"I'm also running fully updated Win10 Pro and Vegas Pro 15 (384)."

If you're keen on running the latest software versions, I'd suggest you download and install build 416 of Vegas Pro 15.

Yeah, I saw the new update (416) and installed it. Same issue.

It is difficult to find Vegas 15 patches. For example the first item in a search (google) for "Vegas Pro 15 update" show the 361 build and then in subtopics most of the previous patches. Second topic links to info on 384. No where on the first several pages (or any?) is there a link/reference to 416 and it was released months ago. I only found it by going through the forum - which is not a normal workflow thing for me.

I see they added update to 16 but that was long past due - check almost any other app for the last 10 years and there is an update choice.

I don't see enough new in 16 for me to spend the $$$ to upgrade. On occasion the new stabilization might be nice (because of the 15 Stabilize bug which causes crashes/hangs on 4k) but most of the other stuff - storyboard and start screen, etc. I would turn off or not use. Bugfixes though are always welcome!

Peter_P,

The driver provided by the board manufacturer is always outdated! In most cases new drivers provide improved performance and bugfixes! Vegas Pro is (and has always been) very sensitive to video driver issues and many problems especially with GPU acceleration have been resolved just by installing new video drivers.

For now I am stuck using a 3 month old Intel driver. It works in most cases but I do still have occasional hangs in Vegas Pro when GPU acceleration is turned on. These happen to me most often when editing 4k and right after modifying Pan/Crop but never when GPU acceleration is turned off. I was hoping a new driver may solve that issue.

In addition, these DCH drivers are using a new Microsoft driver model. Who knows if/when MS may drop support for older style drivers.

In most cases new drivers provide improved performance and bugfixes!

@john-rappl

They are mostly related to games performance. When I had a problem with the latest Intel Graphics driver and contacted the Intel support for help, I was told that they only offer generic drivers and they recommended to stay with the drivers tested and provided by the main-board manufacturer. The newer driver is not necessarily the better for many applications. In the past it went quite good that way.

@john-rappl

Is that the Intel DCH driver : Version: DCH 25.20.100.6577 (Latest) Date: 2/25/2019 you did try on your i7-8700k system?

Did you notice, that the i7-8700k is not listed as a valid product for this driver ?

Peter_P,

I am going to totally disagree on this. While games are driving a lot of GPU development those improvements and bugfixes also relate to non-game applications.

New drivers are required to run new software! Computers are general purpose programmable devices. The alternative would be to replace all the hardware whenever you want to run a new application!

I have had issues with video drivers in the past that caused Movie Studio to be unusable because of crashes and hangs and more recently Vegas issues with GPU acceleration. Many if not all of these problems were resolved by installing newer video drivers! Yes, in a few rare cases I have seen serious bugs introduced in new drivers but in general those are then fixed in the next release and a rollback can get you working.

Who exactly is Intel providing the new generic drivers to (new one every month or so) and what does generic mean in this case? Any system that uses the Intel CPUs with IGP uses Intel CPUs, Intel GPU, Intel Chipsets and Intel drivers. They are all brand name systems (not generic) - Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, MSI, etc. Why would Intel waste time developing and publishing a "generic" driver for generic systems that do not exist! Your communication with Intel support was a classic case of trying to push support and blame somewhere else.

Yes, that is the latest DCH driver. The i7-8700 missing from the list appears to be an oversight as it is the same platform and chipset as others that are listed. The installer checks for a valid device, sees my i7-8700 and installs the driver without issue.

I am going to totally disagree on this. While games are driving a lot of GPU development those improvements and bugfixes also relate to non-game applications.

@john-rappl

Did you read the Release Notes :

DRIVER VERSION: 25.20.100.6577 DATE: February 25th , 2019

HIGHLIGHTS: •

Launch Driver

o Dirt Rally 2.0 *

o Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm

*o Apex Legends

*

•

Performance improvements for

Arma 3

*

•

Enhanced support for DirectML

The i7-8700 missing from the list appears to be an oversight as it is the same platform and chipset as others that are listed.

@john-rappl

Did you check that with the Intel support? I can´t believe that such an wide spread processor is just omitted.

Yes, I did check with Intel with this response:

Hi again @JRapp2 (Customer)​ 

This is an oversight... to better explain, the 1st page you land on for the DCH drivers is mainly informative (with the big warning about improper installation, etc). This is were the Core i7-8700 and many other SKUs are absent.

However on the page where the actual .exe is available for download all the supported SKUs are listed. https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/28567/

Anyway, thank you very much for bringing this to our attention, I'll have this fixed on the 1st page asap.

Regards,

Ronald M.

Yes, I did read the release notes, what is your point?

