I reckon anything in that column from RX Vega56 down to Radeon VII is a pretty good bet. But also take a look at this demo of the RX5700XT utilizing a lot of GPU. We're told those 5XXX series cards are actually supported by VEGAS for hardware decoding/encoding. If they are somehow utilizing more GPU than earlier architecture cards then they might be a good bet, despite the lower GFLOPS/TBP figures than other models. Unfortunately I don't think anyone has contributed benchmark results for them yet.

Coming soon... the info in that thread piqued my interest enough that I just ordered one. Comparative benchmarks to follow.

That's great to hear. It's quite extraordinary to see it using 15% cpu on 4K60P while Davinci Resolve is using 50% Davinci also using an unusually low amount of GPU on timeline playback. If the results can be verified it may say 2 things. RX5700XT is a good card for VP17, but also a bad card for Davinci Resolve. The lack of GPU decode with Resolve obviously skews the comparision with the CPU being required instead but still seems like poor performance.

There is the unfortunate slow and low quality hardware gpu encoding, but the big deal about these AMD cards is that the encoding engine can be fixed with software updates. Well that's what they said anyway, still waiting for it to happen

Maybe best to wait until fall 2020 for the successor to the Turing 20xx nvidea series, the ampère architecture series (probably named 30xx)...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-rtx-3080-ampere-all-we-know

I've just pulled the trigger on a new system with a Ryzen 9 3900X, 32 GB RAM and a 5700 XT card from Sapphire. I should be able to post some benchmark results within a few weeks time... based on my testing and research I'm expecting a 8-10x rendering time improvement over my current system which I built in Jan 2012.

@Gary-Vrckovnik

"... based on my testing and research I'm expecting a 8-10x rendering time improvement over my current system which I built in Jan 2012."

If the community rules don't prohibit the activity, I'd be willing to make a small to enormous wager against that happening. Particularly, if you continue to edit SD video using DV. Even if you're unwilling to risk some money, you should bookmark this thread so you can come back to it.

Signed,

Debbie Downer

My Web Site

I've done enough reading on this forum to know not to bet against you @john_dennis 😉

While the bulk of my footage is from MiniDV tapes, I do have some higher res stuff too. The other reality is that this hobby provided a convenient excuse for me to upgrade my old system which I've been wanting to do for a while now - even if I only get 3-5x rendering time improvements (for which I'm very confident) I'll be very happy.

So I definitely won't take your bet, but I definitely will report back with my results once I get my new system up and running 😃

@Gary-Vrckovnik

Finalize a half dozen projects. Start them all rendering at once and go work on something meaningful like eradicating feline aids.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/i-m-going-for-a-walk--118208/

@john_dennis so, how's that feline aids thing going?
How did you get 6 projects rendering in 16G at the same time? I'd be stunned if I could successfully run 2-3

I highly recommend the affordable VEGA 56 / 64 series until AMD BIG NAVI & Nvidia Ampere get here & demonstrate they are worth the upgrade price... A year ago I found a $350 Liquid-Cooled VEGA 64 for my 9900K workstation that performs as good as a pricier Radeon 7 or 2080 in Vegas. Recently I got a <$200 used VEGA 56 to put in one of my older Xeon workstations that I sometimes move large projects to for rendering so I can keep editing on my 9900K system. The 5xxx cards are considered mid-range & might be better at gaming, but they do not have the compute capability of the older flagship cards...

With 32 GB or RAM on my 9900K workstation I ROUTINELY render multiple instances of Vegas at once to meet client deadlines. Yesterday I had 4 instances of Vegas rendering intermediate MOV & preview quality MP4. I have (3) 4K screens, so have (2) Vegas windows open on the first (2) & do my file transfers, etc. on the 3rd. I charge clients by the project vs. hour, so the faster I work the more I make per hour and/or sooner I leave for the day...

@michael-harrison

"I'd be stunned if I could successfully run 2-3."

The number of concurrent jobs that you could run will be based on your system and the types of jobs. Once any resource gets to 100% utilization, whether it be CPU or GPU, there are diminishing returns to adding more projects. Not only that, you'll be competing with running processes so it will take longer and longer to start the jobs.

Isn't NVENC also limited to 3 instances at a time? (up from 2)

It would be helpful if we could queue renders.

Yes 3 NVENC sessions

This running multiple vegas's at a time is really making the best of a bad situation, being the slow render performance. It is showing the inefficiency of vegas to use the resources available. I have also done this with 2 concurrent vegas's, and got something like 70fps and 60fps encoding the 1st and 2nd half of the same project where a single vegas would do 70fps. Ideally vegas would just output at 130fps and be as efficient as it's rival editors

@Former user What you've just described is the same expectation that software managers have where they expect 9 people to make a software baby in a month.

