According to this article: https://www.provideocoalition.com/key-details-vegas-pro-15-release/ Gary says:

"Beyond the UI innovations, hardware acceleration has been taken very seriously and will get even better in the near future. The company started with a focus on rendering speed, but there are also improvements on the decode side as well. Users who have modern nVIDIA cards or Intel QSV technology will see the most acceleration benefits in the initial release. Future updates will help AMD card owners."

I also notice no render improvements from Vegas 13 using a Radeon card. Not sure if I trust vaporware, been burned a few times.

I am using a Nvidia card and have posted my benchmarks in the recent thread about v15 render speeds. I saw about 2 minutes shaved off of what originally was an 8 minute 4K video encode for the Vegas 11 benchmark project converted to 4K by using NVENC with Magix's new AVC renderer. Some other non-GPU accelerated file types had faster encodes as well, such as a 1-2 minute reduction on the ridiculously slow 4K XAVC-I encode (that same 4K file, over 20 minutes in both versions), down to about 20 minutes from 22 originally.

Some codec types actually rendered a few seconds longer than when I did my V14 benchmarks a while back. I suppose it boils down to what codec you are using. All in all, though, so far I've had rock solid stability, faster encodes on the file types I use most often, and I am noticing improvements while editing as well.

Considering Nvidia users got the cold shoulder for GPU support on pretty much every version of Vegas since GPU acceleration launched for it, I'm glad to see them showing us non-AMD folks some love. I can't do AMD cards, the drivers just are not stable enough to handle the video projection mapping work that I do.

So, there's no particular Preference settings or rendering codecs for GPU acceleration? Vegas is just faster with nVidia CUDA based GPUs?...

The new MAGIX AVC/AAC encoder can use NVENC (not CUDA) on supported NVIDIA GPUs, and QSV on supported Intel CPUs. Initial results have been good. The AMD equivalent of NVENC is VCE. Take note of the quote in marc-s's comment above, and see what future updates bring.

I guess I'm dense. Does Vegas "determine on its own" to accelerate render process based on "detected hardware" OR does the user? I see nothing in MAGIX AVC/AAC encoder that must be selected to use any CPU / GPU for render acceleration.

I see nothing in MAGIX AVC/AAC encoder that must be selected to use any CPU / GPU for render acceleration. I see nothing in Vegas Pro help referring to VCE.

Because it's not in Vegas Pro yet. I have suggested it and am optimistic for it in a VP15 update. I suggest users don't jump ship from AMD to NVIDIA just yet, just to get hardware-accelerated AVC rendering.

Just a little bit of a comment on this...

The overall work on hardware acceleration is just beginning. We have a number of other improvements both on the decoding and encoding side that are in progress and will be released in early updates to Vegas 15. We are definitely not going to ignore AMD users (as many people have, understandably, been pushed to use those cards with earlier versions of Vegas). QSV and NVENC were chosen first as they were areas that had been most lacking previously. Much of the work for Vegas 15 was infrastructure work so we can better implement these improvements moving forward and be flexible in an ever changing area of technology. We do not want to be stuck in a situation like we were previously where we did some GPU work and then left it alone, falling behind on our support of new hardware that was made available.

For Vegas 15, the hardware support work was seen as one of our most important areas of focus and while some of our users have not been able to see the fruits of this work quite yet, we feel confident that the continued improvements will prove beneficial to everyone very soon.

Thanks Derek, that's encouraging news. It would be great if Vegas could become more fluid during editing of 4K material. Nothing like choppy response to kill creativity.

Just a little bit of a comment on this...

The overall work on hardware acceleration is just beginning. We have a number of other improvements both on the decoding and encoding side that are in progress and will be released in early updates to Vegas 15. We are definitely not going to ignore AMD users (as many people have, understandably, been pushed to use those cards with earlier versions of Vegas). QSV and NVENC were chosen first as they were areas that had been most lacking previously. Much of the work for Vegas 15 was infrastructure work so we can better implement these improvements moving forward and be flexible in an ever changing area of technology. We do not want to be stuck in a situation like we were previously where we did some GPU work and then left it alone, falling behind on our support of new hardware that was made available.

For Vegas 15, the hardware support work was seen as one of our most important areas of focus and while some of our users have not been able to see the fruits of this work quite yet, we feel confident that the continued improvements will prove beneficial to everyone very soon.

An RX and Firepro user here, that is good news for me, maybe until I see some improvements on these cards I will upgrade to VP15, for now I'm ok with VP14 &13 and Platinum

For Vegas 15, the hardware support work was seen as one of our most important areas of focus and while some of our users have not been able to see the fruits of this work quite yet, we feel confident that the continued improvements will prove beneficial to everyone very soon.

