V13 Settings and Nvidia drivers

Kit wrote on 11/2/2014, 9:54 PM

What''s the current think re settings and nvidia drivers?

I have a GeForce GTX 550 Ti v314.22 on Windows 7 64 bit with 16 GB of ram and Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770K CPU @ 3.50GHz, 3501 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s).

I just tried rendering a 6 minute 20 second video using the Internet HD 1080p template. With GPU accelration off it took 23:30 minutes to render and with accelartion on 25 minutes. Both with 200 MB of preview ram and 16 rendering threads. Neither seem faster than Vegas 12. Anyway to improve render time? Thanks

Comments

OldSmoke wrote on 11/3/2014, 7:44 AM

There is absolutely no speed difference between VP12/13 unless your project or render settings are different. There is difference between VP11 and VP12/13.
You could try and use driver 334.89 and "tweakT the OpenCL Memory setting from 384 to 1024.
However, if you really want to take advantage of GPU acceleration you may want to upgrade your graphic card to at least a GTX560Ti 448 or better 500series card. If you don't mind switching to AIT/AMD the R9 290 is a very good card too. All these cards are available for reasonable low prices on eBay which where I purchased mine.

Lou van Wijhe wrote on 11/6/2014, 6:56 AM

Your rendering time seems extraordinarily long. I have almost the same setup, only differences being a GTX 560 Ti instead of 550 and Windows8 64bit instead of Windows7 and my rendering times are not much longer than the playing time, with effects, colour correction and all. How can this be?

Lou

OldSmoke wrote on 11/6/2014, 7:05 AM

There is no surprise there. The 550Ti has 192 CUDA cores, the 560Ti has 384 and the 560Ti 448 has 448 CUDA cores. I mentioned it many times over in this forum, GPU acceleration starts to work properly around 384 cores. A GTX460 is the bare minimum provided it is the model with over 300 CUDA cores. Aside from cores, memory and bandwidth are very important factors too. You can look it all up here http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units#GeForce_500_Series

Kit wrote on 11/6/2014, 4:49 PM

So you are saying that if I got my hands on a 560Ti that would radically improve my render times - more so than switching to Windows 8? Thanks.

OldSmoke wrote on 11/6/2014, 6:13 PM

Most certainly so. Windows 8 does not improve render times; who told you so? Keep in mind that there are different 560Ti versions with the 448 being the better one. Try and get a GTX580 off eBay or a R9 290 if you prefer a newer card and don't mind switching to AMD/ATI.

Peter Riding wrote on 11/7/2014, 4:28 AM

For what its worth I've found that Vegas Pro doesn't seem to use the latest driver even though I've installed it.

If you hold down Shift and access the Preference you will have an extra tab called Internal. Go to near the bottom of that to a line "Open CL Vendor 1 New Driver" and you see the reference number of the driver actually in use. For example I've manually updated mine to 344.60 following the recent release by Nvidia.

Whether this in practice is relevant I don't know: I'm on Windows 8.1 64 bit, Vegas 13, Nvidia GTX570 - which is CUDA anyway.

I used to get the widely reported crashes when GPU acceleration was enabled but haven't experienced that in probably over a year now having installed all the latest Nvidia drivers as and when released.

Pete

Carlos Werner wrote on 11/7/2014, 4:40 AM

Pete, I guess this setting only tells Vegas when to show a "Your driver is outdated, please update" message - like a minimum driver requirement.

OldSmoke wrote on 11/7/2014, 11:52 AM

NO, the setting tells Vegas if your driver and card does actually support GPU acceleration. The earliest driver is 270 but required a different handling. From driver 285 and higher Vegas is definitely using GPU acceleration.