A comprehensive study of GPUs - the ultimate guide to choosing one

[Stuart Campbell]

I, like hundreds of other weary souls, have become tired of trying to decide which GPU will be best for our new workstation.

I am incredulous that there is no concrete, specific or up to date advice coming from Sony and the process of choosing the right card is like pinning a tail on the donkey with your eyes full of salt.

I use Vegas professionally - it's what we use to make a living and operate a busy production company. I do not have the time to be trying different cards, risking a gaming card, finding that a Quadro just doesn't cut it, losing my temper with a FirePro. I want to look up which card will be best for our machine and know that it will work and at the very least be a significant improvement on a machine I built in 2007 - that runs seamlessly. Can it really be that difficult?

My days of online research yielded a choice. I could either go with a Quadro K4000 knowing it was designed and built for professional application, a FirePro v7900 or a Gaming card like the GTX770. Trying to find real people with real life experiences of each of these side by side was nigh on impossible. So I thought:

Is there any value in this community pulling together and entering their real results into an online collaborative spread sheet? We could see your;

Processor
Mainboard
Memory
GPU and Driver version
Monitor configuration
what footage you cut on it

% satisfaction

render times
preview frame rates (fx on & off)

This is something that would take everyone 2 minutes to complete and surely prove invaluable to those of us fumbling around in the dark because Sony fail to behave like a company offering a product advertised for use in the professional environment,

Is there any value in this, would many people fill it out? I don't know.

Your thoughts ladies and gentlemen please.

[Leslie Wand]

whilst i agree 110% with your sentiments, i think the answer should be coming from sony....

and, it's not only the card itself but the vagaries of which driver you use any particular one.

scs board is full of such discussions, from which i gather the obsolete 570 or 580 with certain drivers is excellent, and there seems to be a few happy amd r2 2xx around too.

i'm using a 650, it's not brilliant, but it's low power, cool running and does the job...

of course, there's the 'job' to consider as well; oh for the days of dv, now we have an endless succession of complex codecs that need every bit of juice to squeeze an acceptable frame rate out of them.

as i wrote, i don't think it's up to us as a community to figure out what scs should be telling us in the first place....

[Stuart Campbell]

Leslie you are right, it shouldn't be up to us to figure it out but I'm not one for doing nothing just because someone else should be doing it, so being proactive and doing our own PROPER study of who uses what and with what (driver versions, what material they edit inc codec) seems like a sensible prospect.

Yes I've read the threads singing the praises of the older 570 cards but I work in a professional environment and trying to get hold of some obsolete gaming card is quite frankly a joke. Surely that can't really be the best solution?

We have a Core 2 Duo running Vegas 9 with a Geforce 7950 on XP and it runs beautifully but it's become obsolete in our workflow, out of date and increasingly unable to handle the heavier high end projects we undertake.

[Bruce Phung]

You ask for it.

System 1

Intel i7 3930K 5.0Ghz
ASUS P9X79 PRO LGA2011
64Gb DDR3 1866mhz G.S Skill Ripjaw Z Quad channel
2X Radeon HD6970 2GB Crossfired AMD Driver 13.8-14.4 all works no known issue
360gb ssd Corsair Force Series GS O.S
Eva Supernova 1300W PSU
Dual ddc-1t pumps with Mcp35x2 housing
3 24" Dell IPS monitors 5760x1200 "2412M" Eyefinity
Custom water Cooling/Active VRM Cooling front/back
Phanteks Enthoo Primo full tower. Windows 7 Professional 64 bit


System 2

Intel i7 4930K 4.5Ghz
ASUS P9X79 PRO LGA2011
64Gb DDR3 1866mhz G.S Skill Ripjaw Z Quad channel
2X Sapphire Radeon R9 290X 4GB Crossfired EK Full body water cooled AMD Driver 14.4 at the movement, have not try newer driver
480gb ssd Corsair Force Series GS O.S
Eva Supernova 1300W PSU
Dual ddc-1t pumps with Mcp35x2 housing
3 24" Dell IPS monitors 5760x1200 "2412M" Eyefinity
Custom water Cooling/Active VRM Cooling back
Phanteks Enthoo Primo full tower. Windows 7 Professional 64 bit


My footages are 5D mrk III, 60D and anything in between. Vegas Pro loves my system.

