I would also say to get a card that can run the full resolution of your monitor(s)

I'd personally wait for a day or two to see if Sony announces Vegas 10 Pro at IBC.
After all, Movie Studio HD Platinum now has "Support for GPU-accelerated AVC rendering using the Sony AVC plug-in" so our hope is that Pro will have it too.

Mike

Notwithstanding what *may* be in the pipeline for Sony Vegas, you might someday want to use AfterEffects to supplement your Vegas projects. In AfterEffects, you would benefit from using a 1280x1024 display with OpenGL 2.0 compatible graphics card. See: http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/opengl.html

Steve Mann

I'd recommend a lower end nvidea card because many apps utilize CUDA and Sony Studio 10 has implemented CUDA so it stands to reason that the next release of Vegas Pro 10 will likely use this technology.

Here's a listing of the graphic card models and comparisons. This url also has links to prices at various on-line outlets to compare prices.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/graphics_cards_buy_now.html

Here's a comprehensive list of nvidea CUDA enabled video cards:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_gpus.html

As Brighterside mentioned, just be sure look at the specs to verify that the card can support the resolution of your monitor.

Vegas 10 will support CUDA-enabled cards for rendering the Sony AVC format [very helpful for delivering Blu-ray]. So definitely get another Nvidia card, preferably one with plenty of processor cores. My favorites from recent window shopping have been:

MSI N250GTS [costs about $115 and has great speed + 128 cores for faster AVC encoding]
GIGABYTE GV-N460OC-768I [costs about $170 and has decent speed + 336 cores for even faster AVC encoding]

Both would give you great resolution, and the Nvidia software always allows you to calibrate color independently for each monitor.

- -=Seth

i'd say hold off on getting a GPU for CUDA until benchmarks came out.

What good would a $500 GPU today be if in 6 months you upgrade your CPU & it goes 2x faster then if you didn't have CUDA enabled?

Hence my suggestion to get a $115-175 card that will end up being more widely useful across applications.

but a $115 card could end up being slower then if a CPU renderer was used. That's my point.

> but a $115 card could end up being slower then if a CPU renderer was used. That's my point.

I would tend to agree. Let me give you a reference point. I have a GeForce 9800GT and a 2.67Ghz first generation QuadCore CPU. I tried GPU rendering on Vegas Movie Studio 10 HD and it was about the same render time with or without the GPU. So if you have an old DualCore then a GeForce 9800GT should be faster. If you have a first generation QuadCore like me it's about the same, and I'm guessing that if you have a modern Intel Core i7 with a GeForce 9800GT it would render a lot slower using the GPU!

So depending on what CPU you have... if you want to see an improvement with GPU rendering you have to buy a GPU that is more powerful than your CPU which means, buy the "beefiest" GPU you can afford.

> MSI N250GTS [costs about $115 and has great speed + 128 cores for faster AVC encoding]

The GTS250 is only slightly faster than my GeForce 9800GT and in the same class so spending $115 might not give you quite the boost you are looking for.

~jr

what could be really useful is if you can use CUDA on a render farm (network rendering) & give eacch PC 4 CUDA enabled cards @ $100 each. Then you could put in dirt-cheap CPU's & have a (relatively) screaming render.

But like all hardware options, once Nvidia decides the cards have reached their end of life, you could end up buying all new stuff.

The Palit GTX 460 2GB seems to be the card most graphic/video system builders are using. It's supposed to be optimised for video workstation use rather than gaming.

http://www.palit.biz/main/vgapro.php?id=1355#spec

I have one I am going to try out soon. It's not as huge as some cards and is supposed to be quiet with reasonable power consumption and low heat.

There are some reviews on the web.

I went with the Nvidia Quadro FX 580 when I built my current box last spring.

It's the card bundled into the Sony Vegas Pro Master Suite Systems.

> I went with the Nvidia Quadro FX 580 when I built my current box last spring. It's the card bundled into the Sony Vegas Pro Master Suite Systems.

