I'm hoping that other Vegas Pro users with AMD cards can chime in. I know that there's far more Nvidia cards out there, but there's still quite a few AMD users.

These days, you could probably benefit from a system upgrade from your current CPU. My AMD GPU is sitting on the floor next to my chair.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/profile/my-profile/about-me/

Both benchmarks have many AMD entries, including top times!

Anyway a 50% increase in performance isn't so bad, especially if the system has another bottleneck the GPU is waiting on.

These days, you could probably benefit from a system upgrade from your current CPU. My AMD GPU is sitting on the floor next to my chair.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/profile/my-profile/about-me/

Thanks for the quick reply! oh yes, I am very aware of the age of my system. $$ for an upgrade is at least 15 months away. (BTW, three times in the last 12 years I have upgraded my setup to the latest Hot Stuff, but never saw huge performance gains in Vegas). We all know the joke " How do you know your computer is outdated?" "You unboxed it."

Right now I'm trying to focus on the GPU, and specifically figure out why VP20.411 had no problem recognizing a 2017 Radeon RX 570, but sees this 2023 RX 7600 XT as "Unknown AMD", and Windows TaskManager does not show Video Encode info for the GPU - almost as if no GPU-based Video Encode is happening with Vegas.

Attached are some screenshots. GPU-Z and Windows recognizes the new card OK.
With Handbrake on a MOV wrapped Panny GH6 200 Mbps All-Intra 10-bit 422 UHD 60fps H.265 vid transcoded to Production Standard using the h.264 AMD VCE encoder I was getting about 50fps. That's about 30% better than the old RX 570. GPU utilization never went over 25%, CPU never went over 50%. So if my system is so low, why isn't maxing it out? (I can hit 100% CPU if I don't use the GPU for encoding)

I really need help with this. I'm a retired IT guy and I work hard to solve things myself before hollering for help in a forum.

Thanks!

Steve

The really ex-IT guy responds:

You’re not on the most current release of Vegas Pro. Run a trial of 21-208 to see it handles your GPU better.

First check what VEGAS is seeing: gpu_video_x64.log is in C:/users/username/Appdata/local/VEGASPro/20.0.
If it doesn't know what to make of the GPU (old values left over?)

The fact that VEGAS knows there is VCE and recognizes there is an AMD GPU in preferences/ video suggests to me that it is working.

You could try to wipe the driver with DDU Uninstaller then reset VEGAS and see if it makes any difference.

If your times in the benchmarks I provided are comparable to others with similar CPUs and GPUs it may just be the best VEGAS can do at present.

The combination of CPU and GPU may keep either from either hitting 100%- the GPU is fast enough it doesn't have to work so hard encoding the frames VEGAS sends it and your simple project doesn't give the 3D calculation circuitry much to do.

If the file itself is 10-bit 422 HEVC no AMD can decode that and VEGAS's video engine does not work well with such footage, so expect major bottlenecks (internal cache?). If you are using the post-Handbrake AVC footage that should decode well with AMD in VEGAS and thus give faster encodes too (have to read before writing).

First check what VEGAS is seeing: gpu_video_x64.log is in C:/users/username/Appdata/local/VEGASPro/20.0.
If it doesn't know what to make of the GPU (old values left over?)

The fact that VEGAS knows there is VCE and recognizes there is an AMD GPU in preferences/ video suggests to me that it is working.

You could try to wipe the driver with DDU Uninstaller then reset VEGAS and see if it makes any difference.

If your times in the benchmarks I provided are comparable to others with similar CPUs and GPUs it may just be the best VEGAS can do at present.

The combination of CPU and GPU may keep either from either hitting 100%- the GPU is fast enough it doesn't have to work so hard encoding the frames VEGAS sends it and your simple project doesn't give the 3D calculation circuitry much to do.

