"So I need to buy blind?"

Yes, the best you can do is to compare the specifications for the various cards.
How much difference that will make to a) Vegas and b) using it with your workflow is almost impossible for anyone to know.

It is no different to buying tires for your car.
You want a recommendation without us even knowing which car you have and how you will drive it. This is a trivial problem though compared to Vegas and a GPU.

Bob.

Bob: "You want a recommendation without us even knowing which car you have and how you will drive it. "

No. I am using OFX plugs sold and Partnered by SCS. So SCS does know what I'd be using. So "they", SCS, are knowledgeable of the Plugs I'd be using.

All of this conversation pales into insignificance when you confirm that I'd need to buy blind anyway.

What's the point. . . . .

G

Quadro and GeForce cards use the same GPUs but the Quadro drivers
a) enable features not available on GeForce cards, and
b) prioritize rendering precision over speed

Info. here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadro
And here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units

When I was still running Vegas 11 our IT guys swapped my GeForce 460 for a Quadro 4000. I didn't see a difference in timeline playback, stability, or rendering speed so I switched back to the GeForce 460. With V12 I've had to disable the GPU for timeline playback because it's too unstable otherwise. If the next update to V12 doesn't improve stability with GPU enabled I will swap the Q4000 back in, but I don't expect any improvement.

I've been looking at the Quadro vs. GeForce issue for a long time and in the past have always run Quadro cards on my work system. But based on my experience, online research, and talking with an Adobe AE programmer at NAB, I'm about 90% sure that SCS and Adobe apps do not specifically benefit from Quadro cards even if the marketing literature may suggest otherwise. On the other hand, if lives were hanging in the balance based on my decision I'd spend the extra $500 on a Quadro to eliminate that 10% doubt.

"No. I am using OFX plugs sold and Partnered by SCS. So SCS does know what I'd be using."

What of the rest of the field though?
SCS says Vegas supports OFX, what you're saying appears to add a qualification to that.

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I rather suspect that your angst over this issue comes from the same source as it does for many. For years Vegas basically, more or less just worked and any issues were either quickly fixed by SoFo / SCS or else sorted out through this forum.

In fact to a lesser extent they have been around for as long as I have. Way back then there was the UAD-1 audio DSP card that should have just worked with Vegas and it didn't, Vegas could crash. It evolved into a significant finger pointing exercise not helped no doubt by the UAD-1 being a pretty expensive piece of kit.

Other thought on this relates to the very nature of Vegas, there are no fences around it. This makes it impossible to define "success" that'll meet every possible user's expectatiions. I'm reminded again of a comment from the then head of development when faced with a 90 minute movie project of around 140 tracks that simply wouldn't render out without crashing: "We never expected anyone would try to do that with Vegas".


I think Guy S in his post above sums it up as well as it can be.
There are other features that the Quadro cards offer (output via HD-SDI) that probably don't factor in too many Vegas users thinking but here again is another example of how difficult it is to even define "success" that's applicable to every possible Vegas user.

Bob.

"What of the rest of the field though?"
That which I've done a zillion times before. If it was more "fragrant" than that I wouldn't be questioning the validity of the/my specs to perform.

" . . what you're saying appears to add a qualification to that."
What do you mean? Be blunt, I do do blunt y'know.

"I think Guy S in his post above sums it up as well as it can be."
So that I understand your "observation" of Guy's summing-up, what is it precisely? What did you get from Guy?

"There are other features that the Quadro cards offer . . . . but here again is another example of how difficult it is to even define "success" that's applicable to every possible Vegas user."
Bob, I'm doing what I did in VP9 and VP10 and VP11. I was expecting that that which I did in the previous incarnations to work in VP12 - but this time using the new features of VP12, and have my 560ti to make a fist of it. I would have thought that this is a sane concept to adhere to, and is to "me" my definition of "success": Progressive/continuous improvement, each brick placed carefully upon the next.

Grazie

each brick placed carefully upon the next

it might help if one used mortar between the bricks..... ;-)

"Progressive/continuous improvement, each brick placed carefully upon the next."

After several attempts at a reply to this, decided it better to sleep on it, not certain that helped.
I think one could have charted a course through the last decade or so with Vegas and still felt that a valid metaphor. One would have had to ignore a lot of burnt out rubble from abandoned initiatives though, one of which cost me $8K. As such your "carefully placed bricks" seems hilarious and your alarm at "no certainty of success" kind of invokes a "welcome to the real Vegas" feeling to well up inside me.
In this case I have actually been defending SCS's position as it borders on the impossible for them to give valid advice that would cover every Vegas user, what hadrware they have and the way in which they use Vegas. By comparison in the case I mentioned, they knew it wouldn't work but thanks to the lack of any "known bugs" list it was impossible for me to know.

