If you are going to spend around $400 anyway, I would recommend a professional graphics card like the http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814195106AMD 100-505648] FirePro V5900 2GB[/link].

John

I have the V4900 Card from ATI, and its good for the titles and gpu accelerated interface, but its slower than my CPU (Intel Xeon) for rendering.

The Cheapest Card would be one of the Nvidia 5xx series
If you have enough Money, get a Cuda Card - Quadro 4000 or 5000

Next Card in my PC will be a nVidia for sure, because the performance with the ATI is simply not there yet.

I have the V4900 Card from ATI, and its good for the titles and gpu accelerated interface, but its slower than my CPU (Intel Xeon) for rendering.
----------------------

When I posted the link above to the V5900 I went by the reviews at that link. Read them. They seem perfect for the OP's needs.

John

As I said, I have the V4900 and have tested the V5900 with Sony vegas 11 and 12.
I would NOT recommend them, since they wont speed up rendering at all, unless you are using a older i5/dual core cpu/or slower CPU

The reviews you linked to, don't tell anything about actual renderspeed or experience, is mostly random praises (most likely paid to do so even)

I have a Quadro2000 that renders a lot faster than the v4900, even if it on paper looks like it provide less than half the power.

Didn't know you had also tested the V5900. That's good enough for me.

BTW, Newegg reviews are legit. They have posted every review I have ever submitted to them unediied.

John

I'm also building a new system, and will be watching this thread carefully. I have the Nvidia GTX 560, and it does the job, but Vegas still crashes regularly enough, especially with bigger projects. The card does show up in Graphics Acceleration, but when it is turned on I get MAYYYYBE 2 minutes of editing before a crash.

I read in another thread a long time ago (this is just off memory) that someone posted something along the lines of "people buy cheap graphics cards and expect Vegas to work... I have a $1,000 graphics card and never have Vegas crash". I just did a search to try to find that user or post but can't find it (from earlier this year), but would love to see that users system profile. Maybe he has the magic card.

I read in another thread a long time ago (this is just off memory) that someone posted something along the lines of "people buy cheap graphics cards and expect Vegas to work... I have a $1,000 graphics card and never have Vegas crash". I just did a search to try to find that user or post but can't find it (from earlier this year), but would love to see that users system profile. Maybe he has the magic card.

You might be thinking of John Rofrano. His user name on here is JohnnyRoy and he uses an NVIDIA Quadro 4000 card (around $700 at Newegg).

Mike

Just built a new system in May. Here's my spec:

Intel i7-3930K
Asus P9X79 LE motherboard
32Gigs Corsair Vengeance Ram CMZ16GX3M4A2133C11B
Corsair H100i Liquid cooler
GPU: Gigabyte GTX560ti GV-N560UD-1G
Corsair CX750 power supply ..
Samsung 840 SSD 250GB for main drive. MZ-7TD250BW
Windows 8 oem version
Corsair Case Carbide 400R
Asus OEM Blu-Ray Writer

Vegas 12 Pro running very smooth previews on HD material GPU performing nicely. Loving the new system. Still keeping my timelines down to 5-10 min and assembling longer forms from the segments. Old habit but, to me, still makes sense. . Can't remember the last crash. Very glad I got the GTX 560ti...

These are my test results from an earlier thread:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?Forum=4&MessageID=859391

I still believe the 560Ti and higher 500 series cards with drivers between 275.33 and 296.10 are the way to go.

When they have the Kepler design working, I am going to buy a NVIDIA Quadro K4000 3GB GDDR5, but not a second before they have verified it works.

'Twer it me making the purchase, considering all the issues surrounding various graphics cards and poor GPU performance and glitches and almost no real reported benefit, i'd buy a $25 video card with no GPU at all and save the $375 to move up to a much better CPU and more RAM and hard drive space, all of which have very obvious and real benefits.

GPU? Ain't got no use for it.

GPU acceleration works perfectly over here and I sure wouldn't want to miss it!
BTW; $375 wont cut it to get the same performance as I got from my 2x GTX570. You have to invest into 2x Xeon kind of board and that lies well beyond $2000.

GPU? Ain't got no use for it.

... but it seems there is so much to gain from GPU acceleration - it's really a gem - like taken from a treasure chest at the end of a rainbow.

Member Chieworks says it like it is - all these discussions about pro and cons of video card versions to support current builds is really not necessary.

Until SCS can get it clear what direction their development is moving for the software, there is no reason to invest in either the software or the "GPU" functions on cards that are supposed to support them.

I am in the process of adding a current new build, and also a 4 month timetable future build of added servers to my render farm. In both cases I shall spend substantial sums on the CPU, Memory, and Board, but not much on a video card! No thanks, have no use or desire of a GPU.

