ok, so with my new laptop running a modest 1.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo Proc. I just did a render of a video that is 9 minutes long. It took me about 2:1 real time to render a 15 track (9 video 6 audio) project and it had 80% transparency across 60% or more of the video, it was all cropped in the P/C, it was pretty extensively Color Corrected with effects on the clip, track, and project level. It included a couple small Chroma Keying portions, a little blurring, a project long multiply mask track, and so on... you get the idea. Anyway, Vegas just chewed through it like it was nothing. This was being compressed to WMV 512K CBR. Just awesome, I feel like "who needs hardware acceleration when a LAPTOP can get me near realtime playback on most of this while editing, and it can render at near realtime too!"
ok, I'm done now. Time to sleep
Dave