Forcing Vegas to only use NVidia gpu

RealityStudio wrote on 10/30/2021, 1:28 PM

Hey all, I'm using a Dell XPS 15 laptop, i7 11800H 8 core cpu along with both Intel integrated graphics and an NVidia 3050ti and I'd like to force Vegas to only use the NVidia 3050ti for processing. From what I see there are two places where you can configure gpu use:

1) In Options->Preferences in the "Video" tab you can choose which gpu is used for acceleration of video processing, so I have that set to the NVidia.

2) In Options->Preferences in the "File I/O" tab you can choose which hardware decoder to use, so I have that set to NVidia NVDEC.

Normally I still use 30fps 8 bit h264 codec on my Sony A7S3 because it works fast and I get full frame playback on the timeline, but now I'm toying with their 10 bit 60fps HEVC codec. Thing is though when I playback video on the time line and look at gpu/cpu use it jumps like this:

CPU: 2% to 66%

Intel: 0% to 34%

NVidia: 0% to 18%

...which seems to imply that it's still using the Intel gpu for something while the NVidia gpu snoozes so my 60fps HEVC footage plays back at around on only 27fps or so. Is there another setting somewhere in Vegas that I need to configure to make sure Vegas is not using the Intel gpu for processing?

EDIT: In case it comes up, switching to the Intel gpu for decoding in the "File I/O" tab drops timeline playback from 27fps to 3fps.

EDIT: I'm using the latest NVidia studio drivers.

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Comments

RealityStudio wrote on 12/4/2021, 6:49 PM

Ah that's a shame. I mean truth be told this hasn't been fixed in ages so realistically I think it will remain this way at least until they are forced to port Vegas to an alternate architecture like Arm.

I also just did the test with Resolve on my little M1 based Mac Mini, it was quicker than all the others and resultant output file size was around the same but the video quality was substantially worse. No idea what's going on there but I'd have to look into it more. It does make me wonder if all these Youtubers that love to compare render speed between M1 Macs and PC's ever actually look at the final product to see if it's comparable or if they just post numbers.

RogerS wrote on 12/4/2021, 8:24 PM

Thanks for the 3 way test, very illuminating. I hope Vegas can catch up with Resolve for GPU support.

Former user wrote on 12/4/2021, 11:10 PM

The Vegas team has a better relationship with Intel, so while Nvdia performance is better, it's not necessarily the best for Vegas (like AVC decoding).

Who recalls this benchmark from Intel's site when trying to sell the very poorly received 11900K?

No other details are given, but we can guess 100% that a HEVC 422 10BIT file was used as the source file, and that's probably enough to make that somewhat unbelievable result true (8core cpu beating 10core). I mean it is true, but it's not representative of editing and encoding in general. It is a misleading benchmark.

Intel will be releasing their Intel GPU's next year, who's willing to bet they will use Vegas again, compare NVENC encoding via QuickSync encoding. Intel will win due to Nvidia hardware encoding having the problem it does as seen on the encoding graph above

Intel would be mighty unhappy if Vegas fixed their NVENC encoder before then..... so would they dare?

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 12/5/2021, 7:53 AM

I also just did the test with Resolve on my little M1 based Mac Mini, it was quicker than all the others and resultant output file size was around the same but the video quality was substantially worse.

@RealityStudio That's odd... same software and output file size similar but worse quality. MediaInfo might explain.

If you zip the clip and lut for download, be happy to compare runtimes.

RealityStudio wrote on 12/5/2021, 1:16 PM

I film adult industry content so definitely not a shareable video, but anyways having said that my Resolve issues are beyond the scope of this forum. I need to find a Resolve forum and ask there because I really can't figure out why the Mac M1 version of the same render, basically a 7 minute 4k h265 file around 600MB looks bad whereas the same one encoded with the same settings on the same app but with NVidia encoder on PC looks really good. I don't know Mac enough to sort this out so I'll look around.

Former user wrote on 12/5/2021, 7:24 PM

When reading reviews about M1 I recall M1 Resolve has a box in the render section that said something like 'Optimize for speed' that would sound like something you would want turn off, but otherwise you should find the resolve help forum. And read about what a buggy mess the last 2 releases of Resolve have been, so could even be a bug

RealityStudio wrote on 12/5/2021, 9:08 PM

When reading reviews about M1 I recall M1 Resolve has a box in the render section that said something like 'Optimize for speed' that would sound like something you would want turn off, but otherwise you should find the resolve help forum. And read about what a buggy mess the last 2 releases of Resolve have been, so could even be a bug

I tried unchecking the "Optimize for speed" box then re-rendered. It then actually look longer to render than Resolve on my PC laptop and the quality was still bad. I wonder if I have to install a separate encoder or something like that, no idea.