TheHappyFriar - perhaps you mean to say that it won't affect overall rendering speed because Vegas doesn't use the GPU to render?

In terms of overall performance ("snappiness") of the application and things like rendering of effects for preview, playback, etc. I saw a significant peformance jump going to an ATI Radeon 3870 (512MB GDDR4). Of course it also makes a difference which card you are moving up from.

Unless you were upgrading from an incredibly old, legacy video card, you shouldn't see much, if any improvement in preview or playback speed in Vegas. There was a recent thread that discussed this topic at length.

In Vegas, adding more CPUs will lower rendering times, assuming that the codec supports multiple threads. Adding more RAM will give you longer RAM previews. Faster hard drives may also improve preview performance. Unfortunately, unlike a few other NLEs, a high end, new video card affects nothing in the present version of Vegas.

Now I'm open to anyone who can demonstrate through benchmarks that a new graphics card does impact Vegas preview speed, but so far, no one has posted that kind on information, either here or anywhere else on the Internet.

I've never seen any speed up from my Radeon 8500 to the 9600 to the x1950 to the 3850. My wife's vista laptop with an intel built in GPU previews just as fast as my ATI 3850 (unless the CPU can't hold up).

I suppose you might see some improvement in overall graphics performance, especially if you're trying to preview an HD program full screen, but that wouldn't really be an improvement to Vegas directly, it'd just make your system seem better.

The main point is that you don't need to throw tons of money at graphics cards. In fact, if Vegas ever started leveraging GPUs you might kick yourself for having spent so much on the wrong one.

Rob

jabloomf1230, TheHappyFriar, Rob:

My system is an HP m9300t (Quad 9450 2.66GHz, 4GB, Vista64) running Vegas 8.1. It is not an underpowered system. The stock graphics card on that was the NVIDIA GeForce 9300. I upgraded it to the previously mentioned 3870. So I went to a DirectX 10.1 capable (in hardware) graphics with 512MB GDDR4 memory, and Vista was noticeable better - Vista experience level went from 4.0 to 5.9 on the graphics.

Specifically in Vegas, I noticed a definite speedup in previewing the sample project that shows a cube spinning around - I'm sorry I can't remember the name of that sample project at the moment. This project isn't just simply playing a clip, some of the effects it's applying is doing computations and it's probably using some hardware capabilities (via DirectX API probably) and that's where I'm seeing the difference. It went from a jerky spinning to a smooth spinning preview after the graphics upgrade. I suggest if you have the time to experiment, you try it out yourself.

I suggest that you had a driver-related issue with the 9300 and when you upgraded to an ATI graphics card, the problem disappeared. BTW, I just upgraded from an nVidia 7950GX2 (not a slouch by any means, but old) to twin nVidia 9800GT (a mid-level, new card) in SLI and it didn't make any difference in the preview speed of Vegas 8.0c or 8.1.

Vegas doesn't use DirectX 10, SLI, OpenGL, CUDA or anything else that a new card might provide. Not only that, it mostly uses VFW video codecs (not DirectShow), which additionally adds to the archaic nature of the preview and rendering components. The Vegas SDK doesn't even allow software developers to access the guts of the rendering and preview systems to make plug-ins that could improve matters, in the same way that Adobe has done with Premiere.

Maybe all these improvements will come to pass in Vegas 9.0, but we'll have to wait and see.