@OldSmoke and @BruceUSA both recommended using the older catalyst drivers due to what was available at the time Vegas Pro came out and support for that specific card.

That's surprising, and disappointing. Is there a difference in preview when you turn off GPU?

@ddm - at most 1-2 less fps is all.

Are you, by chance, running a second monitor off your motherboards Intel GPU?

I have an older i7-870 system with a 5700, and monitoring the GPU load I see the GPU doing large amounts of off loading. I have seen that projects with certain effects chains kill the GPU assistance, and vegas simply uses only the CPU. With simple common effects like CC and blur, I see a noticeable different in playback quality in Best/Full. Also if you use multiple windows of vegas open at the same time, only the 1st window opened will use the GPU.

I would do a clean install of windows and try again. Make sure your GPU is running at full bandwidth for whatever PCIe slot generation you have. I found on my board that USB 3.0 Tubro mode used PCI lanes from the main GPU slot, dropping back to 4x gen1. Once I solved that problem, added 32GB of RAM, my GPU acceleration went up noticeably. Vegas stability was also improved. GPU-z will show the slot operation speed.

Try executing "winsat mem" from an admin command prompt, and verfiy that your memory bandwidth exceeds yours GPU bus bandwidth. For example my system is operating at 13.7GB/s memory, and the GPU is operating at 8GB/s. This to me indicates that the system will be able to keep the GPU fed, up to at least the PCIx bandwidth. The video memory bandwidth is however 19GB/s, so clearly the PCIx bus will become the bottleneck, if the system trys to move that much data to the GPU. Newer systems will of course have much higher scores.

PCI Express link performance ×16
1.0 4 GB/s
2.0 8 GB/s
3.0 15 GB/s
4.0 31 GB/s

Verify that "Luxmark" works correctly and sees all your OpenCL devices. Try rendering with only your GPU to verify operation. Verify that Vegas is actually seeing the GPU in software, try rendering/playback on a single XDCAM.mxf file with like a Gaussian blur, and see if the GPU is being used.

Move page file to a dedicated SSD, verify that the SSD bandwidth is not restricted by bus bandwidth.

"Winsat formal" will give all stats on your system. Here are my results:
CPU LZW Compression 473.41 MB/s
CPU AES256 Encryption 340.98 MB/s
CPU Vista Compression 1038.34 MB/s
CPU SHA1 Hash 1509.58 MB/s
Uniproc CPU LZW Compression 90.89 MB/s
Uniproc CPU AES256 Encryption 86.37 MB/s
Uniproc CPU Vista Compression 185.10 MB/s
Uniproc CPU SHA1 Hash 424.50 MB/s
Memory Performance 13748.96 MB/s
Direct3D Batch Performance 1023.27 F/s
Direct3D Alpha Blend Performance 1031.93 F/s
Direct3D ALU Performance 334.23 F/s
Direct3D Texture Load Performance 333.05 F/s
Direct3D Batch Performance 0.00 F/s
Direct3D Alpha Blend Performance 0.00 F/s
Direct3D ALU Performance 0.00 F/s
Direct3D Texture Load Performance 0.00 F/s
Direct3D Geometry Performance 0.00 F/s
Direct3D Geometry Performance 0.00 F/s
Direct3D Constant Buffer Performance 0.00 F/s
Video Memory Throughput 19601.80 MB/s
Dshow Video Encode Time 1.50738 s
Media Foundation Decode Time 0.16655 s
Disk Sequential 64.0 Read 262.49 MB/s 7.5
Disk Random 16.0 Read 178.43 MB/s 7.6
Total Run Time 00:03:12.44

Ciff,

I really feel your pain man... The card is not the issue but rather the cause is within your system itself. I suppose, you must have a 2nd system to do your work. In the mean time, I would reinstall Windows as follows: Download AMD Driver 13.9 and .Net Framewrok 4.0 and have it ready (USB stick or what ever storage drive you have) Please find the time to try out this steps and report back.

1) Reinstall Windows,
2) Install .Net Framework 4.0
3) Install AMD Driver 13.9
4) Install Vegas
5) Open Vegas and import your footage and let it rip. You should getting full frame rate playback.

After that, install all of your other plug ins, codecs etc.

@BruceUSA - funny thing is, this is a VERY recent install of Windows 8.1 so it hasn't' really had time to be messed up with a lot of unnecessary third party apps. System is kept clean as a general rule and the time it will take to reinstall right now is not an option as this is my only editing machine other than my laptop which is a lot less powerful than my desktop. I have to edit tomorrow so I'm not able to do as you suggest at the present time but will keep it on my radar to see when I can.

