@MikeJorden: just a wild guess - but 1) use the Nvidia 296.10 driver and 2) go into Preferences, Video and set Dynamic RAM Preview max to 22 MB and Maximum number of rendering threads to 6. Tthis *might* improve your 12 hours rendering time substantially ??

the op's subject title says it ALL.....

ver 12 2nd release and we're still no clearer as to any direction from scs as to what drivers work with which cards and how ram previewing along with acceleration is supposed to work AS ADVERTISED.

what i would love from scs is comprehensive specs as to EXACTLY what set-up actually works as they promise.

i realise most of us roll our own, but i would love to hear from anyone using a 'sony approved' rig (they were advertised some time ago) whether they can actually set preview ram as they like, and use acceleration without problem and whether they update THEIR video drivers.

i'm reasonably happy with the stability of my system with the latest release, even though i can't go above 200mb preview ram and find gpu accel fails on some formats..

whether this is all nvidias fault i have no idea, but 296.10 was released a long time ago and it seems strange than few people have working systems if updating past this driver.

we REALLY need scs to make some sort of statement about the present state of play otherwise we'll be forever complaining in this and othr forums about preview ram failures, render failures, and whether the newest video drivers cause more problems than they solve.

mini rant off as my render (gpu) has just finished ;-)

There are 2 types of GPU acceleration inside Vegas 11 & 12. There is the overall GPU acceleration setting that is found under the preferences which accelerates preview, fx and even renders of certain codecs. There is also additional CUDA acceleration settings at codecs like MC AVC. VP 11 is faster when it comes to rendering a CUDA supported codec by 1-2% over VP12 when I render Sony's own benchmark project. In any case, a 550Ti with 192 cores may not improve rendering by a lot or even be slower depending on your CPU.

Which driver are you using?

There are 2 types of GPU acceleration inside Vegas 11 & 12.

The first reduces your timeline preview to a crawl, the second is no help when rendering to MPEG2, which is what many people still use.

That's my experience recently. Intel HD4000 graphics is supported in VP12, but the moment I invoke it, my timeline preview begins to replace at between 0 and 1 fps, compared with 25fps when using CPU only.

Dynamic RAM set to 0MB.

As for using the GPU for rendering, I never do, even when to formats that support it. Just look at the issues reported when using GPU for rendering.

---------

Aside from that, Vegas is rock solid 99% of the time for me, and makes editing a total breeze. The fluidity of editing is a joy. And that outweighs the disadvantages of using the GPU.

Yep, I've just got into a workflow of using 3gig of RAM and GPU 'on' for editing, then resetting to 22mb RAM and GPU 'off' for rendering. Closing Vegas to effect the GPU to CPU switch has also supposedly got advantages of freeing up RAM.

With firepro 7900 which is on the approved list and I think my system is all approved hardware and a new clean build (although gradually getting filled up with stuff :) )

I'm starting to get something like 2-3 gig preview + all threads which for me is 16 no GPU if I'm doing multi track compositing. With GPU it slows and crashes if I use trach masking in a separate track for example.
16-22 6-8 threads + GPU for general editing with sony plugins
6-8 threads 0 preview + GPU for render but I just use debug frame server now to either virtual dub or avisynth then megui for the final compression which all works pretty well for me.

All of that can change depending on if I use third party plugins or different codecs in the time line.

0 preview 6-8 threads GPU is my default oh it keeps crashing lets try that.

Shouldn't be this hard, when it does work it's great tho, can't imagine doing a long project with it, would drive me nuts I think for for what I'm doing at the moment it's fine.

I've got a rolling ticket open with sony about the stability, so far they have suggested on my new build to create a new admin account and try it with that, no idea why and it didn't make any difference but I'm letting them work through their script to see where it goes all I've asked for it the optimum settings for my system, with the current response time it will be several months I suspect but will keep it ticking along in the background.

Adobe 7 is going to have ATI support as well as Nvidia I read, will have a look at that when it launches don't really want to change but it is frustrating, mostly because I actually really like the product and it's does exactly what I want when it's not crashing.

i'll have to try that one arthur, thanks....

however, even it works for me too, it's still a pretty pathetic workaround for what it was supposed to do out of the box.