Maximum video card and/or interface?

mudsmith wrote on 6/1/2012, 5:35 PM

Seeing packages for sale at Video Guys combining Vegas Pro 11 with an expensive Kona I/O card, and also seeing a huge range of NVIDIA cards available, I am feeling a little befuddled about planning my editing computer upgrade.

1)How much of the power of some of these more expensive cards can Vegas make use of? Is there a limit to the amount of CUDA and/or RAM on the card accessible to Vegas?

2)Would one tend to use Vegas with both the big deal Kona card and a NVIDIA card with big time CUDA processing?

3)With no financial limits, what would be the most powerful card or set of cards for Vegas?

Comments

rmack350 wrote on 6/1/2012, 6:47 PM

The Kona card would get you professional input and output to decks, scopes, good studio monitors, etc. It's a gateway to spending a lot more money but also to charging a lot more. Basically, if you don't know why you'd want a Kona card you probably don't need one.

A Kona would definitely be in addition to a graphics card.

I have no advice about graphics cards.

Rob

Red Prince wrote on 6/1/2012, 10:02 PM

Is there a limit to the amount of CUDA and/or RAM on the card accessible to Vegas?Vegas doesn’t use CUDA (at least not directly), it uses OpenCL. CUDA is the proprietary technology that only works with Nvidia devices (and is different for different Nvidia architectures). OpenCL is an open standard that is not device specific. Each system needs an OpenCL driver that converts OpenCL to whatever device(s) within the system can support it.

Typically, OpenCL is used with GPUs, but device drivers even exist to use OpenCL directly with CPUs (see the list at the link above). It is also conceivable for some company to start developing dedicated OpenCL devices completely independent of GPU. Actually, I hope this will happen sooner rather than later because such a device would most likely work with better precision. The GPUs use less precision that the CPUs because they have to divide their silicon space between the graphics processing and the parallel processing. They are made mostly with gamers in mind. We are just an afterthought. A dedicated OpenCL device would use all of its real estate for parallel processing and nothing else, which would be much better for our purposes.

Now, if you have a recent Nvidia card with a current Nvidia device driver, it includes an OpenCL driver that converts OpenCL to CUDA. How much of it, and how well, Vegas can use depends on the driver, not on Vegas. The one limitation in Vegas 11 is that if you have more than one OpenCL device in your system, Vegas will only use one of them. You get to choose which one, but Vegas will not divide its workload among several OpenCL devices. It is possible that an OpenCL driver could split the workload between two or more devices while presenting them all as just one device to applications (such as Vegas). But there is no guarantee that a driver supports this, though, conceivably, a future version of the driver may, even if the current version doesn’t. Though, since each driver is provided by the hardware manufacturer, it is unlikely any driver would split the workload between two devices from two different manufacturers.

mudsmith wrote on 6/2/2012, 12:25 PM

Thanks for both replies. I certainly understand why the Kona card would be useful, but was trying to understand how it works with Vegas specifically, and whether it would drain resources from the NVIDIA GPU environment or conflict with anything else in Vegas....or provide an alternative to anything normally coming from the graphics card (alternate monitoring, etc.).

In terms of my overall questions about the limits of CUDA/OpenCL with NVIDIA (clearly the company that makes this more accessible for Vegas), I still wonder which NVIDIA card(s), at whatever cost, offers the most accessible power for Vegas. There are ads at Video Guys, for instance, that tout some NVIDIA cards for Premiere or other NLE software packages, but I see none really aiming the cards at Vegas.

Any experiences or data lurking out there among these users?