After contemplating a while on the various options available for me to upgrade the performance of my workstation when working with Vegas Pro 11, I decided to try if getting a new top-of-the-line video card would deliver the extra punch needed.
I went for the AMD V7900 since it's pretty much the leader in today's pro GPU market, and it was advertised/endorsed partially by Sony to be the perfect choice with Vegas Pro 11 and so on.
Here's some of my first impressions:
-The preview video in one of my heaviest work projects so far was faster than before. Still nowhere near lightning fast, but I could definitely see a boost in overall performance, which is nice, but I sort of expected more.
- I've noticed that some of Sony's own video plug-ins now behave in a slightly different manner from time to time, and actually it's somewhat a good thing. For instance, I used Radial Blur in one segment in one of my projects, and I don't know what happened, but both the preview and the rendered result look way different compared to what was the output with my previous graphics card with no GPU acceleration. Hard to describe, but it looks like it's much better calculated, detailed and smoother.
Then the cons:
- It's hard to actually get Vegas to utilize the calculating capabilities of the video card properly. According to TechPowerUp's GPU-Z monitoring software, my highest GPU loads in the past week as I've been trying out this card have been somewhere around 30% or so. When rendering to a Sony MXF file, the GPU acceleration just isn't there (0% GPU load). Often when editing it's the same thing - the GPU isn't utilized much at all - even if I'm using only Sony's own GPU accelerated video plug-ins ... 0% GPU load. Both in preview and rendering. And I really didn't find rendering to files Sony's AVC any faster, even though it supports GPU acceleration.
- I need to output some of my projects to ProRes422, so at times I'm using DebugMode's FrameServer and Ffmpeg. Somehow Ffmpeg can't grab the DirectShow A/V-stream from FrameServer anymore. This happened right after I switched to this video card so I assume it's related to that. This one's a real bummer.
All in the AMD FirePro v7900 it's a great graphics card, but for the price, I'm wondering what other bottlenecks inside my editing rig I could have solved with that money, since Vegas doesn't really utilize the GPU acceleration that much, even with heavy projects.
So the card really isn't a silver bullet solution to speed up your work with Vegas Pro 11, but you might find some benefits by having a video card that's capable of GPU accelerated video processing. Hopefully Vegas will take more out of the GPU capabilities in the future, but as for now I'd say that anyone using Vegas Pro 11 would probably get the equal GPU boost from a video card that's half the price of the v7900.
I went for the AMD V7900 since it's pretty much the leader in today's pro GPU market, and it was advertised/endorsed partially by Sony to be the perfect choice with Vegas Pro 11 and so on.
Here's some of my first impressions:
-The preview video in one of my heaviest work projects so far was faster than before. Still nowhere near lightning fast, but I could definitely see a boost in overall performance, which is nice, but I sort of expected more.
- I've noticed that some of Sony's own video plug-ins now behave in a slightly different manner from time to time, and actually it's somewhat a good thing. For instance, I used Radial Blur in one segment in one of my projects, and I don't know what happened, but both the preview and the rendered result look way different compared to what was the output with my previous graphics card with no GPU acceleration. Hard to describe, but it looks like it's much better calculated, detailed and smoother.
Then the cons:
- It's hard to actually get Vegas to utilize the calculating capabilities of the video card properly. According to TechPowerUp's GPU-Z monitoring software, my highest GPU loads in the past week as I've been trying out this card have been somewhere around 30% or so. When rendering to a Sony MXF file, the GPU acceleration just isn't there (0% GPU load). Often when editing it's the same thing - the GPU isn't utilized much at all - even if I'm using only Sony's own GPU accelerated video plug-ins ... 0% GPU load. Both in preview and rendering. And I really didn't find rendering to files Sony's AVC any faster, even though it supports GPU acceleration.
- I need to output some of my projects to ProRes422, so at times I'm using DebugMode's FrameServer and Ffmpeg. Somehow Ffmpeg can't grab the DirectShow A/V-stream from FrameServer anymore. This happened right after I switched to this video card so I assume it's related to that. This one's a real bummer.
All in the AMD FirePro v7900 it's a great graphics card, but for the price, I'm wondering what other bottlenecks inside my editing rig I could have solved with that money, since Vegas doesn't really utilize the GPU acceleration that much, even with heavy projects.
So the card really isn't a silver bullet solution to speed up your work with Vegas Pro 11, but you might find some benefits by having a video card that's capable of GPU accelerated video processing. Hopefully Vegas will take more out of the GPU capabilities in the future, but as for now I'd say that anyone using Vegas Pro 11 would probably get the equal GPU boost from a video card that's half the price of the v7900.