Ritsmer, really? It seems like most people are reporting at best maybe 3 to 5% increase in rendering speed with the GPU, along with poor renders full of glitches. And those are the folks who get it to work at all.

Chienworks really? You are so wrong. GPU acceleration boost my render times even with one card by 100% cutting render times in half. The 3-5% you mentioned may apply to users with 600 series cards like a Titan from the other thread. Render times with that card are in 2:30 range whereas I render the same project in 00:45 with one GTX570 and 00:35 with both GTX570. My previous GTX460 did the same project in 00:55 which was already a great boost. Proof is in another thread of mine and no, there are no glitches or other errors what so ever.
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?Forum=4&MessageID=859391

Gentlemen:

I started this thread and am looking at this system. They do not offer the 500 series graphics cards.

Internal Expansion 1 x [6-Port] NZXT Internal USB Expansion System
Processor 1 x Intel® Core™ i7 3930K Processor (6x 3.20GHz/12MB L3 Cache)-Intel Core i7 3930K w/ Intel Performance Tuning Protection
PowerDrive 1 x PowerDrive Level 3 - Up to 30% Overclocking- Custom Liquid Cooling 1 x Custom Liquid Cooling w/ Quad + 3 Dual Radiators-
Memory 1 x 32 GB [4 GB X8] DDR3-1866 Memory Module
Video Card 1 x [Liquid Cooled] NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 - 2GB-Single Card
Motherboard 1 x Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4 -- 4x PCI-E 2.0 x16
Power Supply 1 x 1200 Watt - NZXT HALE90V2 1200W-
Primary Hard Drive 1 x 1 TB HARD DRIVE -- 32M Cache, 7200 RPM, 6.0Gb/s-Dual 1TB Drives (2TB Capacity) - RAID 0 High Performance
Data Hard Drive 1 x 2 TB HARD DRIVE -- 64M Cache, 7200rpm, 6.0Gb/s-Single Drive
Optical Drive 2 x 24X Dual Format/Double Layer DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW Drive-Black
Flash Media Reader / Writer 0 x None-
Meter Display 1 x NZXT Sentry LX Aluminum Fan Control, Clock, and Temperature Display-
Sound Card 1 x Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio-
Network Card 1 x Intel Pro 10/100/1000 Network Card-
Operating System 1 x Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate

jkerry - EXACTLY my point - read my post just a couple above. Get a 560TI version of an NVidia Card. You will not be able to do anything more economically and appropriately at this time in history!

You wont get the performance form the GTX680 that you might expect and you end up with the reported 3-5% improvement if at all. I do have a 3930K too but it doesn't make up for the performance difference; meaning that with GPU OFF you are still way too slow. Liquid cooling a GXT680 also seems a bit of an overkill; the 600 series runs in general cooler then the 500 series and you won't get 100% load on that GPU either. Liquid cooling the 3930K does make sense especially if you OC the processor. I got mine up to 4.4GHz on a simple H100 with 2x 120mm fans but to be honest, even the H80 I had did a very good job and 2 fans are noisier then 1. I also would rather switch the primary drive to a single SSD and have a RAID 10 for all the video footage plus a dedicated SSD for rendering. 32GB is a lot and from experience Vegas doesn't use even my 16GB. Also many x79 motherboards have issues when all 8 memory banks are occupied and you may have to reduce memory speed and timing. Anyway, the 3930K likes 1600MHz ram speed and I haven't found any significant improvement beyond that speed. I also would rather get a BluRay writer just in case you want to make those. Good choice is the Win7 64bit!

On the topic of memory, I read an interesting quote about the new Mac Pro here:


The quote is "And since it’s ECC memory, your render job, video export, or simulation won’t be stopped by transient memory errors."

Which implies to me that this is enough of a problem for Apple to use it as a selling point. There's other stuff in that article, though. Notably, Apple is going with ATI cards and OpenCL which makes me think AMD/ATI will do a bit of development. This doesn't mean you'd want to go with an ATI card this round but maybe next.

Personally, I sympathize with Kelly's point about reliability over speed.

Rob

ECC is an issue and you can buy expensive server boards to get ECC memory support but those usually have less powerful PCIe slots and may only support Xeon processors. Not a bad thing, but it will get very costly in the end.

How much of the current issues users have is related to ECC is hard to determine, but yes, turn down your memory speed and you might get surprised that your system becomes more stable and actually faster.

Turning down your memory speed is the more economical choice, and only filling half your slots is prudent.

Of course the problem is that most people who've spent the money to get 32GB of RAM would rather be drawn and quartered than turn down or remove memory. I think the more one spends the less one is likely to see or admit the hardware or software's flaws.

I found it interesting that they mentioned renders stopping due to memory errors.

Rob