Thanks for the advice.

Here is a my story. When I built my PC about a year ago. Brand new system 3930K CPU, install windows and AMD driver and then install Vegas. For what ever reasons, Vegas could not launch. After that, I try the above suggested steps and everything came to life and works wonder.. Install Windows on a SSD is pretty quick and painless really.

In your situation, you can wait, when your work load is lighten. Perhaps you can give that a try. Editing with GPU Acceleration and TL performance definitely worth your time.

@BruceUSA - Made some hardware upgrades back in December od 2014 - Intel 5670 Hexcore processor, 24GB RAM and 240GB SSD boot/apps drive and both the GTX-660ti or the Radeon 6970 card so I have the hardware in place. It sounds like I'm going to have to reinstall which I loath doing as I just got my machine where I wanted it to be for daily work. TBH, I'm about to throw my hands up in the air and just give up.

@Cliff
You got to have a "Gremlin" somewhere in your system. What is your project like? Have you tried the SCS Benchmark project? That is our Vegas "Bench test" so to speak. Did you try to reset Vegas to it's defaults? CTRL+SHIFT during launch?

So, Cliff... I take it you're NOT running a second monitor off your motherboards HDMI? Reason I ask is because I just added a 2nd monitor and plugged it in to my onboard Intel GPU and everything seemed fine, Vegas was working fine although I'm just in the early stages of laying out a documentary so I haven't been stressing the system so the performance was full frame/full framerate. For the heck of, I loaded up the Sony Demo with the red car and my playback was 6 to 7 fps which had always been 29.97 dead on with GPU on my 570. Hmmm. Nvidia GPU was on in Vegas, but no performance gain over CPU. I had 3 choices in Vegas now, Nvida-Intel-or OFF. Thought it might be the fact that I was using 2 different GPU's for some reason, even though I know others here have claimed success with 2 cards. Anyway, plugged my second monitor into the HDMI of my Nvidia card, rebooted and I was back to full GPU performance. So, if you're seeing more than just your ATI and OFF as GPU selection in Vegas you might try something similar.

@ddm - I'm running a 2 monitor setup but the second monitor is on the second DVI port. And unfortunately, it neither of my monitors have an HDMI port on it otherwise I'd try that and see how it works. You may be on to something here but it seems I'm left now with very few options at the present time.

@Cliff
Try the SCS Benchmark project. This is a very good indication if your GPU is working properly or not. Do you have a tool that can display the GPU load? something like GPU-Z or HWiNFO64?

@OldSmoke - I'll give that a shot and see what I come up with.

Where can I download the Benchmark project?

**Edit - found and downloaded the VP11 benchmark test - is that the one you are referring to?"

refresh rates my go down with dual monitor setups using hdmi.

Don't dismiss that GTX 660ti. I found this comparison between the 660ti and 580, which pretty much calls them a performance tie.

http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-660-Ti-vs-GeForce-GTX-580

They might be a performance tie in terms of games or other apps but not for Vegas.

I'm using Vegas 12. I just replaced my nvidia 550ti with a Radeon 6970 and am using the Catalyst 13.9 drivers. Video preview in Vegas is now slightly slower than with the 550ti, and Vegas crashes on startup if I have Render with GPU enabled, producing this error:

fault module c:\ windows\system32\amdoc164.dll
fault address 0x0007FED749e866

Now I remember why I left AMD the last time.

/jerry

I agree that the AMD drivers are not as refined as NVIDIA drivers. It took me a while to find the right driver for my R9 290 but its all good now. I use driver 14.4 but you must do a clean install. Use the AMD driver cleanup utility to remove the old driver and install the new one.

Also keep in mind that eventully the GPU will be faster then the CPU can prepare frames for it and you hit a performance peak that is caused by the CPU, or the bus system on the motherboard.

@OldSmoke:

Thank you for all the time and effort you have put into GPU and driver issues - we have all benefited. I do have a question - in this thread you said you finally settled on AMD 14.4 for your R9 290x. I have gone to the AMD site and under "Revision 14.4" it says this is " Display Driver ver. 14.10.1006"

Revision 14.9 is "Display Driver ver. 14.301.1001" which I am using now, and seems to work well (no crashes, but I have no way to know if it is the "best").

Is Revision 14.4 the one you are using?

dxdy

I apologize, its 14.7-rc3. This is the info from the catalyst page:
Driver Package: 14.20.1004-140811a-174673E

The reason I use this driver because it is the only that works well with NeatVideo and AAV ColorLab plugin.