@j-v I see what you meen. But what you are showing is not really my issue. I manage to have good performance when I only use Vegas internals. So in UHD projects it can use 6 to 8 gigs of video RAM (so not the normal RAM which is 32GB and more then enough). The video RAM is located on my GTX-1080. All doing well. But when I use external OFX plugins, such as RSMB of Neat Video in GPU mode. There isn't sufficient video RAM available for the plugins to cooperate. I could turn GPU acceleration off for the plugins, but then they perform poor. Or I can turn Hardware Decoding in Vegas to use Intel QSV, but this isn't as good als NVDEC.

So I am looking for a way where I can use NVDEC for both Vegas and OFX plugins in harmony.

Isn't NVDEC only for fast decoding the source codec and GPU acceleration not by NVDEC?

But when I use external OFX plugins, such as RSMB of Neat Video in GPU mode. There isn't sufficient video RAM available for the plugins to cooperate.

For better performance of 3th party plugins you have to ask their developpers to make it better for the upgraded Nvidia options, but I think most are not Nvidia lovers.
I think also that using options of the Deprecated Features and not default choosen Options
slow down the proces like I see on my own 4K HEVC test.
I don't know exactly the reason but I think the Vegas development know.
 

@j-v The plugins that I use are all up to the most recent version (less then a few months old) and I do not use the Deprecated Features in Vegas. So all things are on default except for the Dynamic RAM preview, I always put that on "0" instead of "200" MB's because it runs Vegas more stable and I don't use it any way.

It would be nice to limit the amount of video RAM in Vegas so I can let the OFX plugins use some of it. But that is pure a developers request I think.

I will try to make a screenrecording of the issue that I experience later.

@j-v The plugins that I use are all up to the most recent version (less then a few months old) and I do not use the Deprecated Features in Vegas. So all things are on default except for the Dynamic RAM preview, I always put that on "0" instead of "200" MB's because it runs Vegas more stable and I don't use it any way.

It would be nice to limit the amount of video RAM in Vegas so I can let the OFX plugins use some of it. But that is pure a developers request I think.

I will try to make a screenrecording of the issue that I experience later.

Upgrade the hardware too?

NVIDIA's RTX 2080 Ti gives 11GB of v-ram, AMD's Radeon 7 or Vega 64fe 16 GB, so...

And if that's not enough there's TITANs and stuff. :)

@adis-a3097 Yes, that is probably the best thing to do. Just buy new hardware. :-) But do we know for sure if Vegas only claims so much VRAM? Or does it just take whatever there is available? Because in that case it doesn't matter if I buy a new GPU with more VRAM.

@adis-a3097 Yes, that is probably the best thing to do. Just buy new hardware. :-) But do we know for sure if Vegas only claims so much VRAM? Or does it just take whatever there is available? Because in that case it doesn't matter if I buy a new GPU with more VRAM.

Don't get me wrong, but what we do know is that Vegas can't claim more than what there is. We also know that 16 GB RAM is recomended for 4K (we're not dealing with 720 or 1080 anymore, right?), and for any seriuos work - no tool is too expensive. And I stress serious!

Check this out:

Pay close attention to what happens from 3:45 onwards! :)

@adis-a3097 no we're dealing with 4K and 10 bit HDR these days. Which asks for extra GPU processing power. And yes we're investing in camera gear, servers, networking and people. So an new high end workstation would be the solution. I am aware of that. But the thing here is, that the minimum specs ask for 16GB of RAM, it never says Video RAM which is totaly diffent. So this is the thing, with the use of File I/O: NVDEC, Vegas started using Video RAM. It never did this before. Or maybe it did, but not a sufficient amount of it. And this is my problem. How much Video RAM will Vegas use BESIDES the normal 16GB of RAM. Which Nvidia to buy, because the RTX line-up today "only" suits 12 GB Video RAM. Right now I have 8GB and that is not enough appearantly.

32GB RAM recommended for 4K (and that's 8 bit 4k).

They don't offer minimum recommendations for GPU RAM usage, but if you are using other plugins that take a chunk of that RAM, you need to either tell those plugins to use less RAM or get more RAM. It would be nice if Vegas would let you configure how much VRAM it uses, but for now it doesn't. Neat Video does, however, so I'd start there.

@fr0sty Yes, it's 32GB recommended for 4K, I forgot that but your right. Neat Video indeed does let me configure my RAM, I will play with it some more. Because sometime Neat Video recommends me to use more VRAM for stability. I will start tweaking there. But it would be a feature request for Vegas to let us control the VRAM amount.

Why are you reducing your Video Preview Ram to "0"? Some others who I trust have said to set this, since you have sufficient RAM, to about 1/3 of your overall non-GPU RAM, i.e., 10 GB for you. Would you consider trying that and report back?

@fred-w I do not use the Dynamic RAM Preview, so that is why I turn it to "0 MB's". The experience I have is that setting it to let's say 1/3 of available RAM, it makes Vegas less stable. The explaination I have for this is that Vegas claims an amount of RAM and that makes it sluggish. By setting it to 0 the software feels lighter. But maybe I'm wrong. This is a point of debate. I will test this later.