If the file itself is 10-bit 422 HEVC no AMD can decode that and VEGAS's video engine does not work well with such footage, so expect major bottlenecks (internal cache?). If you are using the post-Handbrake AVC footage that should decode well with AMD in VEGAS and thus give faster encodes too (have to read before writing).

Well, I think I figured it out and it's not good news. The new 7000 series AMD chipsets do not have VCE. They have moved past that to a new architecture VCN. Drivers that are written to use VCE likely will not use the VCN hardware-based video encoder on my card.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Core_Next?wprov=sfla1

I really need somebody from Magix who understands development to weigh in on this. How do I get the attention of a Magix rep?

This is particularly frustrating because the hardware compatibility page only talks about the older AMD VCE 3.0 standard. AMD has moved past that.

So I'm SOL. I either get an older AMD card, or switch to the competition.

I really don't like Nvidia but I may be forced to abandon AMD and go with Nvidia. Can anyone recommend a under $500 in nVidia card that you know for sure Hardware GPU acceleration works with Vegas 20 and 21?

Bummed,

Steve

This isn't a new change with AMD, it goes back years and generations of GPUs all of which are compatible with VEGAS.

AMD 6XXX and 7XXX cards work fine with hardware decoding, encoding and AI in VEGAS Pro:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1j8x8w3wYjtEQt1Jg4UFVzA20HCPI9bUlW6uNnQ5bd6Q/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks Roger!

I'm thinking about getting this to compare

GeForce RTX™ 4060 Ti OC Edition 8GB GDDR6 (PCIe 4.0, 8GB GDDR6,

Roger what are your thoughts about Nvidia versus AMD in general for Vegas?

I would just really like to be able to render my 4k simple projects faster than 60 FPS.

Steve

By the way, that spreadsheet with all the different results really isn't helpful although I do appreciate the link. The problem is, there's too many variables in it. There are also some obvious errors. For example, one fellow says he has an Nvidia card, but he used the vce encoder which clearly is not going to work.

What I'm really looking for is someone to just take one computer and compare Nvidia versus AMD, for current cards priced between $300 and $500. I'm interested in more than just rendering benchmarks, I'm also interested in things like GPU utilization, whether it clearly uses the hardware-based encoder as reported by Task Manager, and if Vegas correctly identifies the card.

That's someone might be me.

Roger, what card do you use?

Thanks

Steve

Try the Voukoder plugin for Vegas Pro 20. It has its own relationship with the GPU hardware.

Hi Steve, under filter views you can sort out what you are interested in, for example only AMD GPUs or only Intel CPUs so you can compare like with like.

I do some data validation and cleanup when there are new entries. The entry you pointed to is not an error at all, that AMD CPU comes with AMD Radeon Graphics so it's possible to do AMD hardware encoding with it.

Rendering benchmarks can help determine whether a hardware encoder is in use. Do it once with MagixAVC/Mainconcept and a second time with MagixAVC/VCE and record times and CPU usage.

So, I sorted by Intel CPU to reduce variables.
Howard on this list did such tests with VP20 and an Intel i9-11900K CPU and a AMD RX-6900XT. In Mainconcept mode he rendered in 3:19; with VCE in 2:04. With QSV on his CPU he got 2:09 and as GPU encoders are largely similar I think these results are convincing and beyond testing margins of error. AMD and Intel encoding work with VP 20 and are significantly faster than Mainconcept.

How does the 6900XT compare to similar NVIDIAs on the same CPU? Well we don't have much AMD GPU data. You can help with that by filling out your benchmark results. Looking at AMD CPUs and VP 20 I see a RX 6800 XT in VCE mode rendering in 1:40 with a Ryzen 9 5950 CPU which is a bit faster than the same CPU and RTX 3090 (1:55). There may be other factors in play like system cooling, etc. but for a user submitted benchmark it gives you an idea of performance. AMD had a slightly faster preview framerate here as well as much better AI performance, though Magix redid AI support for NVIDIA in the interim so it should be roughly comparable now.

