwidth available to the 300-1500 GPU cores. But I plan on writing my first CUDA video effect this month to understand the difference.

[Jeff Harper]

Gints, I have no clue. I know early on I didn't like the results with GPU rendered footageand in the end I don't care a whole lot, I'll tell you why.

I like mpeg 2 for bluray anyway, and it doesn't utilize GPU anyway, so the point is moot in my case.

I personally do not care about improving rendering times with GPU, it's playback on the timeline I care about most.

GPU rendering improvements are so minimal with my OC'd CPU it just doesn't matter even when I do use it.

Good luck with your effect.

[Leslie Wand]

agree with jeff - timeline playback IS the goal, rendering is of secondary importance.

[Gints Klimanis]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

GPU rendering improvements are so minimal with my OC'd CPU it just doesn't matter even when I do use it.

Agreed. I'm just trying to figure out why Sony states GPU rendering is about 3x faster while I'm not seeing any acceleration.

[Jeff Harper]

I remember anecdotal evidence from around this forum early on that GPU acceleration seemed to be more dramatic with slower CPUs, and less so with faster CPUs. Obviously there are variables. The GPU speed vs the CPU speed, I don't know what the "right combo" is for optimal improvement, but I seem to remember, as I said, that those with older or slower CPUs benefited more, but I have no proof of that. I might be way off or have it backward, I have no idea, but the bottom line is improvement varies with your setup, as far as I can tell.

I only know that I'm using an overclocked quad-core hyperthreaded CPU that's running at over 4GHZ, and more rendering speed is not what I need. It is always nice when I can get it, of course, but it's not a priority.

So, I'm still frustrated when video files, running off of a RAID 0 array of SAS 15k rpm disc drives that is not even 25% full run roughly as I edit a four camera 1080 24p job.

I've contemplated a move to Edius for better playback, but I chickened out, again.

[Kim Olsson]

Ok "SuperComputer have arrived" !! =)

As I said before, this is my setup:

Antec P280 case
Ivy Bridge 3770k (Not yet OC'ed)
Asus p8z77 v motherboard
32Gb Corsair Vengance 1600MHz
Gigabyte GTX 670 2GB RAM
Intel SSD 120GB 520 serie
Samsung 2TB HD
Corsair Hydro H100 CPU cooling

I must say, Iam really really impressed with the workflow in VP11 and also the rendering so far....
My CPU temp for my short rendering test was 38 degrees, mother board 30 degrees.
Idle its in 26 degrees,.

- Vegas have found my GTX 670 in the preference-video tab. Thats good
- When choosing rendering, customize template - check GPU, it says "CUDA is availible"

But when I choose Mainconcept AVC/ACC *.mp4.. I get a Error dialog poped up. "The reason for the error could not be determinated"

I tested with 3 different different materials on the timeline each time.
Photos, videos from my iphone 4s (1080p), Videos from my nikon P300 (1080p).

Any project test file I should run?

[Peter Siamidis]

That's the exact problem I had with the 670. The card is detected, it says "Cuda available" and it gives that error on encoding. I read that others have the same issue, no one seemed to have any solution so as far as I know we'll have to wait for Sony to patch Vegas to get 670 support. In the meantime I've been sticking with my trusty old 560ti.

[Adam Stanislav]

And now there is GeForce GTX 690 - GeForce, so maybe the price of the 680 will drop?