@dape Very interesting. So not really an upgrade. Is there any difference with timeline playback performance?

I tested a $400 RTX 3060 Ti & its V18 render & playback (fps) performance are similar to my aging VEGA 64 LQ: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/nvidia-3060-ti-vegas-18-benchmarks--126075/

In Vegas, the VEGA 64 LQ also performs very close to a 2080 Ti, so IMO Vegas is unable to tap into the full potential of the last TWO generations of GPUs... Personally I would not expect this to be addressed in a V18 update, but hopefully within the V19 release next summer...

In comparison, Premiere Pro gets a significant boost from the 3xxx series (& Big Navi). According to Puget Systems, "... the RTX 3070 and 3080 [beat] the AMD Radeon RX 5700XT and Vega 64 by around 50% and 75% respectively..." https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro---NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3070-3080-3090-Performance-1951/#HowwelldoestheNVIDIAGeForceRTX3070,3080&3090performinPremierePro?

IMO that's a large-enough gain to justify the expense of replacing the GPU in a current system or spending more on a new build... That said, I would also like to see Vegas optimized for the latest CPUs... In V18, there is also not a big difference in performance between my 8-core 9900K and a new 16-core AMD 5950X...

I guess the good news is that there is no need for me to rush-out and update my CPU / GPU combo any time soon... I can likely go another year knowing my 9900K / VEGA 64 performance is about as good as any of the newer CPU / GPU combos... for now...

@dape Very interesting. So not really an upgrade. Is there any difference with timeline playback performance?

None at what small time game video editing i do. Runs perfect.

They didn't update the NVENC encoder from the 2080ti to the 3080, which is why you don't see an increase in NVENC encode speeds. This isn't just true for VEGAS, but any app that uses NVENC.

@fr0sty Using the nvenc encoder is ideal as it's a constant (especially for people with lower powered cpu), what changes is the speed of GPU processing for rendering the frames, we're not interested with how fast a cpu will encode, . At worse it should be the same speed, should never be slower. There's not enough information in the post about the project to know how badly or otherwise the GPU is working in current version of Vegas18

@dape What do you in your project that would be using your GPU, how complex? Old school COD edits are likely some of the most GPU intensive projects you could do, but then maybe you're literally just editing clips together without transitions, leveling, colour grading or any fx.

Based on circumstantial evidence to date, vegas needs to be updated to use the new cards. Vegas staff still haven't indicated if that is true or not, they'd be the ones to know by this point

They didn't update the NVENC encoder from the 2080ti to the 3080, which is why you don't see an increase in NVENC encode speeds. This isn't just true for VEGAS, but any app that uses NVENC.

I hoped for some benefits from the cuda cores and/or memory speed but.. it seems that asic processes the same. At least the card is a bit cooler and quite silent.

 What do you in your project that would be using your GPU, how complex?

Its just a 1080p60 1 hour movie with small cuts recorded with NVENC at CQP 14 at almost 40 Mbits.

as a comparision benchmark that's not a good test, although should never be slower. If you ever did the red car benchmark (search forum) with old card, that would be a good comparision benchmark test

@dape There's a 4k benchmarking tested by many of the forum users with a large variety of systems. The link to the dropbox download is via my signature. Not asking you to go to the trouble of entering your data there, but you could use the project to test out the nvenc render times with the new card.

@dape Also... here's a link to Red Car benchmarks for Veags and a pip-test benchmark for both Vegas & Resolve:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1TK2lyFZSlzU9JQ8xO1mvoj-zl9tyj2lc?usp=sharing

You know how the little things get more annoying and make you sometimes do radical stuff ? Well.. i uninstalled my Vegas Pro 18 and probably will never use it again.

The render favorite saving issue was enough for me. Too many little problems lately..

I wish you guys all the best and leave you with this:

One hour 1080p60 simple 40 Mbits gaming video rendered with Vegas Pro 18 close to youtube specifications ~ 33 minutes of max 40% RTX 3080 use and around 50% Ryzen 3900x use.

Same video rendered with Cyberlink PowerDirector 19 Ultimate ~ 10 minutes of 85% GPU use and max 20% CPU use.

I mean.. seriously Magix.. there is no point for me hoping and waiting for any VP improvements at this point in time.

Well, if your main actuation is in the render of "Something", you like to have right.

If the main operation is in creative video editing - and render only as a side job, often after days or weekly work - and this is the case with many faithful users - Vegas Pro has the edge.

Was the render quality comparable?

Was the render quality comparable?

Similar in size and no difference to my eyes.

I never seen this RTX3080 at 85%-90% load since i got it this december. I was also looking at a 1080p stream on twitch (while rendering) with no glitches and able to use the system with two monitors (1080p240 + 1440p144) flawlessly.

