Now That Your Video Card Matters . . .

Red Prince wrote on 10/21/2011, 7:53 PM

It is not simple to answer. You will have to find a solution that works for you. On the cheapest end is the GT 430, which I happen to have because, like you, I am not a gamer and when I built my computer Vegas was in version 9. It supports CUDA 2.1. It has 96 cores.

But in my tests it renders only about 1.5 times faster than my CPU. I mean in Vegas, in other CUDA software it flies. And the NewBlue Titler Pro works with it. As I am retired and my Vegas volume is relatively low, I am perfectly happy with it. Everything works, and I can always render overnight.

Then again, I was only comparing the render times in 11. Perhaps Vegas 11 is much faster than 10 even when rendering with the CPU. Because come to think of it, it only took several minutes to render anything I threw at it, while with Vegas 10 typically I waited for hours, which is why I have mentioned overnight rendering.

If, on the other hand, your livelihood depends on it, you may go all the way to the fastest card. Or at least the fastest you can afford.

Remember also, the fast cards consume more power, so there will be continuous expenses with it. And they get hot, so you need to provide sufficient cooling, typically with a fan strategically located in your computer case. That is yet more power and more long term expense. Of course, if it is your main source of income, that is just the cost of doing business.

Those are the two extremes. Most people will probably fit somewhere in-between. But there is no one solution for everyone.

eightyeightkeys wrote on 10/21/2011, 8:16 PM

When I purchased my new i7 rig, I wanted a Video Card that would be "future proof" ...at least for a bit longer than getting it out of the box.
My tech advisor said, maybe rightly so at the time, that the GTX470 was way "overkill" for what I was doing, but, now I am so glad I did it.
With VP11 the GTX470 absolutely rawks !

hazydave wrote on 10/21/2011, 10:51 PM

Your speedup is going to be very project-dependent.

I was kind of bumming... I got a few renders sped up 25-35%, one preview sped up by 100%. On the other hand, I found that with 720p60 AVC on my system, if I'm not doing much to it, the GPU actually slows preview down.

Nothing is future-proof, however. The graphics chip makers want to have at least one major new series of chips every year. That's their job, after all. What costs me $300 today is likely to be available for $150 or so in a year, performance-wise. That's ok, just be sure you understand it.

And of course, as in the case of the nVidia cards, you're always a bit better off buying a low-end version of the new thing than a firesale version of the old thing, even if the latter offers better performance for the price. As we've seen here, older GPU editions (like my nVidia 8800GT, now retired) are not capable enough to support Vegas 11.

musicvid10 wrote on 10/21/2011, 11:08 PM

Good advice hayzydave.
I've always believed that Timex is a better value than Rolex, in almost every scenario.
And I've always waited at least 24 months to purchase computer hardware that I thought was the bee's knees.

Laurence wrote on 10/21/2011, 11:58 PM

I am only interested in graphics cards that come with laptops so that further limits my options. A lot of people think that it's crazy to use a laptop for a serious editing machine, but the way I see it, a desktop is kind of like a ball and chain keeping you in a cave: often a cave without a window even. Why do I use a laptop? Because tablets just aren't up to it yet.

Anyway, my question off-shooting a little from the original is what is the best laptop graphics option for Vegas 11? How is the graphics chip set in a Macbook Pro when it comes to Vegas 11? If I absolutely had to go with a desktop, how about the graphics in a one of the new I7 Mac Minis?

ushere wrote on 10/22/2011, 12:13 AM

I've always believed that Timex is a better value than Rolex, in almost every scenario

what i've found is:

a. they tell the same time

b. when getting mugged, nobody wants your timex ;-)

Byron K wrote on 10/22/2011, 1:30 AM

This link mentioned in the thread below is a good resource for the specs. Though I haven't made up my mind to upgrade to V11 or not, I may be leaning toward the AMD Radeon HD 6870 series because it has slightly better faster playback/dollar value.

