AMD cards and Vegas 12

jamesl wrote on 3/6/2013, 2:22 AM

Hi All,

I have a question regarding video cards.

I am running Vegas Pro 12 on a machine which should be flying (Intel (R) Core i7 3930k CPU @ 3.20GHZ, 16GB Ram). In addition, I have several plug ins (Neat video, Boris FX and Newblue)

But... my card is an AMD Radeon 7950.

In short, the video play back can be quite jittery, particularly when I'm using Boris effects. Vegas also crashes occasionally. I'm wondering if there is a particular card driver that Vegas favours, or if I have to suck it up and get a new card. Has anyone had these issues?

17th August - Just an update, which pertains to this issue I posted several months ago. Vegas updated to build 670 a couple weeks ago, and I noticed a few little issues here and there (bearing in mind that I upgraded my cameras from Canon 7Ds to Canon C100 just prior, which meant instead of having .MOV files to process, I'm now dealing with AVCHD or .MTS formats). Initially, Vegas dealt with it all fine, but THEN played up a little here and there... render crashes, that sort of thing.

Two days ago, I received the blue screen of death, making reference to hardware issues, etc. I turned on the Windows updates, enabling 30 updates to be made, and turned off Overclocking (the machine was slightly overclocked, and I was LOVING the associated speed in file playback and renders). Now it is back to jittery playback, which I find infuriating during an edit.

Has anyone had these issues, especially since the last build (670)?

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 3/6/2013, 6:03 AM

I don't have Vegas 12, but some questions to help others answer:
What are you doing to your edits? Straight edits, lots of FX, etc?
How many tracks?
What codec of footage (DV, HDV, etc).
What resolution?
What preview setting?

I've got Vegas 10, a Phenom 9600 & an ATI 3850, Vegas edits pretty good & is normally responsive on my end.

DeadRadioStar wrote on 3/6/2013, 9:39 AM

Posted this a while back but nobody seemed interested:
GPU rendering with build 486 and Catalyst 13.1
I don't know whether it was build 486 or Catalyst 13.1 that fixed things, but I haven't had a crash since. I've "only" got an AMD Radeon HD 6570, but it was purchased specifically in order to be able to do GPU-assisted rendering in Vegas 12. Of course, then I discover this forum and realise that almost everyone's running Nvidia cards costing $1000's ....

NormanPCN wrote on 3/6/2013, 10:02 AM

That is a super good card. I have VP12 and a ATI/AMD 5850 and current drivers. It does fine, except for some heavy effect/transitions can slow things down depending on preview resolution. My era AMD card is not particularly adept at OpenCL execution efficiency.

I typically preview at 1/2 or 1/4 resolution.

NewBlue titler Pro text overlaies can be very slow depending on what animations and text I have used.

My video is typically a slideshow or 1080p30 GoPro footage. Remember that GPU only helps some things. For plain video footage playback it is only used for interpolation/scaling AFAIK. Effects and transitions let you know what features are GPU accelerated.

jamesl wrote on 3/6/2013, 3:51 PM

Hey Everyone...

To The Happy Friar... here are some of the specs I'm trying to edit with. I'm editing footage off my Canon 7D (MOV files, at 1080 res). The project is set to this setting also. In one part I'm using lots of Boris FX stuff... extruded text, extruded spline (with up to four video tracks operating at once). Preview setting is set to Preview Auto.

To Deadradiostar.. I was using 13.1, but had no joy there.. tried rolling back to 12.9, which doesn't appear to be much better. I thought perhaps an earlier version might be the key, but it seems I'm wrong.

To NormanPCN.. I've disabled GPU acceleration, as it messes up my renders every time. Wherever there is more than one video track in use (eg. text overlay), the render shows pixelated glitchy areas on the vision, similar to digital tv with poor signal. The only way to get a clean render for me is to disable GPU accel which is a little frustrating

NormanPCN wrote on 3/6/2013, 4:10 PM

Well, if you have GPU accel turned off then the card in your system is basically irrelevant of course.

