I did find the checkbox under the custom settings for the template. Thank you. I am guessing I need to keep the box unchecked to use cuda going by the description it has beside it?

It is rendering a video now as I type this so it is out of memory but if I remember right it says: Use cpu for rendering even if gpu is enabled? To me that sounds like if I check the box it will only render with the cpu. I know this may sound like sillyness but I am new to video editing and I am having fun doing it but the rendering times take some of the fun out of it.

It isn't too bad for short 10 minute clips, they take about 28 minutes to do but I have a 2 hour video I want to render and it is going to take over 5 hours. I guess it is soon going to be time to tell my wife I need a dual quad core xeon server and vegas pro LOL

Nutnoun-
I have the same problem - CUDA does not work. I have tried a number of things, to no avail.

(1) Please report your problem to Sony so they are aware that some of us are having problems with CUDA (log in to this website, to to My Account, My Support).

(2) What are your system specs? I am curious how they compare to mine:
Vegas Platinum 10
Win XP SP3,
Core2Quad at 2.83 GHz,
3 GB usable RAM (4 GB total)
Gigabyte GTS250 graphics card
Asus P5B-E motherboard
graphics driver is version 197.xx
video camera: Sony HDR CX550V (but I have also tried to use files shot with a JVC Everio cam, and I have the same problem with CUDA not working)

Here are my system specs:

VMS platinum 10 pro pack
Intel Q9550 core 2 quad 2.83 overclocked to 3.77
4gig ram
Windows 7 professional 64bit
Nvidia 9800gt with latest driver like 215.....
Video camera is HDR-XR150

I haven't tried switching off the cuda to see if it takes longer. I will try tonight and let you know to see if it makes a difference on my system. So far it has been averaging 25-30 minutes rendering 10 minute clips with the input being 1920x1080i avchd to the same output. Just have an a small text intro and small text exit. It was a 2 hour film I cut up into 10 minute sections to upload to youtube.

Like I said I will mess with it tonight and turn cuda off and see if it makes a difference and post the results.

Cuda must be working on mine.

I rendered the same clip which was an 8 minute AVCHD 1920 x 1080 - 60i rendering to the same settings with the box checked for use cpu even if gpu is present:

38:46 without gpu

31:00 with gpu

Thank you. This is very helpful. I am still trying to troubleshoot the CUDA issue on my machine, and I can now rule out one theory - that the CPU is too new. (Here is an excerpt from Sony's response when I reported the problem: ...If you have an older CPU and a newer NVIDIA GPU, rendering using the GPU may improve render times...

That being said, the effects may be minimal - renders may be a few seconds shorter, but using this card/CUDA may not significantly decrease render times. We are still in the process of perfecting this usability in our software.)

The one thing I can suggest is to uninstall the current nvidia drivers that your are using then download the latest one which is like 215.XXX or higher.

Here is what I would try and I noticed after reinstalling VMS that everything seems to work better because I was having crashes during rendering and I did the fix that was listed in the one post and it seemed to correct the problem. But I have since reinstalled VMS which would have undone those changes.

I would uninstall your current nvidia driver, reboot. Uninstall VMS reboot, install latest nvidia driver and reboot and then install VMS again.

I can see their point in the fact that you won't notice as much of a speed increase in rendering with gpu enabled on a newer cpu as opposed to an old one. With that being said the processing power they could harness through cuda or gpu rendering is so much more. A prime example of this is anyone that does distributed computing projects. Some of the ones I have run, the gpu work units get done in half the time.

Obviously it is making a difference with the current setup. One of these days when I don't need the computer I will render a one hour video with and without to see how big of a difference it is then to see if it is proportional or not.

NUTNDUN-
Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. I uninstalled and reinstalled everything per your instructions, and still no CUDA.

I also see their point about old versus new CPUs, but your experience with the overclocked 9550 processor, and 20% improved performance with CUDA, shows me that I should also be seeing an improvement. I still wonder if anyone has been able to get CUDA working when running VMS10 under WinXP.

To enable CUDA with the Sony AVCHD template you must UNCHECK the box labelled "Encode on CPU even if GPU is available". As previously noted, this box is on the Video tab of the Custom template dialog.

Here are the results of a test I did using a single 19 second AVCHD 1920x1080 video clip:

Checked render time: 2:41 (35,229,695 bytes)
Unchecked render time: 1:27 (35,309,568 bytes)

This is a significant performance improvement. The wording on the text box is accurate: checking the box forces Vegas to use the PC's main CPU for rendering and bypass the GPU if it is available. Un-checking the box lets Vegas use the GPU if it can.

I have no explanation why the files sizes are different for the 2 different versions of rendering. It is puzzling that the shorter render time resulted in a slightly larger file size.

On my system I have 6GB RAM, i7-920 CPU and an nVidia 9600GT video card, so Vegas can use the GPU, and does so if the box in the template dialog is NOT CHECKED. The improvement gained by using the GPU is both surprising and impressive considering the i7-920 is a very robust CPU and my Vegas10 is set to use all 8 processor threads for rendering. The CUDA GPUs must be pretty spiffy indeed.

Where is the "use GPU acceleration" option in VMS 10 Platinum ? Is this associated with the Sony AVCHD template only, or is there an option/check-box in the Preferences section ?

Birk Binnard wrote that rendering a test video took:
2:41 rendered on his CPU
1:27 rendered on his CUDA GPU

"On my system I have 6GB RAM, i7-920 CPU and an nVidia 9600GT video card, so Vegas can use the GPU, and does so if the box in the template dialog is NOT CHECKED. The improvement gained by using the GPU is both surprising and impressive considering the i7-920 is a very robust CPU and my Vegas10 is set to use all 8 processor threads for rendering. The CUDA GPUs must be pretty spiffy indeed."

Here's the deal: the Intel i7-920 CPU has four cores, and the NVIDIA 9600GT has 64 stream processors (CUDA cores). Collectively, the 64 CUDA cores are twice as fast as four Intel cores, or each CUDA core is about eight times slower than an Intel core. The only way that GPU acceleration can speed up anything is when the problem can be effectively parallelized (as rendering can be) AND when there are are a ton of cores in the GPU.

If your goal is to speed up your AVCHD renders in VMSPHD10, find an NVIDIA graphics card with lots of stream processors. They range from as few as eight up to 1440 (in a three card installation). In other words, if you had a low-end NVIDIA GPU in your computer with just eight stream processors, I'd expect your rendering performance to take about four times as long as it would take on your CPU. However, the relative performance of NVIDIA stream processors and Intel cores can vary substantially from generation to generation, so all of that must also be taken into account before trying to estimate performance.

I submitted a ticket to Sony because I had upgraded my nVidia card from an 8600 to a GTX 260 and didn't see a material change in rendering times. This is the response I got:

---------------------
Thank you for contacting Sony Creative Software. I have received word from our Development team that they have been able to confirm that lack of improvement with the GTX 260 card when using CUDA. They are currently looking to improve the functionality of CUDA for future versions of the software. Thank you for providing your system details and for providing sample projects and media.
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Hopefully "future versions" means a service pack, and not VMS 14.