[Bruce Phung]

system 2

screen shot of system 2

[Bruce Dempsey]

I'm a one man band
Processor i7 980
Mainboard evga x58
Memory 12gb ddr3
GPU and Driver version GeForce GTX 760 - 2 GB
Monitor configuration 1 Seiki 39" running at 4k (same real-estate as 4 - 1920)
what footage you cut on it Edius 7 mp4, m2ts, mts, mov avi

% satisfaction 90

render times tolerable
preview frame rates (fx on & off) realtime whatever

+ Bruce Phung ! You got that thing cranking at 5ghz ? awesome those two systems would run rough shod over pretty much anything !

[Stuart Campbell]

Thank you guys.

Think I'd better start an 'open collaboration spread sheet'! Some useful info so far.

[Norman Black]

Here is something that somebody put together on the Sony forums site. It used the Vegas press release GPU demo project. Sony does not seem to make this project available on their website anymore.

VegasPro Benchmark

AMD GPUs seem to give the best edit/timeline performance given reports in other forums.

[Stuart Campbell]

Thank you Norman, that's pretty much what I had in mind compiling. What I notice from that table though is that no-one has run the test with professional workstation cards though.

[Norman Black]

Workstation cards are not any faster than consumer cards. They use the same chips as the consumer cards and often clocked lower.

The big difference is the drivers and I have read some accusations online about Nvidia crippling OpenCL and OpenGL interfaces on consumer cards so that workstation cards perform better.

Vegas uses OpenCL in its video engine GPU use. This of course is used during playback and encoding a file. This (OpenCL) could be why Nvidia does not do as well as AMD in Vegas. Pure speculation on my part.

Mainconcept AVC has options for OpenCL for AMD and CUDA for Nvidia. Mainconcept does not support newer GPUs in their code.

Sony AVC does not use GPU much, but does use OpenCL or CUDA as applicable.

The AVC encoder GPU options are independent and separate from the Vegas GPU use.

Third party plug-ins like NewBlue and Boris use OpenGL.

[Bruce Phung]

A workstation card such as Quadro 4000/5000 is a rip off. Way over price, and under performs. You can take a look of it spec and compare it to a let say GTX570, The 570 will win hand down in performance and price. I see no problem with using consumer cards or gaming cards if it can deliver maximum performance with excellent results to your satisfactory. Quadro cards are good for designing works and CAD/SOLID WORKS applications.

[Robert Garvey]

I have just replaced my Gigabyte Nvidia GTX570 card with a Gigabyte GTX 970.

Running Vegas 13 on a i7 OC 3.4Ghz, 2 x SSD, 3 spindle drives, 16 gig ram @ 1866mhz .

When I first built the system with the 570 and installed Vegas 11, the GPU acceleration did seem to work. With subsequent driver updates and Vegas Upgrades, the GPU acceleration would freeze the system, so I ran Vegas with it disabled.

Before installing the new card, I ran a render test for a series of still time-lapse images to a 1 min 10 second render to Sony MXF 30P 4:2:2, with sharpening and motion blur. About 5 gigs of jpegs (so compressed images).

The GTX 570 without GPU acceleration = 9 min 5 secs
GTX 570 with GPU acc. turned on = Vegas crash, or 'black screen' crash video driver @ 10% of render, with Windows reporting 'System Low on Memory'.

I then did a clean install of the latest Nvidia Drivers and the 970 card and repeated the render.

The GTX 970 with GPU acceleration = 6 mins 28 secs.
GTX 970 with GPU acceleration off = 7 mins 48 secs.

So for me at least, the GTX 970 is helping significantly with renders (rendering about 30% faster) and I would hope that this is more evident with more complex projects.

Sorry no more 'technical' specs available, a bit beyond me:)
cheers,
Rob

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Bruce Dempsey

+ Bruce Phung ! You got that thing cranking at 5ghz ? awesome those two systems would run rough shod over pretty much anything !

64GB of RAM. o.0

+1 would like to drool at your system.

[Jeremiah Rickert]

I think it would be useful to have a standard project/clip to render out to get consistent rendering data.

A 5 minute HD clip with some motion graphics or something?

Just a thought.

I am currently in the middle of building a new rig and there are tons of benchmark data dumps for gaming, but very very few for video rendering. This is precisely the kind of data that would help someone choose a video card.

[Jason Robinson]

TomsHardware used to have a h.264 transcode and a MPEG2 render as part of their benchmark test for CPUs. Not sure if they do anymore.