Be careful. Those systems were designed before Vegas had GPU support and as a result, those cards are woefully inadequate for any kind of GPU processing and definitely NOT the best card to take advantage of Vegas Pro 10.

~jr

A Quadro FX 580 is hideously outdated. Performance wise it's terrible. On the plus side, it uses very little power (as it has no processing power).

A Fermi variant of the Quadro would be nice, but very expensive. The Fermi architecture allows both the Quadro and gamer oriented cards to perform very similarly on non-optimized applications. However the gamer cards are at a far lower price point.

The card I mentioned above is the current standard for budget video-Adobe-AutoCAD high performance and is similar to the Quadro 5000 (spec wise and only for non-optimized apps), a $1,800 card.

For professional applications that the Quadro cards drivers are directly optimized for, they will certainly perform better than an equivalent gamer card. However for Vegas, there is no mention of a certified driver or optimizations for Vegas, maybe because it does not need it.
http://www.nvidia.com/page/partner_certified_drivers.html

Quadro = expensive-polished specialized drivers-real customer service-mini driver optimizations

GTX = cheap-good performance

> A Quadro FX 580 is hideously outdated.

It's not that outdated as they just hit the shelves in '09. It has the CUDA architecture too. It's just $140 too.

nVidia has just released a GTS version of a 450 (Fermi) card. Newegg has a Gigabyte version for $129.99 (with a $20 MIR = $109.99 and free shipping.) It has 192 processor cores and will probably work quite nicely with the new version of Vegas.

Newegg: GIGABYTE GV-N450OC-1GI GeForce GTS 450 (Fermi) 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card

> nVidia has just released a GTS version of a 450 (Fermi) card

When I first looked at the card on NewEgg I thought "Oh no... with those two fans that's gotta sound like a jet plane taking off"... but when I saw the head pipes behind them, I'm thinking that perhaps they are two low RPM fans that move a lot of air and could be very quiet.

Does anyone know?

~jr

You can read a litle bid here:

http://www.jagatreview.com/2010/09/pr-gigabyte-launches-high-performance-nvidia%C2%AE-geforcetm-gts-450-series-graphics-cards/

/Ulf

"Does anyone know?"

I'll know in a couple of days. I bought one to replace an nVidia 8600GTS that is in one of my machines.

I think the rudimentary facts, determining which graphics card will be "best" for Vegas 10 implementation of CUDA, are still not known - thus, it's all premature speculation.

For instance:

- will AVC encoding be able to utilize more than one, and how many, GPU cores?

- will AVC encoding need to use the cards' own memory, and if so, will it benefit from large amount of it?

The CUDA implementations in number-crunching engineering/scientific applications are capable of using all GPU cores, and benefit from as much "graphic" memory as possible.

On the other hand, what I saw testing Cyberlink PowerDirector (an entry-level NLE, also capable of GPU H.264 encoding), didn't seem to depend neither on the number of available GPU cores, nor on-card memory amount (I run the tests on one of the lower-end Quadros, with and without a powerful Tesla co-processor - the results were the same).

If however Vegas Pro 10 implementation is a more sophisticated one, and the performance is scalable - then I think the new PNY Quadro 4000 is the best card (at least from the price/performance viewpoint (with 256 GPU cores and 2 GB frame buffer).

Piotr

For some reason, unknown to me, I cannot bring myself to spend that much ($780) on a video card. Perhaps it's because up to now (with the advent of Vegas Pro 10) the video card has not had any real impact of Vegas' performance.

Is the difference between the two cards mentioned worth $650?

"If however Vegas Pro 10 implementation is a more sophisticated one, and the performance is scalable "

Based on what V10 will use the GPU for then there's a practical limit to how far it can scale surely?
Vegas will be feeding uncompressed frames into the encoder and then they have to be written to a HDD. At some point either the data going into the encoder or the data coming out of the encoder is going to be the limiting factor.

Bob.