AMD Radeon VII & Vegas Pro 16

andrew-barbato wrote on 4/8/2019, 6:53 PM

I just bought AMD's new Radeon VII card, mainly for editing in Vegas Pro 16. It arrives tomorrow (2019-04-08).

 

Does anyone else have this card, and have anything to say about it?

 

This one is quite recent, so any feedback on it at all would be great. The only other material I've found about Vegas 16 and the Radeon VII is a few benchmarks from Tech Gage.

Comments

Reyfox wrote on 4/11/2019, 4:53 PM

While the card is out of my price range (and waiting for Navi), I am curious as to how it handles Render As with AMD VCE.

What card are you using now?

Newbie😁

Vegas Pro 22 (VP18-21 also installed)

Win 11 Pro always updated

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16 cores / 32 threads

32GB DDR4 3200

Sapphire RX6700XT 12GB Driver: 25.5.1

Gigabyte X570 Elite Motherboard

Panasonic G9, G7, FZ300

andrew-barbato wrote on 4/11/2019, 8:50 PM

While the card is out of my price range (and waiting for Navi), I am curious as to how it handles Render As with AMD VCE.

What card are you using now?

I just installed my Radeon VII a couple days ago. I was using an AMD RX 580 8GB before this. Beyond CPU-only, the RX 580 is my only comparison for Vegas Pro performance. Since nobody seems to have much experience with the Radeon VII and Vegas, I'll give my input.

  • Both of these cards are obviously much faster at rendering projects than CPU only.
  • I didn't compare identical projects or anything, but the Radeon VII seems to render much faster than the RX 580 when using AMD VCE render options.
  • Editing performance is much better than with the RX 580, but still not silky smooth. My CPU was a bottleneck for the RX 580 and the same applies now. With the Radeon VII, I can skim through 5500 kbps 1080p AVC footage with the preview on "Good - Full" very smoothly. Skimming through 4k footage (~50 mbps, AVC and HEVC) is significantly smoother. Still, though - not silky smooth. Just much faster. Interestingly, regardless of the preview setting, skimming through [unedited] 4k video remains about the same level of smoothness.

My current specs:

  • Intel i7-8700k (6C 12T) (not overclocked; cooled with Noctua NH-D15)
  • MSI Radeon VII (16GB HBM2)
  • 32 GB (4x8GB) Kingston HyperX DDR4 @ 2666 MHz
  • MSI MEG ACE Z390 Motherboard
  • WD Black SN750 NVMe M.2 SSD (500GB)
  • Seasonic 750W Platinum PSU

I was mainly looking for enhanced editing performance, rather than render times. So at this point I'm more inclined to upgrade my processor. Magix recommended getting something with a good balance between clock speeds and core count, like Intel's i9-9800X, i9-9900k, i7-9700k, or W-3175X.

Also, apparently Magix shifted their priorities from away from being very "OpenCL dependent", as Vegas was known for. If I'm being honest here: If you're considering buying this card, you'd almost certainly be better off with an RTX 2080. Turns out, not a whole lot of benchmarks show good things for the Radeon VII. The 16GB of HBM2 looks great on paper, but realistically, it's pretty difficult to justify. I don't think I've seen Vegas use even half of it at once. Not yet, anyways.

Former user wrote on 4/11/2019, 9:33 PM

Would you mind transcoding a 1080p file to 1080p h265 & h264 using the VCE option in handbrake nightly & let us know what your average frame rate is, also noting cpu and gpu encoding percentages?

https://handbrake.fr/nightly.php

andrew-barbato wrote on 4/15/2019, 12:45 AM

Would you mind transcoding a 1080p file to 1080p h265 & h264 using the VCE option in handbrake nightly & let us know what your average frame rate is, also noting cpu and gpu encoding percentages?

https://handbrake.fr/nightly.php

Sorry but that's beyond what I'm familiar with