GPU acceleration

drdancm wrote on 3/16/2015, 3:38 PM
GPU acceleration appears to work with certain render settings but not others.

Mostly it works with internet 720HD rendering, but not 1080 of the same, or Blu-ray rendering.

When it fails it simply freezes at some point during the rendering.

I'm using a Radeon R7 200 series graphics card

AMD FX-8150 8 core processor, 32Gb RAM

Intel 128Gb SSD for OS and programs, and magnetic HD for all data.

Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, Sony Vegas Pro 13 64bit Build 428

I have to choose CPU rendering only and then all rendering works as it should.

Comments

astar wrote on 3/16/2015, 9:06 PM
Does the system freeze or just Vegas? Can you exit Vegas and continue to use windows, or does your whole system lockup?
VidMus wrote on 3/16/2015, 11:04 PM
I luckily stumbled on a way to get great results with GPU acceleration on my Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate install.

Upgrading it to Windows 8.1 and it is not so great and very prone to crashes. Also, with Main Concept to MP4 in a test, I get a lot of black frames. The black frames happen ONLY with Windows 8.1 with GPU=On. I think this is due to some kind of memory process timing issue during the render process that gets upset with Windows 8.1 but not Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate on my system.

The Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate is an upgrade from Vista 64 bit Ultimate. I do not remember the problems, but there were problems from a clean install of Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate. There were certain things available with Vista that Windows 7 does not have and that is what caused the problems. Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 preserved those missing things. As I said, I stumbled on a way to get great results with GPU acceleration. There are many more details to this than what I am including here because it has been quite a while and I cannot remember all of the details.

GPU acceleration, is a BIG hit or miss thing! You either hit it or you don't. When you miss it, it all goes down the potty bowl. LOL!

So naturally I am still using Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate. What will happen when I want to upgrade to Windows 10 or higher in the future? Continued failure or finally a rock solid success?

Or am I stuck in the current box with no hope of upgrading in the future just to get things done?

GPU acceleration is great if one can STUMBLE onto a way to make it reliably work like I did.

Why windows 8.1 and later? USB 3 works much better with Windows 8.1. That means better speed and reliability with external USB 3 drives, etc. Start-up is a whole lot faster as well.

I hope this helps...

john_dennis wrote on 3/16/2015, 11:51 PM
Here's what I do.
Jayster wrote on 6/22/2015, 6:32 PM
I've been using Vegas for about 9 years, starting with version 5. Stopped upgrading at version 9, because it was pretty rock solid and I still use an HDV camera (Sony HVR-Z1U), no 3D. Also I didn't want to part with my Cinescore plugin.

I have a very new laptop that has a good CPU (Intel i7-4810 MQ @ 2.8 GHz), an integrated MB video card (Intel HD Graphics 4600) and a good NVIDIA graphics card (GeForce GTX 980M). So I decided to upgrade to Vegas 13. When I try to render with the Sony AVC codec from Vegas 13, I get "No GPU Available." I tried the overall preferences where you select which card to use for GPU rendering and tried with both. No luck. Maybe 3rd party plugins benefit from the GPU, but so far Vegas Pro is completely ignoring it.

Fortunately that wasn't the only reason I upgraded from VP 9 to VP 13. Overall I can't complain about the render times on my new laptop. I remember using Vegas 6, when HDV really started to gain traction. Render times on VP 6 using desktops of the time where taking soooo much longer. And I can use Cinescore as a standalone app.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 6/23/2015, 5:34 AM
> "I get "No GPU Available." I tried the overall preferences where you select which card to use for GPU rendering and tried with both. No luck. Maybe 3rd party plugins benefit from the GPU, but so far Vegas Pro is completely ignoring it."

Go into Options | Preferences | Video and look under GPU Acceleration. If your card is listed and selected then Vegas Pro is taking advantage of your GPU. Don't get Vegas Pro confused with the Encoders that it provides. The MainConcept AVC encoder is quite old and will not use newer GPU's. The rest of Vegas Pro certainly does use it so it's not "complete ignoring it". In fact, since you must playback the timeline in order to render, your GPU is still being used for timeline playback while rendering MainConcept AVC even though the encoder itself is not using it. Other encoders do use it.

~jr
Jayster wrote on 6/23/2015, 9:59 PM
Thanks for the pointer, Johnny! It was actually the Sony AVC codec that said "no GPU available"; the MainConcept AVC said "CUDA available."

I just purchased Neato Video's really good Noise Reduction plugin. It uses the GPU quite fully. I ran it's performance optimizer on a particular video and below are its findings. I decided to use its "GPU only" setting so that I could keep the CPU cores free for Vegas, since adding the CPU cores wouldn't help all that much, whereas I guess Vegas would get much more benefit from the CPUs. Seems like a good combo.

Neato Plugin Findings:
Frame Size: 1440x1080 interlaced
Bitdepth: 8 bits per channel
Temporal Filter: Enabled
Radius: 2 frames
Dust and Scratches: Disabled
Neat Video 4.0.1 Home plug-in for Sony Vegas

Detecting the best combination of performance settings:
running the test data set on up to 8 CPU cores and on up to 1 GPU
GeForce GTX 980M: 7524 MB currently available (8192 MB total), using up to 100%

CPU only (1 core): 2.23 frames/sec
CPU only (2 cores): 4.27 frames/sec
CPU only (3 cores): 5.35 frames/sec
CPU only (4 cores): 6.21 frames/sec
CPU only (5 cores): 6.33 frames/sec
CPU only (6 cores): 6.21 frames/sec
CPU only (7 cores): 6.25 frames/sec
CPU only (8 cores): 5.99 frames/sec
GPU only (GeForce GTX 980M): 10.1 frames/sec
CPU (1 core) and GPU (GeForce GTX 980M): 10.6 frames/sec
CPU (2 cores) and GPU (GeForce GTX 980M): 8.93 frames/sec
CPU (3 cores) and GPU (GeForce GTX 980M): 10.4 frames/sec
CPU (4 cores) and GPU (GeForce GTX 980M): 10.9 frames/sec
CPU (5 cores) and GPU (GeForce GTX 980M): 10.3 frames/sec
CPU (6 cores) and GPU (GeForce GTX 980M): 9.71 frames/sec
CPU (7 cores) and GPU (GeForce GTX 980M): 9.26 frames/sec
CPU (8 cores) and GPU (GeForce GTX 980M): 8.77 frames/sec

Best combination: CPU (4 cores) and GPU (GeForce GTX 980M)
R0cky wrote on 7/8/2015, 5:39 PM
I'm seeing the same "No GPU available" message in the Sony AVC encoder dialog. I just got a new GTX 960 card and am using the 347.52 driver. On to trying older drivers. MC AVC encoder does see the card as does the "video" preferences dialog.

rocky