I have the next line from that GPU, the HD6970, and I've done some benchmarks. I actually bought both the HD6970 and the nVidia GTX570, that's about the limit of my cash for this, and I've decided that the GTX570 is going back. At least part of that is the fast that the video output of the GTX570 I have was horrible... I looked like analog video with bad/mismatched termination. Don't even know how you'd get that with a digital device... but that didn't affect the benchmarks.

My system is otherwise an AMD1090T (x6, 3.2GHz) with 16GB RAM. I'm pretty certain that the CPU performance and even the system performance (actual PCIe speeds) will have an effect on your results, too, which is why I listed this here.

I started with a simple project: AVCHD video (HMC40 camcorder, "PG" mode, 720p60) , one crossfade, with the Sony Brightness/Contrast plug-in applied globally, and a straight render. For preview, I found Vegas 10 did 51.6fps, Vegas 11 non-GPU did 57.4fps, and with GPU I only got 40fps. Not a good start.

Rendering to MainConcept MPEG-2 (25Mb/s, 720p60, VBR 2-pass), I found Vegas 11 no-GPU rendered 9.1% faster than Vegas 10, while with the GPU, 20% slower! I then rendered to Sony AVC (16Mb/s, 720p60, CBR) and found, versus Vegas 10, VP11 did 13% faster without GPU, 25.6% faster with GPU.

Ok... so next, I layered four 50Mb/s 720p60 MXF clips in two parts. In the first, I did a animated break out into four quadrants, in the second, it was just four layers with transparency. No plug-ins. Vegas 10 and 11 did 2.4fps average playback, so did Vegas 11 with GPU on the GTX570. However, the HD6970 did 5fps. Not amazing, but still a 108% improvement.

In rendering to MainConcept again, I saw a 2% slowdown, VP11 vs. VP10, without the GPU, but a 43% speedup with the HD6970. The GTX570 crashed with some kind of OpenCL or CUDA error. I rendered to Sony AVC, same as before, and saw VP11 render 6.6% faster without GPU, 27% faster on the HD6970, and 15.9% faster with the GTX570.

That project was set to best quality and 32-bit pixels. I ran it again with 8-bit pixels and "good" quality. Very different. I found I got 18fps from Vegas 10, only 13fps from Vegas 11, no GPU, and only 10fps from Vegas 11 with the HD6970. I also found that VP11 rendered to MPEG-2 19% slower without GPU, 86% slower with GPU. To Sony AVC, I sw a 7.9% speedup with Vegas 11, but a 17% slower render once I enabled the GPU. Go figure.

Next, I ran a section of an actual animation project I was working on; this lots of PNGs, some raw AVI with alpha transparency, not many plug-ins, but lots of motion keyframing. I only ran this in Vegas 11, and only on the HD6970. I saw 5.1fps without GPU, 14fps with the GPU. In rendering, I saw a 25% speedup to Sony AVC, a 37% speedup to Main Concept AVC.

Finally, I ran Sony's VP11 benchmark. Like my animation, this has a mix of video, keyframe animation, but lots more effects. Without the GPU, I saw 8fps on my system. With the HD6970, I saw 28.5fps ... damn near full speed. With the GTX570, I saw 27.5fps, still very respectable.

I rendering, I got a whopping 118% speed up to Sony AVC on the HD6970, a pretty close 107% improvement with the GTX570. Rendering to XDCAM EX 1080i60, I saw a 210% improvement with the HD6970, a 175% improvement with the GTX570.

One curious thing is the CPU consumption. In the Sony benchmark, for example, I see 96% average CPU when rendering CPU-only... that's a pretty well tuned system. On the HD6970, I see CPU at 58% and GPU averaging 30%... and yet, this is the fastest render by far. The GTX570 gives me 75% CPU and 50% average GPU. I'm using GPU Shark to measure GPU, it has never crashed on my system.

I'll also point out I'm using the very latest AMD drivers. And that it's a royal pain installing these. I saw errors reported when I first installed... this was actually bogus -- they report an error if their attempt to install C++ framework stuff fails due to there being a newer version of that already in place. Major consumer hostility fail. So I tried again, which apparently boggered up their control panel software -- it gets wonky if installed more than once. So I had to run a couple of driver cleaners on my system to scrape away every bit of old AMD, ATi, and (while I was at it) nVidia stuff from my system. Seems good now.

If you're playing with effects, I wager that most run in realtime or close to with a CPU if you're applying them to standard PAL DV. And also keep in mind, only GPU-enabled effects are going to be accelerated, even when they can be. You can find the GPU accelerated FX listed, so this is easy to assure.

I'm a little underwhelmed, I'll admit, at the lack of preview performance on simple things. As shown, my system can preview 720p60 pretty much on the CPU alone. If I run video in a GPU-accelerated player (which uses DXVA 2.0, not OpenCL, so sure, it's more efficient), I can easily play four 1080p60 videos on my system, now, in full 59.97fps display. Hell, even the fairly wonky VLC can run at least three 1080p60 videos at absolutely full speed. So I do wonder why I'm actually losing performance on very simple things, even though I actually do see a speedup on some projects. And for me, since I do videos with a ton of layers, lots of animation, etc. I think I will, at least for some of my work, see a big win from the HD6970.