I've had similar varied experiences with Dynamic RAM Preview settings -- I wish someone who works on the product team could explain in some level of tech detail when and how Dynamic RAM Preview is is used, and if perhaps it's buggy? I've found when setting it to 0 I've had a more stable experience -- many times I cannot render without crashing or oddities when it's set above 0. But then when using BorisFX if I set this to 0 I had different errors/problems.

Regarding @joost-berk's comments for Vegas to be able to offer a ceiling/cap on how much RAM is used by the hardware decoder -- I think that's a reasonable request so some of the RAM can remain available for plug-ins like NeatVideo. Personally, my system is set to Intel QSV for the Hardware Decoder to use and it's performing fine with my multi-track HD footage (not 4K) -- but that request seems reasonable.

UPDATE: Today I was testing some settings on a HDR10 UHD project of 2 minutes

Rendering: I/O with QSV and Dynamic RAM preview 200MB (default) = 10:59

Rendering: I/O with NVENC and Dynamic RAM preview 0MB = 20:34

Rendering: I/O with NVENC and Dynamic RAM preview 200MB = 10:58

This is my benchmark project, so only with Vegas internal plugins. So during rendering Vegas is using the amount of Dynamic RAM you set in the preferences. This is world shocking for me, because I did not now this. So I hope that a Vegas engineer can say something about how the Dynamic RAM Preview setting has influence on the rendering process.

@joost-berk Interesting results! I've always left the dynamic ram preview at 200 - but I would imagine it has to do with a bit of pre-rendering. When you're editing and working in the timeline, Vegas will always pre-render a frame or two in advance as far as I can tell, and keep that in the ram preview. So if you have it set to 0 it would make sense there would be nothing really buffered, and might take longer to render as it's possibly not buffering any frames and/or not multi-threading properly? Not entirely sure. I will say though, we recently tried swapping out our Radeon VII in one of our suites with an Nvidia RTX 2070 Super with horrible results. Thought it was possibly a faulty card, so swapped for another one, and even tried two different systems with the same result. Basically crashing and poor playback compared to the Radeon VII. Was kind of surprised based on what we were reading, and peoples comments here, and Magix recommended specs. I'm guessing it's quite possibly a combo of Ryzen Threadrippers and Nvidia cards not being happy cohabiting. QSV is insanely fast, so if you have a newer Intel processor I honestly feel like that does more heavy lifting than the GPU - but I can't confirm this. The Ryzen chips don't have QSV - so I was shocked the Nividia card performed so poorly, I thought with all the Nvidia support in Vegas it would be much faster than we were experiencing, but it just choked on most things we threw at it. Perhaps it might depend on the source codecs/footage, and what kind of plugins you're using. We shoot primarily XAVC-I and XAVC-S.

@mikelinton that is interesting! A friend of mine just bought a Imac Pro and installed Windows 10 with Bootcamp, it has a Intel Xeon 10 core CPU with a Vega 56 GPU, it is a beefy machine and it renders the same benchmark-project in 9 minutes. So this is funny to see! It realy looks like Nvidia maybe is not the "to-go-to" GPU. My whole new RTX-2080 Super never exceeds 20% of workload with VEGAS at all. So I don't know what is happening here, but even the fans won't spin up on the GPU. I really hope on a solution for this, so we can use our setups more efficient.

@joost-berk That is interesting. In our experience AMD overall has been faster with Vegas since GPU support first showed up. We were running Radeon R390s on our previous Intel Machines, but recently upgraded both of our edit suites to Threadripper 12 and 16 core machines. Going from an 8 core i7 to 16 core Threadripper was actually not as big of a performance jump as we'd expected. It only netted out about a 10-15% improvement in render times. Going from the R390 to the Radeon VII made the majority of the difference in our case. In retrospect knowing that, we would have probably stuck with the Core i7 and just gone with the Radeon VII. Would have been much cheaper and probably overall with QSV support netting out similar or possibly better performance. Rendering to H264 as we do for delivery of most projects for the web, the Radeon VII is insanely fast when you use the GPU for encoding. Our test project involves 5 streams of video, all colour corrected, all 4K, XAVC-I/S source footage, with 5 OFX audio plugins running - that project will play back at 23.98fps without a hiccup on the Radeon VII. On the 2070 it was barely maintaining 10fps with frequent hiccups. Was really quite shocking as I expected it to perform better. The only reason we went to the 2070 to test, was to see if it would work properly to decide H265 on the fly - and the results were abysmal compared to the Radeon. Sooo... back to the Radeon it is! Id be super curious to see what your benchmark project renders at on this setup - is it something you could upload somewhere we could test it on just for curiosity sake?

@mikelinton So it seems that the AMD GPU's realy do a good job with Vegas! I would love to send you the project, although it is filled with confidential clip material, so I can't do that. But i could try to replace the XAVC clip with same quality/codec/settings clips and test if it shows the same results. Then I will defenitly send you this project.