graphics card for pro 13 and after effects

mattc77 wrote on 6/20/2014, 3:09 AM

Hi all

I'm looking for a graphics card solution for both Vegas pro 13 and after effects cc I've been tying my mind in knots so any pointers and suggestions would be great. I currently have a Radeon hd 6850 which has been fine for vegas but my render times for ae is insanely slow.

Regards

Matt

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 6/20/2014, 5:42 AM

The GPU is only really used in AE for acceleration of the ray-traced renderer. If you're not using it (and these days, most people don't), I wouldn't worry about your GPU at all. (Unless you have a third-party plugin like Element 3d that uses the GPU.)

For Vegas, the nVidia GTX580 seems to have gotten a lot of recommendations.

VideoFreq wrote on 6/21/2014, 2:03 AM

You will have to compromise as the card that works best for Vegas 13, does not work as well with AE. Go to nVidia's site and look up factory recommended cards. Previous mention of nVidia GTX570 or 580 for SVP 12 and 13 is correct. nVidia is THE card brand for Vegas. Don't stray from the 570 or 580. AE rendering can be sped up with a faster CPU. I believe as well that GPU rendering is WAY overrated.

NCARalph wrote on 6/21/2014, 9:42 AM

VP 13 seems to have problems with the NVidia 570 on rendering and is pretty much unusable for stabilization.

OldSmoke wrote on 6/21/2014, 10:06 AM

If the GTX570 has issues with VP13 so would the GTX580 have as these are identical cards aside from the amount of CUDA cores and memory. I got 2x GTX580 in my system and there are no issues what so ever.

BruceUSA wrote on 6/21/2014, 10:57 AM

More often or not, people tend to blame on the card when they have instability with Vegas or labeled as useless in gpu. If that are truth, then all others who has the same card should encountered the same problem. Have you ever wondering why it works beautifully for others and not me? That because they are many variation in hardwares being installed on a system or codecs/plug ins etc . All of these stuffs can caused Vegas nightmare. I had good luck with Vegas gpu and never had any mayjor issue that I can think of. Perhaps someday you can figured out the main root caused of all these. You will appreciate gpu much more. Just a thought.

NCARalph wrote on 6/21/2014, 11:16 AM

Well, rendering a 16 min 1080 30p mts file to the stock DVDA widescreen DVD video stream using the NVidia 570 GPU rendering on VP 11 takes 5:11 and runs without any problems. Doing exactly the same thing with no changes to anything on a newly installed version of VP 13 yields an estimated time of about 13:30 and a hard crash at about 75% of the render.

Perhaps there's something else affecting this, but clearly VP13 at a minimum isn't as robust as VP11.

BruceUSA wrote on 6/21/2014, 11:24 AM

I can totally understand your complaint, Sometime Vegas can get some very strange problem such as yours. I don't have any specific guideline to help solve your issue. Aside from that, I have no problem with V11-13 lucky me I guess.

OldSmoke wrote on 6/21/2014, 1:33 PM

+1 Bruce!
Same here, no issue with VP11-13. All my cards, GTX460, 2x GTX570, 2xGTX580 and even the HD6970 all worked as advertised. In fact, 2xGTX580 + HD6970 also worked well and fast too.

Guy S. wrote on 6/26/2014, 6:07 PM

My old system (HP Z400 w/6-core Xeon) used a GeForce 460 card. With this card I had to keep GPU acceleration in Vegas turned OFF else Vegas would crash often. With GPU acceleration ON there was very little difference in timeline performance so I didn't mind. When working in AE (CC version), the performance in complex HD projects with nested comps was extremely sluggish.

My new system is an HP Z420 with a 6-core Xeon and a Radeon HD 7970 card. Yesterday I did a quick comparison of timeline performance with/without GPU acceleration. The project had three layers of 720P video over a still graphic, and each video layer was resized with Track Motion:
CPU - 3 - 4fps
GPU 29.97fps

I've also 2x - 3x improvement in AE when working with a complex project. With Fast Draft Preview enabled the improvement is even more profound: adjustments are realtime, scrubbing the timeline is fluid, and the project plays at about 15fps (1/2 HD quality).

If I were buying a GPU primarily for Adobe CC apps I would likely go with the GeForce 580, since some 3rd party plugins use CUDA. But since the apps I use most often leverage OpenCL rather than CUDA I plan to stick with ATI for now.