Best Graphics card for V12

[Niall Megahey]

Hi guys

I have an old Dell 730x machine with 2 GeForce GTX 280 in SLI that's finding it hard to edit native avchd footage. (I dont want to start converting everything to Proress or Dnx-hd) I normally edit 4 camera multicam edits. As Vegas can only see one card and the 260 is quite dated im looking to upgrade.

I am just wondering what card really uses Vegas to its full potential|? I have done a good bit of reading and it seems now that AMD using Open GL is the way to go and is giving better results then Nvidia. Im willing to spend about 200 pound or more and will probably get a second hand card as i have also read that the new ones don't work as well?

Anyone know of a card that's really doing the business?

Thanks

[Leslie Wand]

apparently 570 or 580

or amd r2 270

at least that's what i surmise from reading here, scs, and net in general.

i'm running a 650 and it seems ok.

don't game nor am i worried about render times...

[Niall Megahey]

Thanks Leslie

One thing that i came across from reading different posts is that Vegas does not fully support certain models of cards. The 600 series according to the link below is not supported fully. Meaning as far as i can gather that Vegas cant use all of the Cuda Cores or the full potential of the cards Open GL acceleration.

Older cards however can. This is why an older card might be a better buy.

[Christopher Young]

As Leslie indicates some Nvidia cards work well and some don't. I am finding v12 and v13 working fine and with good GPU assists in both previewing and rendering. Sorting out drivers is the issue in my experience.

I am running a GeForce GTX 680 on one box and it worked brilliantly with Nvidia drivers v 332.21. When I updated the drivers to the next version it all went downhill. The GPU card was seen by Vegas but preview playback went west and certain codec renders, especially MP4, slowed right down as there was no GPU utilization. This can be easily checked by monitoring GPU activity with an app like GPU Monitor which seems to be pretty accurate. I went back to the 332.21 drivers and all the performance losses disappeared and GPU Monitor suddenly came back to life. Recently Nvidia came out with 337.88 and I upgraded to them and they are working fine. It's all a bit hit and miss game.

What I have found in some instances, I need to investigate this further. Update the drivers with Vegas installed and often the GPU connection is broken even though Vegas will see the card. What often works is uninstall Vegas then update the drivers and then re-install Vegas. Vegas then seems to hook into the drivers correctly. As long as they are a driver version that will work with Vegas. It's almost as though when you update the Nvidia drivers that something in Vegas remains locked into the old driver config. Vegas will see the card but doesn't reconnect correctly with the new driver. If the new driver is already installed a fresh Vegas install will hook up correctly with the card and its drivers.

Odd behaviour I know but as I previously stated that order of installation seems to work AS LONG as the drivers you are using are KNOWN to work with Vegas. Therein lies the problem. Regardless of installation order if the drivers aren’t ones that will work with Vegas in the first place the whole integration between the Nvidia GPU and Vegas appears to fail. That’s the problem, working out which drivers work.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Bruce Phung]

I love my HD6970 work great in crossfired with 3930K @5.0Ghz. Now, I run 2 R9 290x crossfire with 4930K @4.5ghz all work great to.. A single R9 290x render Sony Benchmark in 24s. 2 HD6970 crossfired rendered in 26s and a single HD6970 rendering XDCAM in 36s. See thread below.4K editing. You can download the Sony Project Benchmark and test your Graphic card see how is your video card perform.


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