Does Vegas v11 support your nVidia card?

Marton wrote on 10/20/2011, 12:33 PM

Thx
i ordered a passive Gainward 430, and hope for the best :)
If it's not good enough for me, i can send it back in 8 days.
So testing coming soon :)

Steve Mann wrote on 10/20/2011, 10:08 PM

". If some standard benchmark surfaces with 3D in it, I'll run it and post."

Sony already did - well, for 2D, anyway.
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro11benchmark

Daniel3D wrote on 10/21/2011, 12:20 AM

@ ingeborgdot

Lots of comparisons, but here's a good link.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/video-cards/44059-gtx-460-vs-gtx-560-a.html

But my 2 cents, before spending money on cards, which you'll want to go 580's, save your money for a faster processor.

jerald wrote on 10/21/2011, 3:14 PM

Hi, Steve,
Thanks for posting this.

Jerald

vkmast wrote on 10/21/2011, 4:33 PM

Hi.

Builds 738 and 371 are publicly available 64-bit versions.

jabloomf1230 wrote on 10/21/2011, 10:12 PM

I have a question anyone with a GTX 590 or two GTX cards in SLI. Theoretically, both CUDA and OpenCL support SLI (multiple physical GPUs). But for example, Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5, which uses CUDA, does not support SLI. And to my knowledge, nVidia has never issued a production driver which allows OpenCL to support SLI (but I could be wrong on that).

Hence, the fastest consumer nVidia card for PPro is a GTX 580 and same is probably true for VP11. But I would be interested to hear from somebody with a GTX 590 (which has two Fermi GPU chips on one card operating in SLI).

John_Cline wrote on 10/22/2011, 12:00 AM

For what it's worth, I have a pair of GTS-450 cards in one of my machines, I enabled SLI and performed a test using my "rendertest-2010.veg", it made absolutely no difference in render speed.

Laurence wrote on 10/22/2011, 1:19 AM

My laptop has a GeForce 9600M GT with a score on this chart of 1.1. I guess that is not very good. It does seem to be enough to let the NewBlueFX titler run however. Anyway, performance is noticeably better than it was with Vegas 10 so I can't complain.

jerald wrote on 10/23/2011, 2:01 AM

Hi, vkmast,
Thanks for the info.
I wasn't aware of that.

Jerald

jabloomf1230 wrote on 10/23/2011, 3:00 PM

Thanks John. Do you have any utilities installed that show each GPU's usage in real time (like AIDA64, which used to be called Everest)? I have another PC with two GTX275s in SLI under Win 7 and I have never seen any software use both of them in parallel, except for video games. It doesn't have a VP11 install on it, but I was tempted to see what would happen if I did install Vegas 11. It must be difficult to write code using CUDA that takes advantage of multiple physical GPUs.

Tom Pauncz wrote on 10/23/2011, 8:20 PM

A little late to the party, but I am at a loss to understand why Vegas Pro plug-ins can utilize the GPU on my card and Vegas Pro cannot.

Card is a GeForce 9800GT with 112 CUDA cores and the latest driver from nVidia.

FBmn's GPU accelerated plug-ins are just fine, Sapphire Edge filters are just fine but NOT Vegas Pro 10 or 11.

Hmmmm...
Tom

musicvid10 wrote on 10/23/2011, 8:39 PM

Click the first link John gave and there's the reason. Your card is 1.0

John_Cline wrote on 10/23/2011, 9:28 PM

jabloomf1230, yes, I have both "GPU-Z" and "GPU Shark" which show GPU usage in real time.

Tom Pauncz wrote on 10/23/2011, 9:49 PM

@musicvid

I did that and am aware that the card is 1.1. Nevertheless, why do the plug-ins work?

I had discussions with Frederic (FBmn) and he was talking about CUDA levels - installing the latest driver brought me to the CUDA level against which his plug-ins are compiled (?) and they work.

I am still in the dark about what it is about Vegas Pro 11??

Tom

jabloomf1230 wrote on 10/25/2011, 9:11 PM

Maybe someone should point out that a GTX 590 is waste of money with Vegas 11, at least for now.

