@TTTT High end Amd gpus have traditionally been more power efficient and better overall performers with Vegas, not to mention less expensive. But the Nvidia 4090 seems to be a top performer. However, comparative Vegas performance data with Amd 7900xtx is limited and I haven't seen an aio version yet. I don't know that there's a potential overheating issue with the 4090 doing video editing. Performance will just dial back as temperatures peak. One issue with the 4090 air-cooled version is it's physical size. It's wider than the 4080 and might take away all the slots on some motherboards unless you use a riser. If you can afford it and your case can accommodate the radiator, look at the msi 4090 aio. It's compact in the slot and, although it'll suck down just as much power as the air-cooled, it won't experience much thermal slow-down. As a bonus, it'll also help heat the house in the winter.

Take a look at the benchmarks in my signature and filter for NVIDIA GPUs.

Thank you, interesting though difficult to compare. It looks like the newer generations indeed perform better. Though the data have no entry at all for 1080 Ti ... some 1080, some 2080 Ti ...

Also check TechGage for GPU benchmarks that include VEGAS.

I only find their benchmarks for Vegas 18 and not many benchmarks about Vegas, again, difficult to compare.

For cost/performance a used 3080 is attractive.

I usually max performances and try to keep the thing for years. (Not necessarily the best approach all times, but worked well with the 1080 Ti since this remained well ranked for year and the prices of RTX 30x0 skyrocketted.)

For power supply you need to calculate maximum total wattage including CPU. You're probably fine though. Heat management depends on the case and fan configuration. Measure carefully given the size of new GPUs.

The size, good point I forgot about. According to Google 4090 -> "304 mm x 137 mm x 61 mm".
Should fit: https://davescomputertips.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/trooper-gpu-cooling-size.jpeg

@TTTT (...) a riser.

Never heard of a riser. So if I understand ... this is a liquid cooled core that replace stock cooler, and the fans for outside the case? (Or according to some video they go on the front panel... which I already fully use for cold-swappable hard-drives... so, that's really something I don't want to change...)

On the other hand, I see external GPU cases ... maybe another way to go?

As a bonus, it'll also help heat the house in the winter.

The GTX 1080 Ti already does that well. (And unfortunately, it does it as well during the summer :-) )

And nobody mentions that it still seems to be better to stick to 30xx nvida cards, since they wor better with Vegas compared to the 40xx cards? Ok, maybe all will be bettet with Vegas Pro 21.

And nobody mentions that the AMD drivers seems to be not do great?

And nobody mentions that it still seems to be better to stick to 30xx nvida cards, since they wor better with Vegas compared to the 40xx cards? Ok, maybe all will be bettet with Vegas Pro 21.

Like how much better?
Though in that case I would still think of jumping directly to a 4080 or 4090 with the extra RAM, than spending almost the price of a 4080 for a 3080 Ti... In the sense that it feels more future proof...

Yet, on RogerS benchmarks, 4080 seems to perform as good as 3090 ...
 

Some users had some issues with 40xx cards in the combination with Vegas, and have reported that here in the forum. Search for it.

I’ve been very fortunate that when my previous setup, a non-3080 - failed, my service/insurance plan had to replace my card and other components. I ended up with my most recent MONSTA! which amongst other upgrade stuff included my nVidia 3080. Very fortunate.

Neat video will benefit the most from the 40xx series. 4080 is all you need, the 90 is overkill and way too much power/heat consumption, and the size is way too big. My 3090 chews through even complex neat video 4K 10 bit HDR scenes at about 9-12fps, so a 4080 should handle it quite nicely.

@TTTT Regarding the two user benchmarks you can help provide data specific to the 1080Ti by doing the benchmarks yourself. Then comparing against systems with similar CPUs to yours you can get a pretty reasonable idea of the potential performance gains to be had. In reality the 1080Ti should be somewhere faster than the 1080 and slower than the 2080. If your CPU is of the same era as the GPU it may become your bottleneck, limiting the gains from superior GPUs.

Techgage also has VEGAS tests embedded in some of their GPU tests. The site is overdue for a VEGAS specific test as they did with 18 so maybe wait for that to come out?

The Pugetbench article linked to doesn't say the 1080ti is faster than the 30XX series- it says that none of the GPUs are really used in Lightroom-- as of 2020. Try to find a more recent test. Here is one.
"Overall, we didn't see much of a difference between the various GPUs we tested, or even the test using just Intel integrated graphics and GPU acceleration disabled entirely."

There are some complaints about RTX 40XX card compatibility in VEGAS; I don't know if those issues are addressed through either driver or VEGAS updates.
There aren't current major AMD driver bugs I've heard of - the last egregious one was swapped color channels in VEGAS but AMD fixed it a while ago.