I wouldn't abandon your GPU yet- try the suggestions I made above for a driver clean and forcing VEGAS to redetect it and then give the benchmarks a try so we can try to compare like with like.

For GPU recommendations AMD gives more VRAM and performance for similar price points. If you don't have a use for CUDA (i.e. AI workflows) I think it's a fine option for VEGAS. I would rather get a used RTX 3080 than a 4060 due to memory bandwidth; the 40XX series is a bit crippled.

VEGAS is undergoing revisions to its video engine so I personally would not invest in hardware until it's clearer what that means for different GPU brands.

An all AMD user, see Signature. I had the RX480 8GB card with the Ryzen 9 3900X. I friend wanted me to test a RX 6600 since he was buying it used, and he would have to get a larger case if he bought it. I did some light testing, comparing the results with the RX480, and the 6600 was 3x faster, using less "GPU" than the 480, which would run sometimes at 100%, while my current card will run less.

For me, I'd rather have better timeline performance and maybe take a hit on rendering speed because I will spend days working on the timeline. Certainly no project will take days to render.

I don't think I've seen a case where timeline playback and render speed weren't correlated.

In VEGAS it's hard to measure timeline performance objectively as there aren't good built in framerate capture tools, so we have to rely on user average estimates of fluctuating values. I completely agree that fluidity editing is the most important thing for actually using VEGAS.

What I think that some people question is, when my past GPU would be used close to 100% and my new GPU isn't even close, why. My old RX480 would be extensively used in rendering, sometimes at 100%, yet, the more recent RX 6700XT rarely approaches 50%.

Why isn't the GPU (or CPU) used at 100%, making use of all the computing power available, is what people are asking. I can't answer that question. But I do know the results of upgrading hardware.

First, single percentages are misleading. 50% of what. On the NVIDIA side with GPU scheduling off Windows doesn't even include CUDA calculations in the overall percent so the GPU can be running with fans on high at 95% usage and Windows reports 0%. With AMD I don't know where the different values are shown if they are shown. Apparently encoding isn't even shown?

The second is that it's like watching the tachometer of a car. It doesn't tell you how fast you are going only how hard it's working. A faster GPU doesn't have to use as much of its capability to achieve the same result, especially if there is a bottleneck elsewhere in the chain. Here that may be 10-bit 4:2:2 media which hits limits in the VEGAS video engine that we have discussed in the past.

I'd focus on throughput- frames per second displayed or rendered.

Hi everybody, I just wanted to throw down a quick reply from my phone to let y'all know that I really appreciate all the responses and I'll do some more tests tonight including some benches and see where it leads me.

FYI I am not trying to render directly from 422 10-bit HVEC files. I use handbrake to turn them into a more editable format.

With the new card, my preview playback while editing is much much smoother, although it's still drags a little bit during dissolve transitions and other effects.

I have just two specific questions for everybody. 1. Does your version of Vegas detect your video card by name, or is it just showing up as "unknown AMD" or "unknown nvidia?"

2. Regardless of whether you're using Nvidia or AMD, does anyone see Windows Task Manager GPU graphs that show specifically "video encode" performance graphs? I used to see those with my older RX 570, but with the new gpu, there is no specific "video encode" performance graph in the GPU graphs tab. That makes me think that something is not triggering or detecting the AMD VCE/VCN engine.

Thanks,

Steve

Task manager: GPU video codec 0

@stevecrye, right now I am using AMD's latest drivers, 24.3.1 with no issues so far.

From within VP20, Preferences, this is what I see.

@stevecrye, right now I am using AMD's latest drivers, 24.3.1 with no issues so far.

From within VP20, Preferences, this is what I see.

 

 

Thanks, (Also Eduardo). I'm going to update to that version of Adrenaline and see if it helps. Will do that now, please stand by. Quick question, ought I uninstall first, or is the full install no-rollback reset after good enough?