@dape “The render favorite saving issue was enough for me.” This is something that gets fixed, then comes back again, it is very annoying for sure, I really wish Magix would fix this for good. I tried the Shift+Ctrl and double click the VP shortcut to clear things out, no luck.

We recently got an RTX-3080 system added to the benchmarking project, its consistent with your results here, no real surprises.

I think, guess, that Magix Nvenc encoders don’t use full, fastest, HW nvenc capability. They may have a good reason for this. When I did some testing using ffmpeg x264 with partial and full HW capability, I found that I was getting poorer quality results with the fastest method. So the small utils in my signature use nvenc, but not the fastest. I stress the word guess here in this paragraph.

When comparing the Cyperlink render time results with VP results, eyeballing it is ok up to a point, but there may well might be an objective quality difference? If you still have the two output files and source file, you could use @fifonik's RQM program to do a quick compare. Or supply the three files and I’ll do it for you. The two output files need to be matched as close as possible for data rate and file size for valid comparison.

Thanks for posting your results here, still very useful.

The above comments relate to the pure render capabilities of the GPU, Magix have stated that they have still to optimise support for the 3000 series cards. This optimisation may improve say playback performance, but no guarantee that the render times via nvenc would improve. Wait and see. The Asic in the 3000 series cards only brought AV1 decoding as an extra, the HW encoding speed via this Asic chip may be no faster than say the 2080's.

You could test with Voukoder x264 (as Dape did at the start of this thread). It was 30% faster, but of course settings matter, which brings us back to the question of how do you know the render is the same quality (and should test) that).

@TheRhino  “That said, I would also like to see Vegas optimized for the latest CPUs... In V18, there is also not a big difference in performance between my 8-core 9900K and a new 16-core AMD 5950X..”

Core counts appear to scale better outside of VP in this testing.

https://techgage.com/article/blender-2-92-linux-windows-performance/

Core counts appear to scale better outside of VP...

@JN- I too follow Techgage because they occasionally post Vegas benchmarks... Unfortunately the apps I use, and even the Vegas FX I use, do not scale well like Blender, Handbrake, etc...

IMO, in Vegas 18, the upcoming 8-core Intel i9-11900K will out-perform the 5950X, etc. due to its higher clock rate, 19% increase in IPC, updated iGPU, and encoding/decoding improvements... However, the performance gains won't be enough to justify upgrading from my 9900K, so I will likely wait until Intel starts shipping their 10nm CPUs in about a year before making a decision.

In the meantime I am upgrading my Mac hardware because I also run FCP for collaborative projects. I cannot afford a $6,000 Mac Pro, LOL, so ironically I'm looking at getting a used iMac 27 (2019) that also uses a 9900K & VEGA graphics. If Vegas w/Bootcamp works well on it, I'll be able to offload some of my larger renders via a TB3 RAID. I'm not a big FCP fan, I'm not that fast using it, but I gotta follow the money...

@TheRhino I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Magix are currently working on some core issues (I couldn’t resist) in preparation for Prores. Perhaps those changes will enable better use of modern hardware. There really is a need also to get VP more stable.

Core counts appear to scale better outside of VP...

@JN- I too follow Techgage because they occasionally post Vegas benchmarks... Unfortunately the apps I use, and even the Vegas FX I use, do not scale well like Blender, Handbrake, etc...

IMO, in Vegas 18, the upcoming 8-core Intel i9-11900K will out-perform the 5950X, etc. due to its higher clock rate, 19% increase in IPC, updated iGPU, and encoding/decoding improvements...

Vegas will have to be updated to support the new intel decoding. Resolve updated a couple of weeks ago with this release info:

Support for hardware accelerated encoding and decoding of H.265 10-bit 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 formats on supported Intel platforms.

@TheRhino These are the handbrake benchmarks from the anandtech review

@JN- @lenard YEP, I'm aware that Magix is working on ProRes RAW & BRAW support and am also figuring those updates will include some type of additional hardware support since they are hardware intensive... But, I've already got FCP work coming in this month, so can't wait. My older Mac Pro won't cut it... The work will pay for my iMac. Then I an use the iMac/Bootcamp to offload some of my Vegas renders onto it, since I prefer to do most of my solo work in Vegas...

Vegas will have to be updated to support the new intel decoding. Resolve updated a couple of weeks ago with this release info:

Support for hardware accelerated encoding and decoding of H.265 10-bit 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 formats on supported Intel platforms

@lenard I find Vegas 18 does really well with Intel decoding, particularly with HEVC. But I wouldn't waste my disk or camera media space on 422 or 444. One problem I have with Resolve is that the free version can only use one gpu at a time and Intel isn't good for much else other than decoding... I'll probably spring for the Studio version if I can get a high-powered Nvidia board like the 3080 but not as long as my premium boards are all AMD because Resolve performance with those is quite disappointing.