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/gpuacceleration
Here are some prices for the cards used on the Sony comparison I made a few days ago to get an idea of price points.
GTX 570: $300 - $350
NVIDEA QUADRO 5000: $1780
AMD Radeon HD 6870: $175 - $190
AMD FirePro V8800: $1,277

These are models they used in thier testing and cards of slightly lower specs may perform almost as well of course YMMV depending on PC specs memory etc.

I've noticed others here have had improved performance w/ cards that are less expensive that what's listed above.

Here's the thread:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=781365&Replies=59

It would be interesting to know what card you decide on and what type of performance improvements you see. (:

musicvid10 wrote on 10/22/2011, 2:07 AM

Going by a straight $ vs. performance graph, I see the crosspoint as the 460, from Nvidia's own data.

Of course that means a new i-class computer, which isn't in my budget just yet . . .

VidMus wrote on 10/22/2011, 2:15 AM

"...I may be leaning toward the AMD Radeon HD 6870 series..."

The new version of Neat Video will only support CUDA in the NVidia cards. It will not support the ATI ones.

Something to think about.

I wonder, beyond Vegas 11 what Vegas related plugins and even other softwares are supported the most in NVidia vs ATI.

From what I have seen it looks like Nvidia gets the most use right now.

rmack350 wrote on 10/22/2011, 2:34 AM

It seems to me that more applications are able to use nvidia cards for acceleration so that's probably the way to go. It's unfortunate since the AMD products are usually more energy efficient and potentially quieter, but I think I'd still opt for the nvidia product.

If you're not in a very, very big rush you might wait until December or January. New 7000 series AMD cards will start to ship in December, and probably some nvidia products too. All this could have a bearing on prices, energy use, and heat/noise.

If you need something now just keep in mind it'll be last year's tech in about two months. How much do you want to spend for that?

If you also need a new motherboard and CPU then I wonder if one of the Intel chipsets allows you to use both the intel onboard graphics alongside an nvidia card? It seems like I'd read something along these lines as a power saving scheme where the board switches from onboard graphics to the discrete card when its needed.

Rob

WillemT wrote on 10/22/2011, 3:38 AM

It seems like I'd read something along these lines as a power saving scheme where the board switches from onboard graphics to the discrete card when its needed.

That is supposed to be handled by a piece of software called "LucidLogix Virtu". It appears the Virtu needs to be "aware" of the program requiring its services. Vegas is not part of the list (every game imaginable seems to be listed). Even when adding Vegas to the list yourself does not seem to get that working. At leat I could not get that to work.

No real loss. Vegas works fine with the Intel graphics but no GPU acceleration.

Willem.

hazydave wrote on 10/22/2011, 4:42 AM

It isn't crazy to use a laptop for serious editing. It's impossible. If you're serious, you need multiple screens, many TB of disc storage, optical media at least for many projects, etc. Doesn't mean you can't do video on a laptop, just that it's not a professional solution for most people.

I have a laptop... it was slightly faster, and about twice as expensive, as the PC I had when I bought it. That was two PC upgrades ago... my PC today is about 3x faster, worst-case. Not counting graphics. And while my HP laptop cost me $1280 new, the corresponding Mac Book Pro cost $2999 that same year, same basic configuration (identical CPUs, slower GPU, etc). Macs are overpriced, if you're concerned about performance. They're quite nicely made, pretty, etc. .... none of which gets your projects done faster.

Of course, if you have a need to run MacOS, go for it. Just realize you're spending far more for far less.

And you can't upgrade. I bought a new graphics card this week for $300, which is now doing what you can do to speed up Vegas. If I was laptop based, I'd either be spending $1000+ for much lower performance, or I'd be SOL when it comes to graphics acceleration (curiously, my HP has the nVidia GeForce 8600M, same series as the card I replaced in my desktop, but just over 1/4 the performance.

The fastest MacBook Pro has the AMD Radeon HD 6750M. That's a respectable, though hardly high-end, mobile GPU. Now, with both AMD and nVidia, the mobile versions of the chips are a bit scaled-down from the desktops of the same series. This is actually critical to Apple's design -- the price you pay for their thin casework and relatively light, long battery life laptops is that they have to control heat. So, only mid-range CPUs and GPUs, but sold at high-end prices. This is true of anything but Apple's tower Macs, since both Minis and iMacs use laptop components.

