2x RTX 2080Ti (GPU) and 2990WX (CPU). In Resolve, I can do full CC and grading of my FS7 clips and still play them back at full 50 fps (ACES or RCM). Only when I add TNR and/or OFX node(s) do I need to cache...

"NEW: GPU accelerated decoding for AVC/HEVC"

Apparently the decoding only works for AVC/HEVC, not XAVC as of now.

So it looks - and this is a silly decision, at least with its HEVC part. This is not an aquisition format, so I don't edit or grade HEVC! MAGIX should have focused on true acceleration of H.264 in its many flavors (like the XAVC, for instance)...

Having said all this, please don't make wrong; I used to love Vegas Pro and hope I return to it one day. When we were doing HD, editing my multi-camera (up to 10, sometimes) BDs (sold as DVDs) with classical music performed by world-class musicians was really a pleasure (at the time of Vegas Pro version 13, the GTX 570 card (Maxwell) was enough to accelerate all angles at preview/half quality windows (I used to do it on 3 monitors, with one displaying all windowed streams and another - the currently chosen one, full screen). But from then on, and with all (including the current) nVidia GPU architectures, it wan't possible any more. It really beats me why, and I admit I'm pessimistic about it being possible again... Pity, because Resolve isn't particularly great when it comes to M-C precise cutting and synchronizing. But - who knows? Just not this time, yet :(

Piotr

So it looks - and this is a silly decision, at least with its HEVC part. This is not an aquisition format, so I don't edit or grade HEVC! MAGIX should have focused on true acceleration of H.264 in its many flavors (like the XAVC, for instance)...

Probably because the GPUs have dedicated hardware support to decode those formats already.

So it looks - and this is a silly decision, at least with its HEVC part. This is not an aquisition format, so I don't edit or grade HEVC! MAGIX should have focused on true acceleration of H.264 in its many flavors (like the XAVC, for instance)...

Probably because the GPUs have dedicated hardware support to decode those formats already.

Whatever - please let me stand by my opinion that Magix should have known better, and mend the H.264 HW acceleration rather than assign resources to accelerating HEVC playback in Vegas... Heck - we usually deliver in HEVC (at least those of us who need the very compact final movies capable of HDR) - so we rarely play them back in Vegas at all (OK, at least I don't). Hardware encoding HEVC is another thing; I do it very often in Resolve to quickly check my results before I do the final export pass - this time using CPU, which gives better quality...

It's what your graphics card does, not what Magix Chose. Direct hardware decoding via NVDEC & that includes HEVC. Your graphics card can't directly decode XAVC via the NVDEC ASIC. Yes Resolve does timeline playback much more efficiently & it does use your gpu to better effect in comparison to VegasPro. Before This version of Vegas, it could not use NVDEC at all.

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support-matrix

It's what your graphics card does, not what Magix Chose.

Fair enough. I also agree that T/L playback - especially using Decklink - is slightly smoother than in previous versions...

It's what your graphics card does, not what Magix Chose.

Fair enough. I also agree that T/L playback - especially using Decklink - is slightly smoother than in previous versions...

It is smoother - because the ACES workflow utilizes now some GPU support. If that is enough for you - seems to be not the case. Vegas does not utilize 2xGPUs by now, maybe that is the issue why Resolve performs still better for your XAVC-I footage. 

Should not be a surprise. AVC was designed to take more effort to encode than to decode. Not much to be gained decoding, if anything, with gpu assistance. HEVC is different. It aims for a 50% or greater compression level that requires almost as much effort to decode as it does to encode. Which might not be practical for today's smart phones. Nvidia has been trying to sell them on buying their firmware but, considering power and heat issues, they seem inclined to go for more wireless bandwidth instead. I know Nvidia has been working closely with Canon which might explain the xf705. They have also been lobbying the home theater systems makers along with makers of dvd, bluray, and uhd boxes to build in their firmware and support a new hevc disk encoding standard, potentially doubling the content per disk. More relevant with regard to VP17 is that ffmpeg Windows distributions have been built and widely tested with the Nvidia encode and decode switches active for over a year now and have not been distributed as openCL active builds for Windows for even longer... mainly because the guy that does the Windows builds has only an Nvidia card and cannot field questions on openCL codec usage. OpenCL has been in the source libraries for years, but to test it with Windows drivers you'd need to fire up gcc and roll your own build. Should not surprise what Magix does with all this. Or Happy Otter which I understand incorporates ffmpeg behind the curtain for certain operations.