Derek, I think you need to start releasing public beta versions six months before the official release. This is a very good experience for us and for Vegas Team.

Just a little bit of a comment on this...

The overall work on hardware acceleration is just beginning. We have a number of other improvements both on the decoding and encoding side that are in progress and will be released in early updates to Vegas 15. We are definitely not going to ignore AMD users (as many people have, understandably, been pushed to use those cards with earlier versions of Vegas). QSV and NVENC were chosen first as they were areas that had been most lacking previously. Much of the work for Vegas 15 was infrastructure work so we can better implement these improvements moving forward and be flexible in an ever changing area of technology. We do not want to be stuck in a situation like we were previously where we did some GPU work and then left it alone, falling behind on our support of new hardware that was made available.

For Vegas 15, the hardware support work was seen as one of our most important areas of focus and while some of our users have not been able to see the fruits of this work quite yet, we feel confident that the continued improvements will prove beneficial to everyone very soon.

I didn't see any improvement in Sony AVC encoding with version 15 with Nvidia 750ti card. NEVC started with the 600 series (so I read), so it should have it. Also, the "check GPU" doesn't find any GPU. I am at latest driver from July this year. In video preferences, it shows the 750ti card. Of course, I select "render using GPU if available". Using AMD 8350 CPU if that maters.

All this render Acceleration seems a little gimmick to me. Sounds like the timeline is still OpenCL based the same as VP11-14 were. So NV cards are not going to be the clear choice for timeline playback.

NV1080 titanx -11TFLOPs

AMD Vega - 13+TFLOPS at half the price.

still seems like AMD is the way to go.

"I didn't see any improvement in Sony AVC encoding with version 15 with Nvidia 750ti card." you probably need a newer version of the NVENC ASIC to work, or work at the level you are asking it to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVENC - this link shows the capabilities of the different generations.

NVENC and VCE are just separate ASIC chips similar to what your phone and camera has to record video to file and playback. Like frame serving to handbrake, the ASIC handles the specific task of encoding. There are limitations/ or fixed ways to how the encoding is performed.

Generation 4 support for 8K HEVC and 10-bit encoding sounds pretty sweet, even if Vegas only supports 4K output.

"Nvidia's consumer-grade (GeForce) cards are restricted to two simultaneous encoding jobs. Their professional Quadro cards do not have this restriction." - with a quadro card vegas may be able to encode multiple resolutions at one time.

All this depends on if Magix will support these features with new cards and functions coming out every 6 months.

I didn't see any improvement in Sony AVC encoding with version 15 with Nvidia 750ti card. NEVC started with the 600 series (so I read), so it should have it. Also, the "check GPU" doesn't find any GPU. I am at latest driver from July this year. In video preferences, it shows the 750ti card. Of course, I select "render using GPU if available". Using AMD 8350 CPU if that maters.

@wilri001 The improvement is in the new MAGIX AVC/AAC encoder, where you should be able to choose NVENC in "Encode mode". Supported GPUs are listed here.

Wow! Render went from 2.25x to 1.06x! Project is 3 HD1080 and 1 4k camera with colorize & pan/zoom & crossfades to HD1080 out.

Thanks for the reply, Nick. That window opens in the middle not showing the new Magix lines, and I thought since Magix bought Sony, it was the same old CODEC being discussed.

Also, "Enable So4 Compound Reader for AVC/M2TS" to FALSE restored smooth transitions in edit mode.

If I can figure out how to use the new PIP RX to zoom easily, I will definitely upgrade (from 13 edit). There's no corner handles to set zoom in the preview window at GT 100%. I'll make separate post for this.

Yes the improvement in render time with NVENC even on a relativ weak Quadro K4200 is significant also - render time went down in my tests to 45% of the time without NVENC, what is great.

But the most important feature is QSV, since it allows faster rendering AND supports also the preview from the timeline. And that will become important for UHD too.

using gtx1070 card and high quality render settings with sony avc I get render encodes more than twice as fast now. It's incredible. a a video that took 10mins to encode with AVC now takes 4m20s with SONY AVC. This is best case scenario though. I deliberately used filters that also used GPU accelleration. This meant my cpu was close to 100% and GPU rose in temperature by 17degreesC (I don't know how to monitor GPU load). This indicates maximum efficiency. using all of cpu power as well as GPU.