External GPU enclosures are intended for laptops and add redundant power supplies and cooling but introduce latency with the connection. For your desktop you need to make sure there are 2 or 3 slots available on your motherboard depending on GPU, no cables in the way, and that after installing it there's still enough clearance for good airflow. If you look at different models of a given board they often have heavier ones with bigger heatsinks and more fans that will better cool the card- you just have to make sure that hot air finds its way out of the case, too!

In general 4080 and 3090 should be similar- see non-editing benchmarks as well. Personally I'd err on the side of more memory vs more compute capability for "futureproofing." Though another strategy would be to buy ahead of the curve (but not bleeding edge) and eventually sell it to upgrade as we don't really know what will work best tomorrow.

Thank you for all comments.

Thinking of most of the test I'm thinking... most of them test rendering time... But what I really care most about is user experience performance while editing. (This has become especially laggy in Lightroom with upgrades... on Vegas side, it mostly depend on what I do with the preview windows and what.) (And yeah, I care somewhat more about rendering times in Vegas than Lightroom... depending on projects... but rendering is something that I can just "let process" on this computer or on rendering computer, and do something else, so not the same kind of time-taker.)

I guess that the CPU is in it for something too, but that would be a future step. I'm not wanting to replace my whole system in the coming month, that's why I'm thinking of getting only the GPU in advance, and use it as some temporary upgrade to current computer.

The 4K "sample project" benchmark also shows preview speed with heavy Fx. On the sample ad it seems CPU limited.

In general for performance in VEGAS I'd rather have a great CPU and okay GPU than the opposite. It's why I built a system with 13th gen i5 CPU with Intel iGPU for decoding and just a 2080 Super as GPU. For what I do performance is very good with fluid playback of almost all media I throw at it. If I were building today I'd get a 3080 used as 4080 prices are just too high for what it is (for me).

3080 used as 4080 prices are just too high for what it is (for me).

I guess that what is driving me to look at 40x0 rather than 30x0 is that my 1080 Ti already has 11 GB RAM and for a real increase on that side, I need to go for something like 4080, 4090 ... or 3090 (but I heard that 3090 had serious overheat problems). Though, I'm yet not 100% sure of the impact of GPU RAM ... mostly I'm thinking "future proof".

Then the price of a 3080 / 3080 Ti on eBay seem to start around 500 EUR ... but the specs feels like only a half upgrade ... But true that witht the 1.500 EUR of a 4080 ... I could do a similar upgrade 3 times over the years ... (and/or use that card in a secondary computer). Then question is, do I trust "used" products? ..

An 3070 Ti with 8 GB works fine in my laptop - and the 3080 Ti with 11GB is fine for Vegas Pro 20 today. So if you wish to upgrade your existing systems, that would be a good choice.

To go for the 40xx is great for the future. With the upcoming Vegas Pro 21 one can have the expectation, that this GPUs should work with upcoming versions. But nothing has been published here up to now.

The more general question is also, what type of footage you wish to edit. For long-GOP or even HEVC an i-GPU would be important, while for all-i your 2950x with 16cores is still a good choice.

I upgraded my graphics card from GTX-1080Ti to RTX-3060 a couple of years ago, based on the CUDA core number and GPU RAM. Since Vegas uses CUDA I always check that specification. Vegas began to render without any more crashes! The next important thing was to install the Nvidia STUDIO driver for that card. The STUDIO driver range is for content creation rather than gaming. Both these upgrades meant Vegas and 3DS-MAX rendered so much better.

So compare CUDA along with other specs, and download the 'Studio' rather than the standard Nvidia driver!

Then the price of a 3080 / 3080 Ti on eBay seem to start around 500 EUR ... but the specs feels like only a half upgrade ... But true that witht the 1.500 EUR of a 4080 ... I could do a similar upgrade 3 times over the years ... (and/or use that card in a secondary computer). Then question is, do I trust "used" products? ..

There's roughly a doubling of performance from the 1080 to 3080 and then 50% to 4080. I think you'd be quite impressed with the performance of either. For used products it's how I bought my GPU (Ebay). Try to pick a seller with a track record and screenshots demonstrating the card works. GPUs aren't easy to kill so if the card is only a year or two old and hasn't been abused should have many years left.

 

Then the price of a 3080 / 3080 Ti on eBay seem to start around 500 EUR ... but the specs feels like only a half upgrade ... But true that witht the 1.500 EUR of a 4080 ... I could do a similar upgrade 3 times over the years ... (and/or use that card in a secondary computer). Then question is, do I trust "used" products? ..

