Oh crud! I JUST bought the GTX-580.
Well, maybe I can sell it on Ebay. The 680 sounds really good, and who knows, maybe it will help Vegas 11 run better.

I saw the video on YouTube. The card will officially be launched on the 22nd and on sale the 23rd!

And for those that don't want to spend $500+ for the latest GPU prices for the GTX-580, etc. are dropping. Either way your render speed per dollar invested has just improved greatly. If you already have a pretty good card you could wait for Black Friday sales, etc. & just wait it out a good deal...

And if you are serious about video editing you should stick to Nvidia CUDA since more applications support it. Nothing against AMD but you don't want to spend big bucks and then not see improvement in other applications that require CUDA...

My expectation is to be buying one of these soon, however, I'm going to see if waiting a couple of months will mean some higher VRAM options that aren't available in the current ones ( at least I think I will, but my anticipation may get the best of me ).

Anyway, I was looking to buy a year ago, and I thought I'd be better off to wait ( didn't know it was going to take so long ). I've had a GTX 260 for a while, and I bought a 2nd one for some of my CUDA enabled tools, but now it's time to upgrade I think.

Dave

If the ripple effect leads to reduced prices on the 5XX series cards then this is good announcement.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-gtx-680-review/17

Before you run out and buy one of these check out the compute benchmarks. They are lower than the 580. It could still be a better performer in VP than the 580 but buyer beware of these compute benches.

Is there anywhere that measures the GPU performance of different graphics cards in NLE's? If we could have test results in say VP, PremierPro and other GPU assisted hosts then it would be easier to choose a card. The GTX680 review claims that the compute performance is on par with the 580 but then concludes that it beats everything out there on every level including ATi so I'm confused.

There is still a lot of confusion over which card to buy for example whether to get nVIDIA or ATi card with Adobe projects. Whether After Effects uses GPU (it doesn't but CS6 might.) Whether Vegas performs better with nVIDIA or ATi.

I can understand Sony not wanting to recommend one card manufacturer over another but we the users would benefit from this knowledge. I don't have the capacity or the knowledge to test cards and create such an article. I just wondered whether one already exists or if it could be created?

I got an email from VASST touting the Sony booth at an upcoming tradeshow. Note AMD's involvement.

http://vasst.com/nab2012.aspx

The point being that they started out heavy with Nvidia, and then included AMD. Perhaps they are swinging a little more that way.

Holy shitaroony! The ATI Radeon 7970 looks damn good compared to the 680.

Spectralis,

They say the compute performance is about equal to the 580 but game performance is faster. This is most likely because nVidia knew that with current games compute performance wasn't the bottleneck for fps. So they pretty much left compute alone. My guess.

The point is the 680 might not provide much boost over the 580 for Vegas. I'm just saying before dropping a lot of money you might want to check this further.

According to several reviews the compute performance has nearly doubled from 1581 GFLOPS to 3090 GFLOPS partly because the CUDA cores have been tripled and partly because the the core clock and memory clock are running faster.

IMO the key reasons to buy this over the GTX 580 is that it uses less power and runs up to 4 displays. It is also based on PCI Express 3.0 and supports 4K monitors - 38040x2160 resolution. IMO the key reason to buy this over AMD is performance gains in other applications like CS5.5.

For me to spend $500 on a GPU I need V11 to run as stable as V9e. Otherwise I will just upgrade my CPUs and keep editing in V9e... However, I DO Need a new video card. My 2-3 year-old GPUs are getting very noisy in spite of regular cleaning & maintenance...

EVGA sent me this this morning @ 0323 EDT:

http://www.evga.com/articles/00669/#GTX680

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We'll know what's up once someone tests 580 vs 680 in Vegas. Otherwise it's just speculation.

Thanks Hulk, the confusing bit for me is that their conclusion is that the 680 is much better than anything else out there but as you rightly say the compute performance isn't much better than a 580 and lower than some of the ATi cards.

If the price differential isn't too great between the 580 and the 680 then 680 is probably the way to go due to the reasons given by TheRhino. The lower power consumption and heat levels are appealing.

Past articles on the Adobe forum have noted that CS5.5 performance scales nicely as the number of cores are increased. A gaming article noted that a single GTX 680 plays some games on maxed-out settings as well as (3) GTX 580's. What this means is that 3X the CUDA cores SHOULD make Vegas fly if Vegas scales as nicely with added CUDA cores as CS5.5 & games.

Another advantage is the possibility of a 4-GPU configuration. If CS6 or Vegas 12 take advantage of multiple video cards we could finally see HD renders complete in minutes vs. hours. I would love a 2 hour HD project to render-out in 20 minutes. For a while I was starting to love fast SD renders, but then we switched 100% to HD & were back to slow renders...

If a HD render only takes minutes, I won't moan & groan so much if Vegas messes-up a render... Currently it is nearly unbearable to have Vegas crash 90% of the way through a 2 hour render... It forces me to work on multiple projects at once. switch rendes to another workstation, etc. and I lose my train of thought & creativity... There were a lot of things I was doing with SD video that I do not have time for in HD without adding cost to the project...

HD renders taking over 2 hrs isn't helped as you say by VP11 instability. What would help would be a standard project that we could all download in order to benchmark our systems. That way we could build a database of system vs performance so that we could use this information to build optimal systems or upgrade our own with confidence. I wouldn't want to shell out for 4 cards only to find I couldn't get it working with my system or VP.

Anyone had some hands on testing yet?

Christian

As expected the GTX 680 is pushing prices down:

Gigabyte GTX 580 = $330 AR @ Egg

For some games (1) 680 appears to peform about as fast as (2) 570s in SL1 mode. I am not a gamer & want to see how the 680 renders before spending $600 for a video card...

Also note that current NLEs do not take advantage of multiple GPUs so there is no advantage of buying (2) cards unless you want to run extra displays. In comparison the 680 will run up to (4) displays...

Our IT department is about to order a GeForce 680 for my system and I'm wondering if anyone has tried this card with Vegas Pro 11 yet?

The 680 was released on 3/22/12, but the 670 is due in a couple of days (5/10/12)

The 670 is $100 cheaper than the 680, and has a slightly slower base clock (915MHz v 1006 MHz), and slightly fewer CUDA cores (1344 v 1536).

From what I've read, only gamers will realize the difference in performance.

Thanks for the info. I will probably look at the less expensive card for my home system, but since the 680 is approved for CS6 I'll need to stick with that card for my work system.

AfterEffects' ray tracing engine would not work with the Keppler GPU when initially released, but the first update for CS6 included support for the Keppler GPU in the 680 card.

Because, unlike adobe, Vegas supports GPU acceleration in a non-proprietary way via Open CL I would assume that the new nVidia cards should work just fine. On the other hand, we all know what happens when one assumes...

OK, just got the GeForce 680 card installed in my pre-Sandy Bridge 6-core Xeon workstation and so far I'm very underwhelmed. There's about a 1 - 2 fps improvement in timeline performance with the Magic Bullet plugin, which uses the GPU.

After Effects feels a little faster, but still not as fast as a newer Sandy Bridge Quad core with a Quadro 4000.

I didn't keep track of the rendering time, but it feels about the same. In a quick test, a recent project (1:55min) rendered in exactly the same amount of time (1:41) with the GPU enabled as with the CPU only. Prior to the upgrade the CPU was slightly faster.

Given the great difference in hardware spec I was hoping to see a very noticeable speed improvement, especially in timeline performance. I suspect that my home system, a lowly Core i5, would benefit far more from this graphics card than my work computer.