For example, the HD 6750M includes 480 stream processing units -- those are the little parallel processors that implement OpenCL -- the more and the faster, the better. The desktop version of the HD 6750 contains 720 of the same processors... 1.5x the performance at the same clock speed. Such a PCIe card runs about $100 at NewEgg, as a desktop PC upgrade. That $300 graphics card I added is an AMD HD 6970, which has 1536 stream processors, at higher clock speed too.

I'm not suggesting the GPU is the lone criteria for PC purchase. But knowing that Vegas is actually improved, at least some of the time, with a part you're probably going to get anyway (you can't really not have a GPU anymore), like any other tech purchase, it makes sense to spend your money where it does the most good.

I have a tablet (Notion Ink Adam running Android "Honeycomb", 10+ hours on a charge, longer in the daylight, with the LCD backlight switched off -- it has a display that's totally fine in full, beach-level sunlight) as well... that's the thing I carry around. No, it's not for video editing, but in that respect, neither is the laptop, except in a pinch. And photo editing -- forget out it. I found 8GB (the max you can get on the MacBook Pro) acceptable for Vegas. But once I started working in 18Mpixel 16-bIt TIFs, lots of them (for HDR and panoramic photos), I found the $100 or so for a total of 16GB to be money well spent.

The Mac Minis these days come with the Radeon HD 6630M GPU. That's a much, much slower laptop GPU. You can get the same HD 6750M in an iMac. Apple doesn't really make desktops -- as I mentioned, these are made from laptop chips. Apple knows you have to upgrade a Mac PC from them. So they don't build any of these for much in the way of user-level upgrades. The problem I have with that is that most components I have change at different times. My dual 24" 1200p MVA monitors are five years old -- I have absolutely no reason to replace them with the PC, as one does with a laptop or iMac. I have hard drives out the wazoo here (I use HDDs for project drives for major projects... my PC has front-panel slots for one 3.5" SATA and two 2.5" SATAs, works much like the old timey cartridge HDDs from IoMega, only standard), and a RAID, none of which change with the PC. Unless I get unhappy with the new Radeon, it'll almost certainly go into my next PC upgrade.

Sure, this isn't for everyone. I'm an engineer, I could design most of the PCBs that go into a computer, so swapping them in and out is nearly trivial for me. But this is also why I usually have a really fast PC, with exactly the components I find optimize my system, and do that for a fraction of the cost of buying whole boxes.

ritsmer wrote on 10/22/2011, 7:35 AM

Before buying exorbitant graphic cards needing 800+ W power supplys it might be an idea to find out where the bottle neck is now after SCS has blessed us with the CUDA GPU assist.

In WillemT's post in this thread http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=766629 - he shows that the GPU usage during rendering using a low end GTX 460 card is between some 7-18 %.
I wonder if this means that a $$$$ high end card will render more or less at the same speed - but then with a GPU usage at some 2-6% ...

hazydave wrote on 10/22/2011, 8:06 AM

There's a bottleneck still for sure, but I'm kind of wondering if it might be, at least in part, in communication. The CPU and GPU have to coordinate, obviously. I'm not sure at what level, but it stands to reason that, as GPU use goes up, CPU use might drop some.

And that's just what I've seen. I have done a bunch of benchmarks, with my AMD card (HD 6970) and seen CPU drop from a typical of 90-100% (depending on the nature of the render) down to 45-70%, while GPU rose from 0% to 30-54%. Any time it's not working maximally, there's got to be something waiting for something else. This is with a 6-core 3.2GHz AMD ... not the faster, but still pretty fast on the CPU side.

Sure would be nice to have more data on this. I'm starting to wonder if I might have been better off with a more moderate nVidia card, not so much for Vegas performance, but because it's useful elsewhere. No plans to buy the $500 models...

