Strange, normally GPU drivers don't mess with non-GPU stuff unless it's deigned to. IE Nvidia's multi-core support. I see you used an Nvidia card before (according to your system specs). The ONLY time I've had a successful card architecture swap (ATI to Nvidia or the other way) was a reinstall of the OS, did you do that? There's so much junk left from the drivers it's easier to just wipe & reinstall the OS.

I know it's strange. For a while, I thought it was my CPU that was damaged. Using the latest driver, my computer would give me BSODs every few minutes. The computer was stable only when using an older driver.

When I tried to compile using in GPU accellerated MP4, I was not surprised when it didn't work. But when I tried to compile using the CPU only, I got a lot of corrupted frames with some images appearing where they were not supposed to. I was certain the CPU was damaged.

I put back my "old" GTX 570 and everything became normal again. I even ran Intel Burn to test the CPU and I didn't experience any problem.

I have to put together a few videos tomorrow and Wednesday. I will try a clean reinstall as you suggested. We'll see how it goes. I really hope it works out because I love that card. It was incredible to play my video with numerous animated layers at a full 30fps. I made sure I had used all GPU accellerated transitions and my videos played very smoothly.

I'd offer to buy it off you but I looked at the price and it's a lot more then I've ever spent on a GPU. :)

I built a computer that I want to last at least four years. Cheap parts/less powerful components become obsolete a lot faster. That's the reason behind my madness.

I build mine to last ~4 years too (it's coming up on 4 years now), I just don't buy the fastest of whatever, I normally by the next step or two down. IE you bought the 7970, I bought the 3850 (which was ~two steps from the best when I bought it, ~1/2 the price of the best), I got the Phenom 9600 (~1/2 the price of whatever the fastest was at the time). However, what's limiting me now is XP not my hardware. If I had Vista or 7 64-bit I would be using some 64-bit software and I'd have more RAM, that's for sure.

From people I've talked to in relation to CPU's & GPU's, the fastest one, in general, isn't that much faster then one of the same generation ~1/2 the price. That's coming from gaming geeks who spend a thousand every year (maybe more) to keep up, they're just addicted like someone who always keeps pimping out their card. :D

It is hard to find the right kind of information regarding the computing capabilities of video cards. The NVidias were great until they reached the 580. The 680 is a no go as far as people like us in this forum are concerned.

I can tell you from a couple of days of usage that the HD7970 is incredible when it comes to playback. If I used GPU accelerated transitions, the entire video would play at 29.970 fps. That got me hooked up. I am willing to accept non-gpu accelerated rendering in exchange for being able to preview my video perfectly during playback in Vegas.

I have to finish a couple of small jobs today, then I will try reinstally Windows from scratch. I hope it works. Otherwise, I will probably return it to the store and get the fastest 580 I can find.

If you have an extra hard drive lying around I'd try doing a fresh install of Windows on that vs wipe your current drive (unless you don't need to backup much). I did that back when I had several IDE driver in my system, then I would transfer over what I wanted from the old boot drive to the new one, wipe it & use it as a data drive.

But yeah, GPU info can get sketchy. Drivers are tweaked to specific software at time so a big increase in program X might not help program Y, it could even hurt it. Constant driver updates are annoying, I just upgrade now if I need it (still using the ATI driver from ~mid 2011). It seems strange that non-GPU render is being effected by the video driver. Did you happen to try the the GPU enabled encoder included with the ATI software?

I am absolutely not erasing my boot drive. I have another one I will use instead. It will also be helpful to copy some important files like the Outlook data file onto the new installation if all goes well.

As for the GPU enabled encoder, it didn't work at all. At least, the one in Vegas Pro. I don't know of any encoder included with the ATI software.

By the way, I have just finished the two short videos I had to do. I will be able to start the reinstall tomorrow morning. I must be ready to restart work no later than Friday. So I hope all my testing and reinstalling will not take too long.

Looks like the ATI/AMD encoder isn't part of the driver package any more, it's here: clicky clicky

Download and give that a shot, maybe it's a Vegas specific issue.

I reinstalled windows and all the drivers. Now, I have started the update patch dance. It always takes a while. But there is some good news. The driver that made the computer crash constantly on Sunday is very stable right now. I am keeping my fingers crossed until later when I reinstall Vegas.

It's a no go! If my experience is anything to go by, the Radeon HD7970 was a disaster on my computer. I got BSODs and rendering was messy - I got worse than artifacts, I got images appearing all over the place where and when they didn't belong. On the good side, playback was superlative.

The store folks ran furmark on it for 10 minutes and it worked perfectly. Maybe it was the combination of my system and the drivers. Who knows? Maybe the drivers will be more solid in a few months.

I always worry about those high end cards if I have to saw a hole in my computer to fit it in.
JJK

After upgrading to Vegas 11 (64) I replaced my low-end nVidia card with a mid-line Radeon based on Sony's benchmarks, which indicated significantly better timeline performance vs. a much more expensive nVidia 580 card.

It was horribly unstable with Vegas to the point where the program was unusable. I ended up swapping the card for an nVidia 550 and the crashes were reduced to the common Vegas 11 issues reported by others in this forum, and certainly nothing that stopped me from finishing the project I was working on.