If you are using footage that NVDEC or intel Quicksync can decode, you can check to make sure the right device is selected by going into preferences, File I/O, and then check under "hardware decoder to use". Currently, AMD cards are not supported. I'm told there's a driver issue with AMD being worked out, so hopefully we'll see it before too long. I'm hearing from some users here that even if they do not have quicksync, this preference is being set to quicksync instead of their NVDec like it should be, so make sure you have this set correctly to ensure the hardware decoding works.

Lol...

Nothing Decode Accelerates XAVC I. Nothing off the shelf, at least... XAVC Intra is a digital intermediate format, similar to DNxHD or ProRes.

It is not the same as AVCHD or XAVC S, which are basically variants of H.264 and can be decoded by hardware.

Decoder SIPs are designed to decode Compressed/Long-GOP media CODECs like H.264, H.264, VP8, VP9, VC-1, etc. CPUs generally suffice for Intermediate CODECs, as they use far less compression and don't have a GOP structure to contend with.

Decode SIPs are on the CPU board (distributed with the GPUs, or CPUs with iGPUs), but they aren't GPUs. They're separate components... High end GPU may have the same decode SIP as a budget GPU ;-) Keep that in mind.

Honestly I've turned off the NVDEC Decoding in Resolve and gotten roughly the same performance with QSV in that NLE with H.264 and HEVC footage (tested with 60 FPS UHD VFR footage). Intel supports 10-Bit HEVC Decode/Encode as well (7th Gen and later)… So apart from Lossless and 4:4:4 Encoding/Decoding (If Implemented), you don't gain a whole ton from using NVDEC over QSV, generally speaking.

Adding additional Decoder Choices is mostly so that people aren't completely shackled to a specific CPU-type (Intel). With NVDEC, it allows people to built a Ryzen System and still get Decode Acceleration by simply slotting in an NVIDIA CPU ;-)

And AMD support is also possible, though it isn't enabled (ready?) at the moment, modern AMD GPUs do have hardware HEVC and AVC decoders.

"NEW: GPU accelerated decoding for AVC/HEVC"

Apparently the decoding only works for AVC/HEVC, not XAVC as of now.

OK, so I tried the "accelerated" AVC format (UHD@25p) from my GH5. OMG, what a mess! Even in just a 8-bit project, Vegas 17 is unable to play back those long-GOP H.264 clips at full speed (just shy of 24 fps internally, a mere 21 fps with Decklink monitor active). Plus - have no idea why - the image is so noisy that if I didn't know it's in fact perfectly clean (in Resolve or any software video player), I'd panic my GH5 is broken! Very similar results with my A7Rii's XAVC-S.

My XAVC-I UHD@50p clips (and also DNxHR or Prores from Shogun Inferno) are unable to play back faster than just several fps - but this is in 32-bit ACES projects, plus the picture is clean at least...

Shame on you, Magix! Vegas 17 in its current state cannot be used for any serious work at all.

And finally: has anyone using video i/o card like Decklink managed to switch it into HDR10 mode with appropriate monitor? Vegas reports HDR10 active, scopes are HDR-style (0-1000 nits) - but my Decklink works in SDR mode...