I've read about both the 3080ti and 3090 having overly hot ram chips with people speculating it's a reason not to buy them 2nd hand without warranty due to possible failure in the future. If I was buying a card now and wanted to keep it for a few years I'd want 16GB VRAM, so for Nvidia that's 4080, 4090, 3090,3090ti.

3080 12GB is a classic card worth considering at right price, but with AI apps, and even gaming in the future with RT and path tracing that 12GB might be a problem pretty quickly.

Vegas devs never admit to their software causing problems due to not being compatible with modern hardware. This was seen with the 30 series GPU's and slow encoding using NVENC, lots of reports of problems, NEVER ADMITTED to it being a software fault. Eventually they release a version of VP18 which was fully compatible and the slow Nvenc problem went away.

I see crashing with 40 series, and I know Vegas isn't fully compatible so left wondering if it's because I have a 40 series GPU, but also maybe it's only 'slow nvenc' again, but this time the incompatibility is only using 1 nvenc instead of dual nvencs. I get roughly 10fps NVENC 8K via MagixHEVC,and 30fps via Voukoder. Not that you should ever use MagixHEVC/AVC anyway, I use it to illustrate the incompatibility with the dual Nvenc's seen in 4070ti and higher GPU's.

@Former user has a point, I always wanted to mention on this forum: the issues Vegas has with the 40 series as far as my suspicion go is also in the direction of having issues (performance and/or stability) of not always coping well with (or not taking advantage of) dual NVENC which is novel in 40 series. That being said there are older Nvidea cards like the GeForce GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti who also possess 2 NVENC encoder chips. And not all 40 series have 2 encoders..

Here is a link showing which has a single and which has two encoders:

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new

Note that a new single encoder in a new generation can replace or even surpass the speed of 2 in a prior generation.

Also large GPU memory is going to be more and more needed in the near and far future in all sort of applications and games.

Thank you all for comments.

I made this comparison table:

The lowest cost per performance gain would appear to be getting RTX 4090 from eBay.
Thought, then with the difference in power consumption, 450-320 W = 130 W. I believe I pay 22 cents/kWh ... (not checked recently directly from energy supplier)
So 0.13*22 = 2.86 cents / 130 Wh -> ~0.7 EUR / day at full performance.
320 W -> ~1.7 EUR/day at full performance.

450 W -> ~2.4 EUR /day at full performance.

200 W -> ~1.056 EUR /day at full performance.

285 W -> ~1.5 EUR /day at full performance.

I'm not sure how much time I would actually use it at full performance ... but from that point of voint 4070/4070 Ti seem like a better "investment" than 3080/3080 Ti. And right now I think 4080 seems like the most balanced choice.

(All of this: "If" all my numbers are correct!)

(Some GPU specs mention power consumptions when idle, but not all)
 

@TTTT 

I might take a different approach to improving performance with your system. For the $1200 price of the 4080, I'd keep your current video card for timeline acceleration, use the on-die video adapter in the 13900K for decoding. Then, buy a new video card in the future behind the price curve.

Motherboard

CPU

Memory

I rarely use GPU render templates.

@john_dennis : Thanks fotr the suggestion. Though my question is only about upgrading GPU (now or later), as mentionned, I plan on upgrading other pieces but much later, maybe waiting for 14th gen to be out, maybe not.

It's still unclear what you intend to edit and what GPU will be sufficient. If your cameras are of a similar vintage as the GPU and you are not using intensive Fx there's not much performance gain to be had. Once you're at full preview framerate there's only savings in render time.

If any of it involves HEVC 10-bit 4:2:2 consider tossing in an Intel ARC too for decoding (cheaper than replacing MB and CPU just to get the decoding).

For whether the chart accurate represents the power of GPUs I wonder about that. I think it would be closer to 100% increase for a 2 generation upgrade to the 3080 than 50%. Userbenchmark appears to be based on 6 games, which may not simulate what you do in VEGAS or Lightroom very well. Some data points here on Lightroom, Premiere, Handbrake and Blackmagic Raw that may be more relevant. One other difference between the 3080 and 4070/Ti is memory bandwidth where NVIDIA's been cheaping out as of late. That may be more important for video editing and similar tasks than gaming.

In response to the other question while editing the GPU will hardly ever be at max power draw and you need to look at efficiency in getting work done vs idle or theoretical peaks. The 40XX series scores well there from tests I've seen vs 30XX. The benefit is less heat and less cooling needed.

Also keep an eye out for a new TechGage review using VEGAS that should shed light on this.