Harold Brown wrote on 10/26/2011, 11:29 AM

I played the benchmark project in V10 & V11 (both 64bit). Region 7 of the test in Vegas 10 Pro gave me full fps of 29.970, while on V11 it was as low as 11 fps and varied until the end where it finally hit 29.970. I run a GeForce 8800GT so no GPU performance gains from it.

johnmeyer wrote on 10/26/2011, 1:21 PM

I'm still hoping that Sony will provide some benchmark data. I've read all these various threads about GPU support, and have looked at the links where nVidia card specs are provided. Unfortunately, so far no one has provided any real insight into what the "equation" is that describes the relationship between video card cores, memory, clock speed, driver version (2.0, 2.1, etc.) and other variable, and the resulting performance in rendering to each major video format (MPEG-2 (both DVD and HDV), AVCHD, AVC/MP4, etc. This part should be straightforward.

It would also be nice to have some sort of statement about preview speed, although these comparisons are extremely difficult to interpret because there are so many variables. It is almost impossible to duplicate a preview test and get the same results twice, not only because of memory caching, but also because any slight tweak to dozens of settings (preview scaling, bit depth, project settings, etc.) will completely change the results.

However, some general statements would still be useful.

I am very seriously considering not only upgrading to V11, but also finally reformatting my Vista boot drive (which I never use) and installing Win 7-64 bit. As part of this, I'd like to upgrade my Geforce 9800 GT which is not supported, but I have no idea what I'm going to get for my money when I purchase one of the various supported nVidia cards.

Sony, please take the lead on this, and provide some information that we can actually use that will help us make purchase decisions!!

Frederic Baumann wrote on 10/28/2011, 5:29 PM

Hi,

if I can bring my contribution to the thread (even though if I am not in Sony's secrets), having developed 2 GPU-accelerated plugins:

- The Compute Capability is a nVidia-specific concept describing the type of operations that a nVidia graphics card can perform. For instance, it says whether single or double precision floating point computing is supported, among many other things. Compute Capability is a characteristics of the hardware, not of the driver, nor any other software library.

- CUDA is a nVidia-specific API, which provides developers with access to many details about the hardware - leading to more optimized programs. The drawback of it is that it does not exist for AMD cards.

- CUDA is available in various versions, the latest being 4.0. For that reason, it might be necessary to upgrade the nVidia driver so that CUDA-based apps can work (especially for FBmn GPU-accelerated plugins which use CUDA 4.0).

- OpenCL is a standard (thus not nVidia-specific) API which is supported by both nVidia and AMD graphics cards. Not all of them though. For nVidia cards, OpenCL is built on top of CUDA. As a result, OpenCL support depends on which CUDA support you have, which in turn depends on which nVidia driver you have...

- As far as I understand, VP11 relies on OpenCL, not CUDA, and for that reason it is able to use both AMD and nVidia GPUs... under certain conditions.

- For nVidia graphics cards, what should be considered with caution, is that even though the GPU is mentioned to be CUDA-enabled on the nVidia website, there are some cases where the graphics card (from some brands) won't provide this support. For instance, GTX460 is theoretically CUDA-enabled, but some GTX460 cards from some vendors do not support CUDA. So the ultimate point to check is that there should be the CUDA logo on the card box!!

Regarding VP11 requirements, seeing no mention of the link on this page, I put it as a remiinder: http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/gpuacceleration.

Frédéric - FBmn Software

MattAdamson wrote on 10/30/2011, 7:03 PM

I've noticed my card a GTX 285 is not level 2 compatible. This is obviously a real shame as it's a very powerful card. In fact I thought since a year ago when I purchased it, it would be easily surpassed however a lot of the newer cards now which are CUDA 2.0 are less powerful than this.

It seems a great shame to upgrade to something less powerful just to get CUDA 2 and benefit in Vegas. However I may do this. I don't play games much if at all so really only bothered about the processing speed of Vegas. Soon to purchase a Full HD 3d camera so will need as much rendering performance improvement as I can get :)

paul_w wrote on 10/30/2011, 7:32 PM

@Frederic, thanks for the good information.

Cuda and OpenCL, and why some "Cuda enabled" cards are not really enabled! This could explain some wildly different results from users with different GPU cards.

Paul.