TheRhino wrote on 10/22/2011, 9:21 AM

Personally I am going to wait until the Nvidia 600 series is released:

1) Smaller die=less heat.
2) Double the CUDA cores
3) Possible support for future OpenGL & DirectX

Note how many are disappointed because their one year-old $$$ card did not support 2.0 specs. New versions of OpenGL & DirectX may address some of the bottleneck issues that are under-utilizing CPU & VGA speed. The BETA drivers have already been leaked, so I expect the first releases to hit the shelves right around the holidays-not that long to wait really...

I think what makes this an exciting & likely upgrade for most folks is the fact that a video card upgrade only takes 10 minutes. The last time we had to upgrade our processors they required a whole new socket, motherboard, RAM, etc. It turned into a weakend long project to upgrade 3 workstations.

Red Prince wrote on 10/22/2011, 12:10 PM

Personally I am going to wait until the Nvidia 600 series is released

I was under the impression that series uses the Kepler architecture, not Fermi. That, I believe should be CUDA 3.x. Are we sure Vegas supports it?

TheRhino wrote on 10/22/2011, 1:42 PM

That's just the point... Kepler is based on a 28nm fabrication process, and it will deliver an estimated 3 to 4 times the performance per watt compared to Fermi. With (2) multi-drive RAIDs and overclocked 980X, our main editing rigs already serve as space heaters. If the ONLY thing Kepler does is reduce the heat its worth the wait.

However Nvidia indicates that we will see a significant improvement in CUDA 2.X performance as well as support for 3.X. A lot of guys are whining because their $$$$ workstation class card only supports 1.0. Why not wait a month or two to get 3.X support?

Plus, Windows 8 and DirectX 12 will likely be released in late 2012. Chances are that Kepler is designed to handle DirectX 12 since it will be Nvidia's mainstream chip for the next two years.

Red Prince wrote on 10/22/2011, 1:58 PM

The question I asked: Does Vegas support Kepler? If people with CUDA 1 wait a few months get CUDA 3 just to find out Vegas does not support it, what do they gain?

rmack350 wrote on 10/22/2011, 2:02 PM

That, I believe should be CUDA 3.x. Are we sure Vegas supports it?

It's a moot point right now. You don't really need to know if the Vegas of today supports cards that won't exist for months. You'd have to wait to find out. However, if the prospect of a new graphics series tomorrow is blocking you from buying a card today ... you just need to decide how much you need it right now, and how much you want to spend for a card that's going to be superseded soon (or for a card whose price will drop when the new products hit the market).

As for editing on laptops... some of the claims about a laptop's shortcomings are overblown. Yes, it's a fixed product that you can't modify much, but you can definitely add a second screen if you want (I've always done so) and you can add external storage. And if you choose carefully you could get a unit that supports *some* GPU acceleration and you could edit quite happily in hotel rooms for the next 3-5 years.

Rob

Byron K wrote on 10/22/2011, 2:15 PM

Reply by: VidMus
The new version of Neat Video will only support CUDA in the NVidia cards. It will not support the ATI ones.
Excellent point, there are many apps and plugins that only work w/ nVidia CUDA. Definately something to consider, forgot about that. Thanks VidMus..

Reply by: TheRhino
Note how many are disappointed because their one year-old $$$ card did not support 2.0 specs.
I'm one of those..
Bought an single nVidea 1.0 SLI about a year and a half ago, thinking when the prices drop I'll install the 2nd SLI card and be ready for any app that has CUDA capablilites. Now CUDA 2.x are the new standard and I'll need to upgrade the whole card. On the bright side for the money I'd pay for the 2nd SLI I can probaboly get a decent mid range card that has the specs needed for V11 if I decide to upgrade. At lease we know Moore's Law is still alive and well!

farss wrote on 10/22/2011, 2:46 PM

Why all the interest in CUDA, Vegas doesn't use it as such, it uses OpenCL?

Bob.

Red Prince wrote on 10/22/2011, 5:11 PM

Why all the interest in CUDA, Vegas doesn't use it as such, it uses OpenCL?

Bob, OpenCL is just an abstraction layer which creates the native code for the underlying architecture on the fly. And on NVIDIA card that native code is CUDA. No matter what language you use, on an NVIDIA card it always comes down to CUDA.