Kelly .. no bull. GPU works for me. With the GTX560Ti my render times are a minimum of 100% faster with GPU (using CUDA) turned on. I can fully understand someone being reluctant to add a new graphic card to an old system with the hopes it will improve render times --- but the OP is getting a new system.

The GTX560Ti would be my choice within his system spec if Vegas editing is the prime use of the machine.

I just want to thank everyone for all the replies.
I think I will be going with the GTX560Ti card.

But have one more question. I was told it maybe better to add 2 graphics cards. I can not understand if it would help with rendering having 2 cards on the system.

Anyone with experience having 2 of the same card on their system that it helped any with Vegas.

Thanks,
Jeff

Yes, I do have 2x GTX570 on my system and you get an additional 30-40% gain on rendering speed. I rendered the SCS benchmark project in 00:48sec with one GOU and in 00:35 with two. Just make sure you use driver 296.10 and don't set up SLI; don't even install the SLI bridge. You should also check the your motherboard can support 2x PCIe x16 and doesn't revert to 2x PCIe x8. Also make sure you have sufficient spacing between the PCIe slots but the 560Ti should be fine as it only takes up 2 slots versus the 570 which is 3 slots. I run 3 monitors, and I am very happy with the system. You can actually get GTX570 from EVGA or ASUS on eBay for got money as many gamers are changing to 600 series which is where they shine. I bought my second one from there and it has been running now for 5 month daily without any issue.
As for the 560Ti, there are two versions with different CUDA core count 384 and 448 whereby the later one also has a higher bus bandwidth and is very similar to a GTX570.

Thansk for the quick reply.

Jeff

Edit: Not all render codecs take advantage of the 2nd GPU, MC AVC does but MPEG2 doesn't; I haven't tried others as the main reason for the second card is the 3 monitor setup and if you split preview window and external monitor on separate cards, you will see that both cards are under load when you playback the timeline.

> [rs170a] said: "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)."

Yea, that sounds like something I would say. ;-)

The key thing being that professional graphics cards get tested and tweaked to work and perform well with professional graphics programs and gaming graphics cards get tested and tweaked to perform well with games. No one should be surprised that the game card doesn't work well with a professional graphics program. That's not what it was designed to do. It's not about the hardware chips that are on the card... it's about the stability of the software drivers that talk to the chips! A lot of what you are paying for with the Quadro cards is the extensive compatibility testing that's done.

> [chap] said: "...but would love to see that users system profile. Maybe he has the magic card."

I'm sure my system have changed since I posed that but here are the specs for my current system which I built in June 2012:

Intel Hex Core Video Editing Workstation

It's based on the VideoGuys DIY9 build. It's really important to use components that match in the "real" world not just "on paper" because just because the specs match doesn't mean the components will work together reliably.

Here are the spec for the new system I'm getting later this year. :-D

~jr

I am just surprised that the Quadro 4000 isn't any faster. 61sec. on RenderTest-2010 is almost twice as long as my GTX570 takes; 33sec on my system.

> "I am just surprised that the Quadro 4000 isn't any faster. 61sec. on RenderTest-2010 is almost twice as long as my GTX570 takes; 33sec on my system."

That shouldn't be a surprise at all. The GTX570 has twice as many CUDA cores (480) compared to the Quadro 4000 (256). The new Quadro K4000 has 768 CUDA cores. You don't buy Quadro for it's power; you buy it for the stability of it's drivers.

~jr

While like you I prefer stability and I don't have any issue with that at all I can't imagine anything slower then what I currently have. You do need performance too as it is difficult to do your project, color correction, chroma keying and so on at a low preview setting. I can run a 4cam project with transitions and FX at "Best Full" and with scrolling text a setting lower. I don't mind spending the money on a Quadro K5000 if it is proven to be any faster.

Like you and after having build countless systems over the past 25 years, I select my components carefully.
Motherboards may have the same designation but there are vast differences between manufacturer; same applies to all components. My system is very similar but I do regret the Intel doesn't make boards anymore and I might change to an Asus WS board too or even go wih a dual Xeon on my next build.

@JohnnyRoy on the Mac Pro

It looks like a very well engineered purpose-built design.

Titan for me is stable I also had a 690 which worked as 680
No Nle can see dual Gpu at present
Depends on finances but 680 may be good

Have fun shoe-horning capture devices onto Darth Vader's waste bin- or at least getting them to run on your windows partition.

EDIT:

Hello everyone,
I have been following this topic for a while and I am still unsure what to do since I want a new card that also works well with both BIM software (Revit, ie lots of CUDA cores) and Vegas. The GTX660 is fairly popular for BIM, but is a poor choice for Vegas. I was looking on ebay for a GTX570 1GB or GTX560 ti 2GB.
How much should I pay for a 560 or 570, seems most are used or an OEM unit?
How much improvement in Vegas would I see with the 660 compared to my current Radeon HD 4350 (considering bagging GPU rendering)?

