More video RAM= Faster render!

smallanditalian5 wrote on 9/3/2007, 8:50 PM
Just something I've found out, thought someone might not know this. I sure didn't and I'm pretty good with computers...

I recently upgraded my onboard 96 MB video card to a 256 MB PCI card. When I went to render a recently made film, I chose to render at the normal NTSC 30 FPS AVI format with Best rendering quality. The video rendered so fast that the preview couldn't keep up with the render. It only slowed down for titles and transitions and even then it barely stopped. I always thought that render speed was based on the processor and RAM, but I guess I was very wrong.

Conclusion: If you want faster renders, get a new graphics card. It's worth it.

Comments

4eyes wrote on 9/3/2007, 9:05 PM
Conclusion: If you want faster renders, get a new graphics card. It's worth it.Thanks for the tip.
Have you ever tried under preferences changing the "Preview video while rendering" to Disabled? (Uncheck this setting) Frame render counting is still on.
I always have this setting disabled on the slower machines (even on the fast machines come to think of it). On board video is usually slow & many motherboards use shared memory which is slow compared to most memory on AGP/PCI-E video cards.
Your new video card is probably DDR3 superfast ram.
Chienworks wrote on 9/4/2007, 4:07 AM
I suspect that something else is going on here. The video card has absolutely nothing to do with render speed, not in any way, shape, or form.

When you say "recently made", is there any chance that you placed the finished .avi you created in a previous render on the timeline and rendered from that? If so, Vegas doesn't actually render DV .avi to DV .avi. It simply copies the frames bit for bit as fast as the hard drives can move the data.

If you instead open the original .veg file and render from that you'll find that the rendering time will be almost identical no matter what video card you have installed.
Ivan Lietaert wrote on 9/4/2007, 8:42 AM
Also, if an avi-file is in the play, smartrendering may have reduced the time. Try rendering to mpg and compare times (there's no smartrendering of mpg files)