Hi all,
I've owned a GTX 970 since launch and despite everything I've read about post Fermi performance in Vegas, it was even worse than I could have expected (my previous 2 cards were a GTX 560ti and then a 580). It's important to note I bought the 970 for gaming performance, not editing performance, and after updated to a 34" Dell I added a 2nd one. I'm not overly fussed by render times as I do short 2-3 minute videos, and I usually try to publish them as soon as possible after editing, so 5-10 mins render time actually lets me get descriptions, thumbnails and other things in order. Preview speed is what's important to me.
Anyway I've been away from editing for a year or so and really want to get back into it. I figured I could live with poor playback and compensate but selecting Draft or Preview... wrong. The 970 not only gave poor frames, but would even pause for half a second every 3 seconds, totally jamming the system, dropping GPU usage to 0% and making it impossible to do voiceovers within Vegas. Results varied depending on format (DSLR and AVCHD 50p mostly). I tried numerous drivers, Nvidia Inspector settings but I just couldn't make any headway with it. I put it down to the combination of poor Vegas support of these GPUs, and poor OpenCL support by Nvidia. Anyway, in Beta driver 350.05 and WHQL 350.12, Nvidia updated OpenCL from 1.1 to 1.2 support. It didn't seem to make much difference but on the weekend I decided to mess with settings and after hours of failure all of a sudden had a smooth preview window!
The settings were a combination of Multi Monitor Performance mode (this seemed to eliminate the disable SLI between gaming and editing sessions). Prefer maximum performance (anyone using a Maxwell GPU already knows this setting is critical to make the thing actually work at full speed), having NZXT cam software disabled and the big one... having the SECOND GTX 970 selected in Vegas, not the first. It seems anything that can take the GPUs attention away from concentrating on Vegas will. Funnily enough it's still the first GPU that's being taxed and the 2nd runs at 0%, gotta love unexplainable workarounds :D
Anyway now to get to the point. In the new Nvidia driver released today 352.86 the Vegas profile is inaccessible in Nvidia Control Panel (manually adding Vegas130.exe will not actually effect the core Vegas profile). In Nvidia inspector the Vegas profile has been updated and it works straight out of the box. All my hours of testing over the months and a simple driver update has made it all just work.
So in conclusion, Maxwell (and likely Kepler users), try this driver if you're having trouble. My previous workaround was quite specific to SLI, but I had the same problem when using a single card without finding a solution with the available drivers at the time. I still have the second GPU selected in Vegas, I'm not game to change it to GPU 1 as it can be tricky to get Vegas to hold the setting for 2nd GPU. I've also noticed increased frame rates when using HitFilm plugins in Vegas.
This isn't going to be as fast as a 290x of course. I've tested it against my 280x from my HTPC and it's pretty close in timeline performance now, maybe not quite as consistent though.
Good luck, any thoughts or personal experiences are welcome.
I've owned a GTX 970 since launch and despite everything I've read about post Fermi performance in Vegas, it was even worse than I could have expected (my previous 2 cards were a GTX 560ti and then a 580). It's important to note I bought the 970 for gaming performance, not editing performance, and after updated to a 34" Dell I added a 2nd one. I'm not overly fussed by render times as I do short 2-3 minute videos, and I usually try to publish them as soon as possible after editing, so 5-10 mins render time actually lets me get descriptions, thumbnails and other things in order. Preview speed is what's important to me.
Anyway I've been away from editing for a year or so and really want to get back into it. I figured I could live with poor playback and compensate but selecting Draft or Preview... wrong. The 970 not only gave poor frames, but would even pause for half a second every 3 seconds, totally jamming the system, dropping GPU usage to 0% and making it impossible to do voiceovers within Vegas. Results varied depending on format (DSLR and AVCHD 50p mostly). I tried numerous drivers, Nvidia Inspector settings but I just couldn't make any headway with it. I put it down to the combination of poor Vegas support of these GPUs, and poor OpenCL support by Nvidia. Anyway, in Beta driver 350.05 and WHQL 350.12, Nvidia updated OpenCL from 1.1 to 1.2 support. It didn't seem to make much difference but on the weekend I decided to mess with settings and after hours of failure all of a sudden had a smooth preview window!
The settings were a combination of Multi Monitor Performance mode (this seemed to eliminate the disable SLI between gaming and editing sessions). Prefer maximum performance (anyone using a Maxwell GPU already knows this setting is critical to make the thing actually work at full speed), having NZXT cam software disabled and the big one... having the SECOND GTX 970 selected in Vegas, not the first. It seems anything that can take the GPUs attention away from concentrating on Vegas will. Funnily enough it's still the first GPU that's being taxed and the 2nd runs at 0%, gotta love unexplainable workarounds :D
Anyway now to get to the point. In the new Nvidia driver released today 352.86 the Vegas profile is inaccessible in Nvidia Control Panel (manually adding Vegas130.exe will not actually effect the core Vegas profile). In Nvidia inspector the Vegas profile has been updated and it works straight out of the box. All my hours of testing over the months and a simple driver update has made it all just work.
So in conclusion, Maxwell (and likely Kepler users), try this driver if you're having trouble. My previous workaround was quite specific to SLI, but I had the same problem when using a single card without finding a solution with the available drivers at the time. I still have the second GPU selected in Vegas, I'm not game to change it to GPU 1 as it can be tricky to get Vegas to hold the setting for 2nd GPU. I've also noticed increased frame rates when using HitFilm plugins in Vegas.
This isn't going to be as fast as a 290x of course. I've tested it against my 280x from my HTPC and it's pretty close in timeline performance now, maybe not quite as consistent though.
Good luck, any thoughts or personal experiences are welcome.