I also chose non GPU accelerated filters, some that traditionally really slowed down rendering and I notice CPU load would reduce to as low as 30% indicating non gpu accelerated filters slow down the queue'ing to rendering engine so everything becomes less efficient and the gains become much less. It is maybe to be expected but I don't know why the filters can't use extra cpu to speed things up

Good to hear this work continues. Given that AMD GPUs offered the best overall performance in Vegas, and that OpenCL is clearly the future of GPGPU computing, it was concerning that Vegas 15 went nVidia proprietary in the first release rather than general purpose (OpenCL isn't just for nVidia or AMD GPUs, but all sorts of computing devices). Seems like a waste of time, though I guess using NVENC made it pretty easy, since nVidia did most of the work. I suppose VCE gives you the same shortcut for AMD systems.

Just as critical is to get past the handcuffs that Main Concept placed on the rendering engine by keying their GPGPU support to specific GPU chips. The whole point of OpenCL is to function independently of the specifics of the GPU or other compute engine (Intel PHI, etc). The whole industry is pretty much embracing OpenCL, and it woudl be a shame to see Vegas left in the dustbin of history... which is where it was heading under Sony, for sure. Maybe general purpose OpenCL is too much to ask, but the competiton is going there.

Hopefully I can sneak a quick question in here, as many/most of the parameters are the same.

I am in the process of a new build, and like many orthers, I have asked for an AMD openCl GPU card. In my case, just like the OP. a RX580.

I haven't made the jump to 15 yet, I'm still on 13 Pro, (I plan to upgrade in the not too distant future, but need a functioning device first) but did I glean in the above comments that the Radeon card is a good fit for 13? The comment was "And as for marc-s's post; nothing has been done since v13 for Radeon card." From that I infer that in the 13 release there was provisions included to embrace the Radeon cards?

Thank you for any insights you can offer

To whom it may concern, this is kind of urgent...I'm falling behind in my work.

I currently have a Windows 10 64-bit machine, 64GB DDR5 RAM, an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X 16-Core CPU and an AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB card.  I am currently using SVP13.

This AMD card is a great card and I can edit my 4K timeline just fine (not choppy at all!), but when it comes to actaully rendering and using GPU Acceleration in Sony Vegas Pro 13, it fails more often than not.  Rendering looks like it’s going just fine, and then I walk away and come back and all of the sudden Vegas Pro 13 says Frame is at “0” and rendering has stopped.  And sometimes, when I’m rendering, the GPU stops rendering and CPU kicks in, and I don’t know why…CPU seems to be working hard at completely unmanipulated 4K 150MBps footage that has no filters on it of any kind, just straight clips.  Not sure why it’s switching to the CPU, not sure why it’s rendering so slowly, and not sure why the GPU just stops rendering, but it’s frustrating. And even more frustrating, sometimes I get the BSOD.

Should I get an AMD HD 8000 series card instead of my AMD RX 580 card?  Or switch to NVidia GTX card? If so, which? Which card do you think is absolutely best for my configuration of editing 4K footage? Or should I upgrade to Vegas Pro 15?  I am at my wit’s end and pulling my hair out rendering these videos only to find that they aren’t rendering all the way, and having to rinse and repeat.

If I understand correctly SVP15 now makes much more use of NVidia cards for GPU acceleration, so I'm genuinely considering getting the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080ti (https://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-GeForce-GAMING-Graphic-N108TGAMINGOC-11GD/dp/B06XXJL3HM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1506491944&sr=8-1&keywords=GIGABYTE%2BGeForce%2BGTX%2B1080%2BTi&th=1)

Thanks so much for any and all replies!!!

@ringsgeek Take a look at this thread: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/faq-how-can-i-stop-vegas-pro-hanging-or-crashing-during-rendering--104786/

So, there's no particular Preference settings or rendering codecs for GPU acceleration? Vegas is just faster with nVidia CUDA based GPUs?...

The new MAGIX AVC/AAC encoder can use NVENC (not CUDA) on supported NVIDIA GPUs, and QSV on supported Intel CPUs. Initial results have been good. The AMD equivalent of NVENC is VCE. Take note of the quote in marc-s's comment above, and see what future updates bring.

I certainly understand adding NVENC support before VCE, but what is the formal method for sending Magix your suggestions for enhancements? I had a Nvidia 750ti and just installed AMD Fury x last weekend, and saw no improvement in multicam editing or rendering. So I kept the Nvidia card in the motherboard for rendering. But looking forward to VCE for even faster render with a much more powerful Fury x.

Also, can anyone clarify the role of a graphics card playing back the timeline (especially in multicam mode)? I'm sure it helps with FX like transitions and compositing, but it doesn't seem to help displaying multiple tracks at once. Is there hope for more ways a graphics card can be used for multicam preview in the future? Or just upgrade the CPU?

Thanks for your advice.

I certainly understand adding NVENC support before VCE, but what is the formal method for sending Magix your suggestions for enhancements?

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/faintly-outraged--108640/#ca669597