Thanks!
Jeff

Here is my current system:
Windows Version:7 64-bit
RAM:6GB Mushkin PC3 1280
Processor:i7 950 3.06 GHz
Video Card:ATI Radeon HD 4350 by Asus 512 MB fanless
Sound Card:M-Audio Fast Track C400
DVD Burner:LG 6x SATA multi blu-ray HD DVD ROM
Asus P6T i7 motherboard

Here is a link to an earlier thread about GPU acceleration with GTX570
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?Forum=4&MessageID=859391
My preferred brand is ASUS and a GTX 570 should be around $200. The GTX560Ti is ok but not as good and you may actually be able to get a GTX580 for $250 if you want to maximum power with one card.
This link contains all the Nvidia Chip and cards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units

I cant speak for AMD as I only had one for a very short period before VP11 but SCS comparison http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/gpuacceleration shows that the 6870 is better in playback but not when it comes to rendering. Surprisingly the Quadro 5000 also cant keep up with the GTX570. Since you are on Win7 you can use the older Gforce driver 296.10 which is still the most stable one for that GPU.
Keep in mind that you need a good power supply for such a card, 750W minimum depending on all the components in your system. If you have all that and space, go for two cards and you get an extra 40% performance.

Here's what I have found over the past few years of tinkering with GPU acceleration:

Intel HD 4000 is by far the fastest RENDERING solution out right now for Vegas (unless you are going to spend over $500 on a GPU). Hands down if you are rendering to MP4. For me it is 50% faster than the 968 CUDA cores in my EVGA GeForce GTX 660 SUPERCLOCKED 2048MB GDDR5 card.

However, and this is a BIG caveat, it is important to have both the graphics card installed and Intel HD 4000 working for the fastest render speeds. I have a 2 monitor setup and one monitor is driven by the GPU and one by Intel HD 4000.

I have tested the render results and have found that with certain video files the GPU card helps the Intel HD 4000 render 300% faster. I know that may sound un-scientific, but I have been using Vegas for 7 years and I have tested many different ways of rendering.

Again, who would have thought that having both a GPU and Intel HD 4000 available would make a difference, but it indeed does (especially for certain video file types). Now some may say that Vegas only uses one system or the other during rendering (either Intel HD 4000 or the GPU) and I believe that is technically correct but I am convinced that Vegas uses both interfaces somehow during rendering.

How do I know this? I purchased the GPU card hoping for amazing results and they were only OK. I then removed the card and tested Intel HD 4000 and was amazed at the speed increase, except for certain video file types. Finally I reinstalled the card and have them both available to Vegas and realized an increase in speed over the Intel HD alone.

My system:
Dell XPS 8500
Intel 3770 Quad at 3.6ghz (with Intel HD 4000)
EVGA GeForce GTX 660 SUPERCLOCKED 2048MB GDDR5
12GB DDR3 RAM
480GB SSD

@drewU2
Sounds interesting! So how fast is fast? Have you tried rendering the SCS benchmark project? That would give us some comparison to my test in the other thread. I am still interested in getting a Keppler based GPU like a GTX670 but I haven't seen anyone reporting actual render speeds and timeline performance. Unfortunately the LGA2011 CPUs don't have integrated GPUs so I cant verify that but I did have a 3770K before that and found it not to be any faster then the GTX570 and I also had troubles to get Quicksync to work properly.

Thanks OldSmoke,
I have a Nexus RX 8500, 768 watts AC and 850 total. Ebay has slim pick'ns for GTX570s but I will keep looking.
j

I actually just switched to a 670, was previously using a 560ti. This is on a 4.3ghz Haswell 4770k cpu and both monitors are driven by the 670. Maybe it's a recent thing but it looks like I'm getting partial gpu support now on the 670 with Vegas 12. The timeline ran pretty smooth with the 560ti, around 30fps or so, but with the 670 it runs at the full 60fps even with filters applied, it's buttery smooth which is why I switched since I record everything at 60fps, so seeing it at full speed on the timeline is great. On encoding I did some timings, the 560ti is still the fastest, cpu alone was slowest, and using the 670 fell somewhere in the middle. I don't mind losing some encoding speed because the timeline just runs so nice now!

I tried the HD4600 gpu on the cpu as well on it's own, with no gpu added in the system. The timeline was just much too jerky, and encodes weren't that quick either so I gave up on that. I did not try using both the 670 + HD4600 though as the previous poster suggests. I might give that a go at some point.

Question for drewU2, on your setup which monitor does your NVidia card power and which one does the Intel gpu power? Like goes your 660 power your main display where Vegas is run and the Intel 4000 powers your secondary display? Or does that not matter? I wonder if you are seeing the performance boost because during encoding it can use your 660 to decode the h264 video stream then it uses the HD4000 to encode it, all done in parallel. Whereas with just the HD4000 in your system your cpu has to do both decoding and encoding.