I've used Vegas for quite some time actually (well, 3-4 years at least), I am just unfamiliar with what these hardware packages offer... I'm under the impression that they offload the rendering work to the card, as you said, for realtime playback. This is what's really attractive to me. I'm assuming when you speak of rendering in vegas being faster than realtime that you're talking about "render as" or the something similar. That's all well and good for the final render, but I could save a ton of time by being able to preview stuff on the fly... as soon as I start doing some 3d stuff or add in a couple of extra video tracks, I can't play it in realtime without either rendering it to memory or by lowering the quality of the preview (sometimes this is ok...)

So, short of buying a new pc, is there an add-on card that would do this for Vegas? Or do you guys have some other suggestions on how to do this?

thanks!

well, the RT.X2 is ~$1700 new. Check out how much more PC you can get if you ADDED that much $$ to your current one.

IE could you get a duel-quad core setup?

I've used the Matrox RT2500 in the past &, honestly, i'd prefer the then-current version of Vegas over the headache's & limitations you had to deal with. Basically, anything creative = render anyway. Don't know about the new RT's though.

Years back I used RT2000 and completely agree that the promises of how dedicated hardware (ASICs etc) will unleash you were never realised. The next gen card and it's promises always got in the way of the job being finished. Features and bug fixes suffer. Not that decompression doesn't deserve something other than the CPU to assist the smooth running.

Throw more computers at Vegas. You could contemplate network rendering too, but more CPU on the same machine with dang fast memory is to be coveted.

Vegas8 might do more GPU offload but this could be at the risk of being Matrox/Canopus'esque in how useful this will turn out to be over time.

We're using Matrox Axios at work. You should hear the complaining!

It looks good on paper but I think the real problem for Matrox is that Adobe is hard to work with. Particularly, PPro's attempts to gaurantee RT playback combined with Matrox's attempts to create RT playback have lead us to contstant timeline updates and 15 minute initial project loads. It's not saving us any time.

Anyway, the answer is that there is no hardware acceleration for Vegas up through version 7. Even GPU acceleration only comes into play with Magic Bullet. It's much better to put the money into building a killer quad core system, and this will speed up everything. Great bang for the buck there.

If you need advanced I/O you could look into AJA Xena cards.

Rob Mack

Does anyone know how well Vegas scales up to 8 or 16 cores? 16 cores as in an 8-way AMD system.... I believe Nucoda and Baselight run on these. (Though Nucoda also uses the GPU and they have custom hardware for motion estimation/noise reduction.) Such as:
http://www.hpcsystems.com/servers.htm

2- There are some benchmark results for various processors here:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=526098&Replies=51