anyone using Vegas Pro + 4k + new Intel gpus?

Pete Siamidis wrote on 1/19/2015, 3:54 PM

Hey guys, is anyone here using Vegas Pro 13 with 4k footage along with one of the new Intel 5500, 6000 or 6100 gpu's? I ask because I have two machines that I use, a laptop and a desktop, and oddly when scrubbing through my 4+ + Film Convert footage I find that the laptop with just a 750m gpu performs about the same speed as my quad core desktop with a 970 gpu. That's only when scrubbing, when playing back on the timeline the 970 is far far faster. It's just scrubbing which seems equally bad on both.

That left me wondering if maybe the bottleneck is perhaps because of all the cpu<--pci bus-->gpu traffic that goes on during scrubbing. I can't figure out why else playback would be far faster on the 970 whereas scrubbing is just as slow as on the 750m. This in turn left me wondering, would maybe Intel gpu's be better during scrubbing because they are right on the cpu die and hence less bottlenecks involved? I don't have any Intel gpu to test this theory, but does anyone here by chance have one of the new Intel gpu's, either the 5500, 6000 or 6100 and been able to compare it during scrubbing of 4k footage to a normal external pci bus gpu either laptop or dekstop part? Or of the new Intel gpu's are still scarce, maybe someone with a current 5000 or 5200 Intel gpu?

Comments

DataMeister wrote on 1/24/2015, 12:32 AM

I don't have the Intel hardware to test your theory, but a 16x PCI Express slot would have plenty of bandwidth to handle 4K uncompressed video.

So my guess is that scrubbing is probably straining the storage system, more so that the video system.

Pete Siamidis wrote on 1/24/2015, 10:53 PM

Hmm, I'm using an ssd so not sure it's that since the ssd can read at around ~500MB/sec or so. I did do one other test though. On a hunch I installed a trial of the most current Premiere Pro creative cloud, just to see how that works on the same hardware to determine if maybe the issue is actually with Vegas Pro and how they implement their gpu support. Well surprise surprise, on my laptop with its 750m gpu Premiere Pro works significantly faster than Vegas Pro does. Timeline playback with my 4k footage is faster on PP, where Vegas Pro is pretty good but PP plays it back in real time at full speed. Scrubbing is also faster in PP.

This makes me wonder if the issue is elsewhere. I noticed PP seems to use the 750m gpu via Cuda whereas Vegas Pro supports it via OpenGL. I presume that could be the difference as to why PP has significantly better gpu support in my case. So maybe the bottleneck is in OpenGL, or in how Vegas Pro is coded to use OpenGL.

OldSmoke wrote on 1/25/2015, 3:00 PM

The problem is in the way Vegas supports OpenGL/CL on Nvidia GPUs. I used to have 2x GTX580 in system but changed to 2x R9 290 and it's like day and night.

Pete Siamidis wrote on 1/25/2015, 3:35 PM

That does then make me wonder if the new Intel broadwell gpu's would compare favorably to Nvidia gpu's in Vegas Pro. Hence why I wish there was someone out there that had access to one to test Vegas Pro on it. If true it would let me buy a laptop that would get much better battery life since a discrete gpu wouldn't be needed, assuming Intel gpu's run well with OpenGL.

Just curious OldSmoke, with your 290's can you scrub 4k footage at a fast clip or is it still slow?

OldSmoke wrote on 1/25/2015, 3:51 PM

Scrubbing speed depends on more then just the GPU; CPU and hard disk play a roll as well, almost and equal role. I don't scrub, I see no reason for that but I tried it for you. It is acceptable but not instant.
Editing 4K natively requires really good hardware but there are some tricks: work with proxies, lower the project resolution and lower your preview quality come to my mind.

Pete Siamidis wrote on 1/25/2015, 6:31 PM

Ok cool thanks for that. I'm pretty sure at this point it's just a Vegas Pro issue. Main clues are that lowering preview quality has no effect on scrubbing speed, that my laptop with 750m gpu is about as fast at scrubbing as my quad core Haswell desktop with a 970 gpu and ssd, and that Premiere Pro smokes them all on my laptop. It's quite telling when Premiere Pro works faster on my laptop than Vegas Pro on my beefy desktop, so there's probably very little I can do about until Sony improves their code. I will still test on Intel gpu's one day when I get the chance in case by some miracle Vegas Pro works better on that hardware. Normally I'd just switch to Premiere Pro since it clearly seems to make much better use of my hardware but they still can't match Vegas Pro scripting so switching is not an option alas.

Ok I need to go hunt down some Intel gpu hardware sometime and do more tests.