Just because two instances can run @ ~60-70fps doesn't mean that a single instance should be able to do 130. That's just not how it works.

Now if Magix would break apart the renderer such that it was truly multi-threaded for the frame rendering and used a back-end thread to turn those frames into the video output, we'd see some real speed gains. I have no idea how hard that might be. If their base architecture didn't have that planned in from the beginning, a big rewrite would be probable.

I highly recommend the affordable VEGA 56 / 64 series until AMD BIG NAVI & Nvidia Ampere get here & demonstrate they are worth the upgrade price... A year ago I found a $350 Liquid-Cooled VEGA 64 for my 9900K workstation that performs as good as a pricier Radeon 7 or 2080 in Vegas.

@TheRhino Thanks, I like AMD (used to be the ONE that worked best for Vegas, year to year, till recently) and I like your idea and looked into it. I back off because of heat/power issues that I'd heard about, and I wasn't into upping my power supply and I have a lot of hard drives already, and one of my machines is an HP Z420 workstation, which presents certain limitations as per upgrade...

...but do you care to comment on heat/power concerns, and actual live playback boost, fps vs. more common cards.

My Web Site

Downer 😢

@TheRhino ….I back off because of heat/power issues that I'd heard about, and I wasn't into upping my power supply.......but do you care to comment on heat/power concerns, and actual live playback boost, fps vs. more common cards.

The 9900K with liquid-cooled VEGA 64 pulls 250W while editing & around 400W when rendering 4 instances of Vegas with CPU at 100% & GPU to 35%. During editing 4K intermediates, I have no problems previewing multiple tracks, picture-in-picture effects, etc. The preview quality is good-enough I do not need to use proxies...

The CPU also has Corsair H150i liquid cooling and is totally silent for sound work. The GPU is undervolted & both CPU & GPU run very cool with liquid cooling. (4) 2TB M.2 sticks in two sets of RAID0 serve as source drives and there is an internal (4) 8TB RAID10 in hot swap bays for target video. The 9900K has a 1000W power supply, but ran just fine when I had it on a 750W. I've been editing paid work for 20 years & find a quality power supply solves a lot of hardware glitches...

Also, 4 hours of editing work pays an entire month's electricity, so I'd rather have stuff that works vs. stuff that saves energy... I can easily fiddle-away 4 hours fixing hardware glitches, especially new hardware, software, or drivers that are unproven. When the AMD 5xxx GPUs were first released, they did not run well with Vegas.... I would have wasted too much time vs. just sticking to my reliable VEGAs which have already had years of driver updates... When I wanted to save electricity, I converted all of my studio lights to LEDs which saved more energy & heat (running A/C to cool-down heat from lights...) than all of my workstations running at once...

I am totally opposite every one else. I do not care or give a s h i t about high power draw. I really don't. If a card that give me the best performance at high power usage, so be it. It is like hey I want to drive a high performance 1000hp corvette but I am worried about using to much fuel. You want a low power car, then get a low power car. There is no way around it. Same go as with computer.

@BruceUSA +1

@Former user What you've just described is the same expectation that software managers have where they expect 9 people to make a software baby in a month.

Just because two instances can run @ ~60-70fps doesn't mean that a single instance should be able to do 130. That's just not how it works.

Now if Magix would break apart the renderer such that it was truly multi-threaded for the frame rendering and used a back-end thread to turn those frames into the video output, we'd see some real speed gains. I have no idea how hard that might be. If their base architecture didn't have that planned in from the beginning, a big rewrite would be probable.

I have head people talk about how the engine has to be replaced or completely rebuilt, and what magix have been doing with Vegas since they acquired it seem more like patching it together and addons, the engine remains the same and it's the same speed it's always been, and asking for engine to be replaced/rebuilt is apparently ridiculous (unlikely). But in case of Voukoder encoder plugin, it fixes the delay with frame serving to encoder. I have not measured increase in speed but could be 20% faster. Just not having to see that annoying delay once a second would make me feel Vegas is working more efficiently.

Also I work entirely via Nvenc hardware encoding, so vegas just needs to render the frames. at 1080p I've seen NVENC encode at 270fps, so people doing the dual vegas session believing it's the NVNEC that also is being advantaged by using 2nd Nvenc session are misguided. It is probablyl true for slow amd encoding but Nvenc just needs to be served the frames

I was going to spring for an AMD 5700 series card, but with Big Navi around the corner... I'll wait.

I've had good success with my very "old" RX480 8GB and have been quite happy with it with VP17. And hearing 5700 series is supported, I was quite happy. But now, really close to Big Navi, waiting seems to be prudent.

I've had no issues with AMD drivers for the RX480.