Not sure the decklink passes through HDR signals, I know the mini monitor 4k does, but it didn't work with Vegas 16 last I checked. Best way to get HDR in Vegas is to connect a secondary gpu output to a HDR monitor, then put windows 10 into HDR/deep color mode on that monitor. The TV flags into HDR as soon as you do that, and you get beautiful 10 bit video out of vegas. The only requirement is a GPU that supports HDR, which most released in the past 5-6 years do.

Shame on you, Magix! Vegas 17 in its current state cannot be used for any serious work at all.

@megabit Please refrain from shaming our developers hard work. I've seen a tone of positive feedback so far and the criticism we are getting, we are taking very seriously.

Have you opened a support ticket? Sometimes, when it comes to very technical issues, it is better to talk one on one to get to the bottom of things. This is also an opportunity to share your material with us.

Sorry, but Windows 10's "HDR mode" of the GPU cannot even compare to what you get on appropriate monitor or UHD TV which switches into true HDR mode when it senses the trigger sent by Decklink. At least on my Samsung, the former looks more like its own "fake HDR" - while the latter still has this "wow factor" to it, even after 2 years of my watching it every day!

Shame on you, Magix! Vegas 17 in its current state cannot be used for any serious work at all.

@megabit Please refrain from shaming our developers hard work. I've seen a tone of positive feedback so far and the criticism we are getting, we are taking very seriously.

Have you opened a support ticket? Sometimes, when it comes to very technical issues, it is better to talk one on one to get to the bottom of things. This is also an opportunity to share your material with us.

Dear Mathias - it wasn't my intent to depreciate your team's hard work, so if you got such impression I apology. The directions Vegas is evolving to are great - and when it gets there, it will again become my favorite NLE it used to be it the times of nVidia's Maxwell architecture. As you can see, even though I've been using Resolve for almost 3 years now I'm still looking forward to each new Vegas Pro release with great hopes. I'm sure one day I'll return to Vegas Pro - at least with some type of work, like multi-camera projects... Please, keep to good work, and Best of luck to you and the Magix team! Thanks and Best Regards

Piotr

PS. I understand very well this is the very first release of the newest version, and my criticism only applies to it. As I said: Vegas is evolving in the best direction imaginable!

Thank you @megabit for your heartwarming comment. No hard feelings.👍

Just to make sure, did you send a support ticket? If so, please send me a personal message with your ticket number.

Frankly speaking - no, I didn't send a support ticket yet. I think it's too early for me - I must test the playback speed - related issues really thoroughly and in all possible usage scenarios before I'm 100% sure of my observations; if I could suggest anything at the moment would be adding ability of I/O devices like Decklink to send the HDR10 trigger to the UHD TV whenever the project is set to HDR10 in its properties; I guess Magix has relied more on the Windows 10 GPU "HDR" display mode, which is inferior - plus, when using a proper I/O card, there is currently no way to tell the HDR-capable TV to switch into its HDR10 mode (not speaking about HLG as my Samsung doesn't support it, anyway).

Regards

Piotr

It's what your graphics card does, not what Magix Chose.

Fair enough. I also agree that T/L playback - especially using Decklink - is slightly smoother than in previous versions...

It is smoother - because the ACES workflow utilizes now some GPU support. If that is enough for you - seems to be not the case. Vegas does not utilize 2xGPUs by now, maybe that is the issue why Resolve performs still better for your XAVC-I footage. 

No, Wolfgang - seeing in the Windows Task Manager how low is the usage of one of my 2 GPUs during playback (decoding), the low playback speed is an issue more related to the quality of acceleration algorithm and not the quantity of separate GPUs. Were the load close to 100% I would agree that Vegas should be capable of using each and all GPUs it finds in the system. Also - since my comments about accelerating the XAVC-I format, I managed to check all the others I'm using (XAVC-S from A7Rii, Prores or DNxHR from Shogun Inferno, and last but not least - AVC from my GH5) - and it turns out the worst results I'm getting involve the AVC format, which - along HEVC - is supposed to have gotten best GPU acceleration in the 17... Go and figure.

Cheers

Piotr