Rendering times for me is the reason to upgrade, right now im running a P3 666 with 750mb ram and it works fine with vegas, my only complaint is the rendering times and and watching the preview window (ive been utilising the dynamic ram preview function alot lately).

A 5 min project with transitions and fx takes about 2 hours to render in best quality, if i can get that down to 15 mins id be much happier.

Do NLEs that use the GPU have vastly better rendering times ?

I have a dream that maybe one day sony would make an optional hardware component for vegas that gives unbelievebale rendering times.

regards
Jc

Maxum PC just did a shoot out between the Athlon64, G5 and the Extreme Pentium 4--guess who won---the Pentium 4--extreme--only problem is its a fortune and I think that Intel intends to keep the price high.

There is a whole lot of issues using hardware for rendeing. One of the attractions to me of using VV was that it didn't use hardware for rendering. Once you go down that path you can become limited to what fx the hardware supports and you're pretty much stuck at whatever speed the render hardware supports.

Also it depends on just what is being rendered. GPUs can render very complex details at amazing speeds, just look at what they do in 3D games.
To answer your question yes NLEs that use the GPUs do render very quickly. I think this will be the way forward as the interface to the GPU is generic.

What is going to be an issue is support. It's a big enough can of worms when all you need is a basic PC to run VV, just look at the number of people having problems and 80% of those aren't caused by the code. Add the GPU into the equation with all the variants and it could become a nightmare.

In your case I'd spend my money getting a faster PC. You don't need to go overboard, the 2.6GHz P4s seem to be at a reasonable price / performance point now.

Do what I did. I bought a much cheaper P4 rated at 2.8, then overclocked. It runs at 3.3 Ghz and saved me a bundle.

Buying the "fastest" CPU is like buying jumbo sized eggs. Its still eggs, the jumbos aren't superior in any way, they're just bigger If you want more its much cheaper to buy large or medium grade and fix yourself 3 eggs rather than paying a premium for two jumbo eggs just to say basically oh look how big this egg is.

Same principle applies with CPU chips. No need to buy the highest rated since there is NO difference in the chip itself, it simply done better in testing which is what justifies its higher price because it can run at a higher clock frequency. You can boost a slower chip via overclocking. Very simple these days with many motherboards.

Above applies to chips in the same family, not variances between one design to another. Also keep in mind both AMD and Intel hype the marketing and much of it is snake oil. You do know that, right?

The thing with comparing the G5 vs AMD-64 vs Intel Extreme is that none of them are in any way alike anymore (well, the AMD and Inter have 32bit, and the AMD and G5 have 64 bit..) There isn't any PC software yet that really uses 64 bit code. Several companies are releasing stuf though (DivX is releasing a special 64bit encoder and Canapus it releasing 64bit stuff).

The Iner has a faster 32bit speed then the AMD. The AMD does 64bit and the Intel doesn't. Can't use Vegas on the G5.

Here's an idea (what I did). Buy what you can for say, about $400-500. That will get you AT LEAST an AMD XP 2600 (or somewhere around there). Then, wait a fre months. If the AMD 64 bit's take off, buy one. It WILL run all your old programs (32,16,8 bit) and any new 64bit.

When people always say that the Inter is faster in "benchmarks", I always like to mention something I saw at college.
A Duel p3-700 running Maya 1 rendered just as fast as an SGI O2 with a 300mhz chip running Maya 1. Why? The SGI's were 64bit, fast BUS, etc. Of course they lost the benchmark in games. :)

Now SGI does 128bit and their fast processor is ~600mhz. But boy, it renders FAST! :)

But BB,
it MUST be true, look at all that shiny packaging and all those holograms on the box. With all that on the outside its just got to be better on the inside, hasn't it?

farss - thanks for that . . I needed a chuckle. I'm headlong into a 5 minute Diwali project . . . I've had my head up my bottom on this "puppy" for the last 2 days. . your comment has really broken my "concentration" enough to get back . . "On-Track" - thanks - HaHa!!!

I really do like this Forum . . real world medicine . . .

BB, I got a flash 3.2 - nice colourful box - no overclocking - one day I'll be clever enough to do the "engineering-side" of things . . . but I'm very very happy with it. Now I can see what, "Building a dynamic RAM Preview" means. 1 gig for Vegas to "munch" on, makes for a very slippy workflow . .. Shame we can't convert the RAM preview to an actual render - yeah?

Grazie

Unless price is no problem, I wouldn't buy the 3.2 Extreme Edition Pentium. As Rex says it will be expensive and I don't think it would buy that much more performance over a 3.0 pentium. You could use that money for more memory or a bigger hard drive, etc.

To be overly simple - With VV more ram, faster CPU, fast hard drive will greatly help render speed. Graphics cards will not.

Having said that - as with anything else software needs to come into play with hardware for anything to really work. if you don't have a DX 9 graphics card having DX9 on your machine won't much help with graphics. Software that isn't optimized for DX9 won't be greatly helped by DX9. Likewise software that isn't optimized for P4 commands or, in this case, "extreme edition" Pentium will not see the full gain. "real time" preview - that is another story. If the NLE software interacts with things like OpenGL and DX9 and such you will see a gain in preview. RedGL uses OpenGL so "real time" previews, in therory, are faster and look better on a graphics card that supports OpenGL. Render however falls back on the systems Ram and processor speed for a start.

If what you habe now works than I would wait for the upgrade until you see what the Sony folks have in plan for V 5.

I recently purchased a P4 3.00c, and last night overclocked it for the first time, using the overclocking for dummies BIOS option on the ASUS P4P800 (which I heartily recommend, btw). With a 10% overclock, my rendertest time went from 1:35 to 1:30. I repeated it several times to be sure. The overclock has the CPU at 3.3 ghz.

I would imagine the Extreme 3.2 ghz would probably result in a pretty nice increase, especially if overclocked, but would it be worth the sizeable price difference?

I belive on "The Screen Savers" on TechTV they got a p4-3.0 to ~4ghz overclocked. But, they had liquid cooling, the best RAM, etc. They said it cost a total of $5000. :) I would be interested to see how fast that thing renders. :)

4 ghz?! WOW! I, too, would be interested in that render time.

I was shocked that I cut 5 seconds off the render time with a 10% increase, to be honest. I thought I *might* shave a second or two off, but never five. How this relates to a real world render I don't know, but I am definitely interested in finding out now...