If you are asking if a different card would perform better? Better how. Performance or quality or both?
As for quality I would speculate that quality would be the same. The GPU code is OpenCL which is hardware independent.

As for performance, I have no answer other than the AMD 7xxx cards have changed design to something similar to what Nvidia did a generation ago. The design is more optimized for general purpose GPU programming, verses optimized for games performance (DirectX, OpenGL). OpenCL benchmarks indicate good performance on the 7xxx cards.

AFAIK, Boris does not use OpenCL. They do use OpenGL to help speed previews but the CPU can still be a bottleneck depending of effect.

Anything auto for the preview window has a dynamic variable render size depending on the size of the preview display. The preview render size is shown in the preview status window, as well as preview window size. If you are at anything higher than quarter, then try restricting the preview to something smaller. 1/2 size smaller results in 1/4 the pixels to process.

jamesl wrote on 3/6/2013, 4:18 PM

Thanks for the response NormanPCN,

Would you know a possible reason why my GPU accel causes these digital noise glitches in every render? I'd love to switch it back on if I could, as it does seem to help with playback and effects processing.

I guess if I could solve the problem with the GPU accel, I'd just render effects-heavy sequences separately and import the rendered piece into the main project

NormanPCN wrote on 3/6/2013, 6:07 PM

I would guess only Sony support can help you there. Give them a shot of both CPU only and GPU, and see what they think. This is assuming the artifact comes from something Sony, and not Boris, or something else.

OpenCL GPU programming is hardware independent. That said, hardware capabilities are different and a bug could exist and only show itself with a specific hardware setup. Something like how an operation is distributed across the GPU resources.

I can see how a GPU algorithm will not give per pixel exact same results as a CPU algorithm. The paradigm is fundamentally different is most respects. But noise/artifacts are another matter.

If you have a friend with Vegas and different hardware, then you could try putting a sample project on a flash drive and render on that setup to see if it shows the same noise characteristics. You need to eliminate variables to find the problem source.

OldSmoke wrote on 3/7/2013, 6:54 AM

jamesl
Does this happen with all renderer or just those that are GPU accelerates? I am asking because the GPU accelerated ones like MC AVC have an option to set the GPU acceleration for the respective video card. I have a Nvidia and if I set it to OpenCl instead of CUDA I also get bad render times and errors. For AMD/ATI you should select the OpenCl option, don't leave it on automatic either.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 3/7/2013, 7:52 AM

From the sounds of it you're just doing a lot of intense tasks and that's why it's choppy:
*MOV calls an external codec (Quicktime, Apple)
*Boris is a seperate program (to the OS)
*Lots of instances of FX doesn't give the system time to precache when it's playing back.

set wrote on 3/7/2013, 9:13 AM

to DeadRadioStar : I'm using ATI Radeon 5750 , catalyst was kept in 12.8 as later version after and/or Win7's updates make a bit trouble, even to Win7 itself.
I want to know further too how the stability or performance will be after add recent win updates, or updating the catalyst, but due to a lot of edit jobs, I better not applying any updates right now, as my condition is very stable now, V12#486 - ATI Catalyst 12.8.

Will look forward to do it later.

Skuzzy wrote on 3/11/2013, 7:08 PM

My system specs are in my profile.

I am using Vegas 11 32 bit, and just upgraded to the 13.1 drivers for my 7950 video card as I was having problems with the original drivers that came with the card.

Seems to be stable and the GPU rendering is working much better. I do not have any Boris
plugins, but do use the latest Neat plugin.

Have not run into any other issues with the 13,1 drivers. One note; I do not install the Catalyst Control Center, nor the HDMI sound drivers. Never have.

Now, if I load up the plugin chain with Neat and a few others, the playback review does skip frames to keep up with the audio, but I expect that.

The only crash I have suffered was with the older drivers and trying to use the Newblue titler. I also have witnessed a memory leak when rendering. If the project is long enough, it crashes the 32 bit version of Vegas.