Again, just because a fix or enhancement is listed with a game does not mean it is an exclusive fix for that game. Generally it is a fix for a bug that shows up or was reported with that game, it does not mean it does not relate to other uses of the GPU.

From the release notes notice that many of the listed fixes have nothing to do with games! See the bold items:

KEY ISSUES FIXED:

• Intermittent crashes or hangs may occur in Cinema4D*, Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm*, vkQuake2*

• Minor graphics anomalies may be observed in Final Fantasy XV* and Microsoft* Edge browser.

• OpenGL stability fixes for background applications.

• Few Internal panels may show black screen after installing graphics driver.

• Content protection may not enable when resuming from sleep after connecting display port monitor.

• Rotation may not be persistent when swapping displays in multi-monitor configurations.

• Aspect ratio options may be missing in Intel® Graphics Control Panel for HDMI displays

• Garbage may be seen while using Multi Stream

@john-rappl There is an issue here indeed between the Intel “generic” driver and the new type driver.

In this long post, 12th. post down, on this page https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/intel-i9-9900k-processor-review-using-vegas-pro--113429/?page=2  I overcame the non Qsv hardware acc. issue by using the new driver but then some render times were slower than with the older “generic” driver. So I reverted back to using the older driver, since I use Nvidia anyway for Hardware acc.

Sometimes a pragmatic approach I find is best, but if you do need Intel for hardware acc. then maybe use the driver that gives the best performance. As to when the “new” Intel driver will work better, who knows, I guess that it also depends on the specific hardware mix that Vegas finds.

Extract from the post above ... “Update … The new Intel graphics driver 444 fixed the middle section issue.  I've added in values post Intel driver update in brackets [444 ].  Note that the render times are now longer for QSV renders, more than double where rendering using QSV and Nvenc is HW Acc.  Non QSV render types are the same or slightly quicker.”

As I mentioned above, when Vegas is able to use both of my GPUs (non-DCH Intel drivers - 6373 and before) my timeline/preview performance is better than using no GPU or with just one enabled.

Since you have two GPUs installed it is likely the 444 updated driver fixed your one bug but caused QSV encodes to fail and default back to software only. Pull up task manager/performance tab and see if there is any utilization for the Intel GPU during the QSV encode, if not that demonstrates the issue with the DCH driver, quicksync and apps built using pre-DCH development systems.

As I mentioned above, when Vegas is able to use both of my GPUs (non-DCH Intel drivers - 6373 and before) my timeline/preview performance is better than using no GPU or with just one enabled.

Vegas needs the intel IGP for hardware decoding via Quicksync. It is a necessity for reasonable 4k timeline playback for people with slower computers. Vegas can't use the video hardware decoder of your video card, or an AMD cpu.

No, @john-rappl not the case. My testing, by my standards, was thorough. Have a look at the page with my Red Car results. I didn’t necessarily expect you to digest it all, that’s why I gave the small extract from it, as a summary. The Qsv was real, just slower with the newer driver, definitely better than having no Qsv. But because I have the use of an Nvidia card, I was able to choose to not have Qsv as HW. Acc. and get superior results using the older driver and Nvidia as HW. Acc. Other users may well get different results with different combinations of hardware.

I contributed here because I saw my previous experience as corroborating yours.

I have an AMD card and Vegas does appear to use both GPUs for timeline editing. I can monitor the GPU utilization and see both GPUs increase utilization as I do things like pan/crop, etc. Can you verify that the Intel GPU is being utilized during the encodes with the post DCH drivers? My experience is that it stays at 0% and the encode defaults to software only which of course is much slower.

Its very simple, look at the red car results. Verified by result.

All encodes/renders using Qsv are faster than Cpu only encodes, using the newer 444 driver, but slower than if using the older driver, where available.

I have an AMD card and Vegas does appear to use both GPUs for timeline editing. I can monitor the GPU utilization and see both GPUs increase utilization as I do things like pan/crop, etc.

I think you've selected the intel GPU in vegas pro for video processing but you say it appears that both of your GPU's are being used for processing based on the gpu monitors. Is it possible your AMD gpu is only showing processing due to it being your display monitor, so it's just processing the video output, it's not really accelerating anything inside of vegas?

This problem has been reported to Intel through their forums by several people (including me) and has gone for months without resolution. It does seem like if a app is rebuilt using the newest Intel Graphic development API (for QSV) it then works in the app.

@john-rappl

If all existing QSV application would require a ‘rebuild’ (driver adaptation), most would become obsolete and useless with the new Intel drivers. It is very unlikely that there will be a further new release of Vp15 or even Vp14.

So the Intel development has to ensure backward compatibility of their new drivers. There is no other way to maintain usability of ‘older’ applications.