Bob.

Bob, please give me a summary of your last reply?

Cheers

Grazie

I guess Apple solves one aspect of the problem by (in effect) providing one with the hardware. But I'm curious about the concept of letting SCS off the hook because they can't know how Vegas will be used. The least one expects of software designers is that they start with a clear idea of purpose and scope, with knowledge of their end users and their needs, and have a specification that will control the development.
The difficulty for SCS is working with heritage software that wasn't initially structured for the current market. Sooner or later the thing falls apart because its backbone can't carry the load. Apple bit the bullet and rewrote FCP from the ground up, and lost customers by releasing a new version in an underdeveloped state that did not meet the needs of their customer base.
But acknowledging all that, I expect SCS to know their most demanding class of client and their needs, and to have a specification that is designed to meet those needs better than alternatives. Obviously the product fails if it doesn't satisfy that set of goals. If it does meet them, it ought to handle lesser demands with ease, no matter what peculiar workflow the less skilled throw at it. If Vegas is designed for the hobbyist then of course it will have trouble dealing with feature films. Perhaps SCS isn't sure where it is aiming, so without an overall strategy bits get added because they are general marketing ideas rather than being essential, so effort gets diverted from that which is important.
Seems a bit daft to build something without any idea how it will be used.

as i've written elsewhere - for years i wholeheartedly endorsed, recommended and swore by (favourably!) vegas. 10 began to give me some problems that were, from my pov, purely internal. 11 confirmed then as certainly internal and introduced a whole lot more....

since my earliest days in the business producing video has been fraught with 'technical' problems, from tube alignment through to multicam camera sync, but with the advent of nle these problems have increased immensely as manufacturers vied to market faster and more complex software.

the idea of a 'simple' nle has long gone with every manufacturer now trying to cram in every know facility, or tack on, to usually (once) reliable code bases everything they think the market wants. in vegas's case that'd be 3d afaic, some might argue, but at the end of the day if you're selling a professional product, aimed at professionals, it should at least be reliable. i don't think any are particularly reliable (though edius does seem to have a very loyal user base - akin to that of vegas 6/7 era). as serena mentioned, apple tried to rewite to meet present day demands, but as is apparent from recent experience, marketing forced the software out the door before it was ready....

i don't particularly hold any hope that things are going to get any better. at least with 12 scs seems to have 'tried' hard to improve vegas's reliability - but any kudos they might have garnered has been squandered on poor gpu implementation and / or documentation.

i'm now thinking that quicksync is looking very interesting, but i said the same about betamax ;-)

"Bob, please give me a summary of your last reply?"

What proves or shows there has ever been "Progressive/continuous improvement, each brick placed carefully upon the next."?

Your metaphor implies something being bult. What was / is being built, what is the goal stated or even implied by SCS?


Going back to a previous post:

"Bob, I'm doing what I did in VP9 and VP10 and VP11. I was expecting that that which I did in the previous incarnations to work in VP12 - but this time using the new features of VP12, and have my 560ti to make a fist of it. I would have thought that this is a sane concept to adhere to, and is to "me" my definition of "success":'

OK, so SCS are going to need to find a "fistometer" :)
On top of that they're going to have to have a reasonable understanding of what you've been previously doing and with what, which new features in VP12 you're using plus the specs of some new system that's going to include a GPU. That's a signifcant ask for just one user, imagine if they have to do it for every user.

Surely you've been read enough posts to understand that if you have a latest gen CPU with a decent slab of RAM the GPU isn't going help a whole lot. At best it's going be a pretty limp fist, whatever a "fist" is.

On top of that the whole hardware acceleration thing has been a topic of discussion for as long as I've been here, the general consensus was and continues to be given the way Vegas (native) works and people use it, it was unlikely to help speed things up and could well slow them down.

And further to that, it's another decent chunk of code for things to go wrong in or have issues working with all the other code that has to run at the same time. John Cline has made this point several times, people asked for it, they were warned, SCS caved in (so it seems, who knows), the people got what they wanted and exactly as predicted it didn't do much apart from create more grief.

Now some background:
Hardware accleration / assistance of video decoding makes a lot of sense in some platforms e.g. low power devices. It made some sense when H.264 first came along, the demands made on the CPU to decode it could cause issues and a raft of extra silicon on the GPU to USB dongles appeared to ease the pain. We're past that now. Also, as always, all that hardware was more or less limited to decoding one stream, which can be a bit of a limitation for any NLE and moreso for Vegas and moreso for some users of Vegas.

Bob.