You don't need a big-bucks graphics card for Vegas to work well, unless you want to use CUDA rendering of AVCHD files. However, the render times I've seen posted so far indicate that you'd be far ahead spending money on a fast multi-core CPU rather than a video card.

Thanks, so is the GeForce actually better - the specs say it has 192 cuda cores but the Quadro only has 32? Is an Intel Core i7 960 noticeably better than a i7 950? I've never overclocked and wouldn't start now.

Some of the OpenFX plugins will benefit from an OpenGL video card (I have at least seen this on the option button on some of the Boris CC7 fx). One such plugin being Boris Continuum Complete 7. So, if you plan on using plugins that can take advantage of a gpu, you may want to see what cards benefit performance the most.

j razz

"Thanks, so is the GeForce actually better - the specs say it has 192 cuda cores but the Quadro only has 32? Is an Intel Core i7 960 noticeably better than a i7 950? I've never overclocked and wouldn't start now."

For a few dollars more than the GT450, the GTX460 768mb has 336 processor cores, and it is a very quiet card .
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127512&cm_re=gtx460_768mb-_-14-127-512-_-Product


IMO, the i7 960 would not offer a noticeable improvement over the 960, and the almost $300 premium would be better spent elsewhere .

Though, you say you don't want to overclock, consider that Intel is just overclocking the 950, calling it a 960 and selling it for more..
You could easily bump the clock on the 950 to run at 960 speeds without having to make any other adjustments ..

Something I'm not sure about..

Does rendering using the GPU suppliment the CPU or replace it during the render. What I mean is, could you render two projects at the same time one using CPU and the other GPU?

I currently have an ATI card and wondering whether it is worth changing to a NVIDIA. I have a quad-core CPU.

There's a lot more to the rendering process than encoding to the output format. All the frames must be gathered from the source files. Generated media frames must be generated. Affects are applied. Transitions and composites are combined. Memory is allocated for various tasks. The UI is updated. Audio is processed and encoded. The output has to be cached and written. Since the GPU only assists on some codecs and all the tasks above are non-codec related and occur no matter what codec is used, it's reasonable to assume that those tasks are not run on the GPU even when the GPU is used for encoding.

So, you can't expect an idle CPU while GPU rendering is active.

That being said, you do realize that you can render dozens of projects simultaneously on the same CPU anyway, right?

It appears that expensive GPU cards are of little or no benefit in Vegas 10. See the recent thread below for more details:


http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=731093&Replies=28