Graphics driver Update and rendering times

Barry W. Hull wrote on 5/4/2013, 8:16 PM

I had rendered a project, took about 28 hours. I needed to make a tiny change, but the change was worth it to re-render. In between when I did the first and second render, I updated the Nvidia graphics driver, now using version 320.0. That is the ONLY change to the system. The second render took less than 11 hours.

This decrease in render times has now repeated itself for multiple projects, rendering times decreasing by over 60%.

At first I thought I had something wrong with the render, how could they be rendering so fast I thought, but have double checked all settings, rendering out MainConcept MP4 (1280x720), have used this same setting over 100 times, got some good advice for appropriate settings, have used them for over a year. The final file is exactly as it was before, the projects are simply rendering much faster, as if, out of the blue, Vegas sped up. Because I updated a graphics driver? On the preview screen, the frames are clicking by over twice as fast as they used to. Anyone ever heard of anything like this?

One odd thing, the preview window now has a green outline that comes and goes, appears to be a preview bug of some sort, but it does not show up in the rendered file.

Comments

OldSmoke wrote on 5/5/2013, 9:40 AM

Very common. I have to stick to driver 296.10 for my GTX570 to get fast render times. The even older 275.33 is the fastest driver I know of for the GTX500 series and is another 10-15% faster then 296.10. If I use the latest Gforce driver 314.22, not only does the render time go up by as much 40%, the preview fps also drops a lot. So yes, that is possible. I m glad to hear that a Keppler based GPU does finally work with VP12. Maybe someone can figure out how to use the Quadro drivers with the GTX600 series. The K5000 is based on the GK104 chip which is also in the GTX660 up to the 690 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units#GeForce_600_Series

dxdy wrote on 5/5/2013, 1:54 PM

Barry, where did you find the 320 driver? I have checked the nvidia site for GTX 660ti and cannot find it, even as a beta.

Barry W. Hull wrote on 5/5/2013, 2:10 PM

I have a Quadro card, my guess is the drivers are not the same as those for the GeForce cards. The latest Quadro driver, I should have been more specific about that, is 320.0, and it is lightning fast, better than anything I have experienced, as far as render times. I am still experiencing the occasional crash (sometimes more than occasional), but when it works, it's fast.

I knew there were big differences in speed with different hardware, but didn't realize a video driver could make such a difference in speed, assuming the driver IS the difference.

wilvan wrote on 5/9/2013, 1:57 AM

My 2 workstations ( only and solely dedicated for editing ) also contain each 2 x quadro 4000's.

Upgraded drivers to 320.0 ( since that version has particular improvements for the quadro 4000 ) .

All same , when GPU=ON -> preview RAM must still be set to few MB only , otherwise preview stuttering with the least fx or simple cross fade.
( and notice ( since vegas12beta ) vegas CPU using 5 to 6% when GPU is ON ,
even when doing nothing at all in vegas , just having it open )

Since both workstations have plenty of CPU power AND plenty of RAM , GPU remains OFF and RAM preview to 20 and more GB . Way faster than GPU

The HPZ820 I had to ( options-internal prefs ) change max threads and threads to 32 since otherwise vegas restricts to 16 threads only . ( why they restrict that number to 16 is totally unclear ).

Am only interested in real-time previewing the best way possible ( rendering is done while I do something entirely different or whilst working at another system )

Mark_e wrote on 5/9/2013, 3:11 AM

NeatVideo has a nice benchmarking tool in their preferences that I found where you can set the project size and it will run through a series of tests from 1 - max threads cpu, GPU only and CPU+GPU 1- max threads to self test the plugin,

With Vegas + NeatVideo and my setup 2 x 4 core xeon 3.30ghz + 7900-- firepro +16gig max performance comes in at 12 threads CPU only then starts to tail off to 16, GPU only is slower and CPU + GPU is slower. Might be why Sony put the upper limit of 16 in perhaps ?

I used that as a guideline for the overall settings and I don't see much improvement over 12 threads but GPU helps more in the core vegas system I get stable smooth playback and at max preview + 50meg ram 12 threads + GPU with multiple 50mbps IPB 1080p files in the time line for example.

All the Sony default plugins I've tried play nice and I can stack a good few before I have to put preview to best auto to get smooth playback, even the gradient one which used to bring my old system to it's knees works ok.

What I haven't figured out yet is when it get's to a point where it's stuttering in preview I can't as yet see where the bottle neck is as yet CPU rarely goes over 20% in total and I usually have 8+gig unallocated and on the GPU side I've never seen that over 20% and 800meg ish when it's working ok.

Rendering out on that is also pretty much disk limited I think for 10bit dnxhd 25fps 1080p I get just under realtime playback unless I stack loads of plugins and it's quicker on my SSD then hard disk raid array for the same file so I'm guessing it's that.

I do have to be really careful with 3rd party plugins tho, some of those will just bring it to 2 fps render and stutter playback even if no effects applied just by adding them to the time line and I've noticed they will often max out the GPU memory at the same time. Need to get ticket into vendor again for that once I've got a bit more detail and I'm getting my head around how it hangs together better (after my embarrassing having 2 year out of date graphics card incident to start with :) I want to make sure I have all my data correct before asking for more helpv:) )

Barry W. Hull wrote on 5/9/2013, 1:05 PM

Yeah, good points, and obvious too.

I do most of my rendering when I'm asleep, so who cares how fast, well, unless it's REALLY slow. I know the render is faster because I can measure it, used to do it in two hours, now do it in one hour, easy enough.

As far as the preview, that is really what I want, a silky smooth preview even when I clog the timeline. Of course, preview is more subjective. I "think" it looks better, or maybe I'm fooling myself. I can't measure preview the way I measure render times.

In fact, I know I cut my render times in half with the latest driver update, but I'm not really sure if the preview looks better or not.

dingus wrote on 5/9/2013, 4:48 PM

"Barry, where did you find the 320 driver? I have checked the nvidia site for GTX 660ti and cannot find it, even as a beta."

Here's a link to the driver: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us

Barry W. Hull wrote on 5/9/2013, 7:54 PM

I have a Quadro GPU.

Try this:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-tesla-grid-win8-win7-winvista-64bit-320.00-whql-driver.html

Barry W. Hull wrote on 5/9/2013, 7:57 PM

To be clear, this is a driver for Quadro cards, not GeForce.