Take your time do a nice screen capture and upload,then link it here. I am very interested to see how well the gtx960 do in regards with Vegas. Good,bad,ungly we still want to see it.

I have a 970 in my gaming pc/Vegas render box and it does indeed help quite a bit on the timeline. It is not used by the encoder, however it still does speed up encode times because it gets used for h264 decompression and composition of video effects, etc, but it's ignored on the encoding part which is cpu only. Or in other words during rendering my gpu and cpu usage breaks down as follows in my case:

NVidia 970: Decodes h264 footage, applies gpu accelerated text, applies gpu accelerated Filmconvert effect, applies gpu accelerated sharpen effect, final raw frame is now composited and ready by the gpu.
CPU: Takes the above frame and runs it through the video encoder.

In my case without the 970 gpu my render times increase roughly 4x because the first part which prepares the raw frame gets handled purely by the cpu (Haswell quad core 4770k) and it gets over whelmed. So the 970 takes a good chunk of the load away from the cpu leaving the cpu to handle the final encoding step.

Pete

It is good to hear that the 900 series does work to some extend. However, to have a better understanding how much acceleration it does really provide we need a reference point. The SCS Benchmark project is what we all have used to compare performance with. Can you run some tests too? A good reference would be my test with the GTX570 and the video I made; see the link a few posts above.

Sure I'll give it a try. Forgive me for being a noob with Google Drive (never used it) as I'm used to One Drive, but how do I download all the files on your link? There's no option to download them all, and when I click on an individual file it just tries to display it in my browser.

Pete

There should be a download button somewhere in your browser but you can only download one file after the other. I should have zipped it and uploaded but I was under the impression one would be able to download a complete folder but that isn't the case.

Hmm weird, it doesn't show any download buttons for me. I can see the files in grid view in which case it's just a list of icons and their names, or in list view where it shows icon, name and last modified date but no way to download them.

Pete

Which browser are you using? I will upload a zip file later today to make things easier.

I use Chrome but I tried with IE as well, those are the only two browsers I have installed. I'd post a pic of what it looks like on my end but it doesn't look like this forum supports pic attachments.

It doesn't allow attachments but if you follow the instructions under the sticky "Forum Markup" you can display a picture here.

@ peter

Using IE
veg & pdf files: left click once & wait a couple of seconds,, you should see a down arrow in the screen header. The 'down' arrow will start the download.
Same goes for the veg file.

Media folder: single left click opens folder (13 items). This time a single either offers a download option(centre window) or plays the file. If the file opens & plays then move the cursor to the window header and the download arrow appears.

Seems a bit hit or miss but all files will download.

Ok I tried that, sort of works but often gets this error during download:

"Mercedes Clip 3 MPEG-2 XDCAM 422 - 50mbps 1080p30.mxfUnknown network error."

I'll try again later.

Ok downloads worked today and I was able to get all the files. So what encodes do you want me to test? I assume the test it to render all the regions in that project in one shot, but with which template?

Pete

first of all thanks for taking the time and bandwidth downloading the project. SCS used MC AVC 1080p Internet CUDA template with default settings and XDCAM EX 1080 60i with default settings for their test which is also what members of this forum used a long time ago to make a list of systems and their performance.

Ok I just did the test with the MC AVC 1080p template, which is basically what I use as well although tweaked a little but I left it stock for this test. I've never used the XDCAM template so I skipped that one. I rendered the entire video footage of that project which is around 1 minute 3 seconds of footage. There were 4 renders in total, cpu/cuda versions with the 970 enabled on the timeline and cpu/cuda with the 970 disabled on the timeline. By "enabled on the timeline" I mean how in the preferences->video tab you can select the NVidia 970 so that it accelerates video in the timeline, or you can disable it and rely on cpu only for the timeline. My pc is a stock Haswell 4770k, NVidia 970, 16gb ram, Windows 8.1 64bit. Results are:

With NVidia 970 enabled on the timeline:
Encode with cpu only: 2:30
Encode with Cuda: 2:30

With NVidia 970 disabled on the timeline:
Encode with cpu only: 5:49
Encode with Cuda: 5:50

So this does show what I normally see as well. Basically the cpu/cuda times in each case are the same because of course the MC encoder does not use the 970 at all, because as we know it requires a Fermi based gpu. So that's why those times are identical. But we can see how having a 970 still dramatically helps where it drops the encode time from 5:50 to 2:30 because the 970 still gets used to compose the frame before it gets handed off to the encoder. In my case working with 4k video footage I see a far more dramatic speed increase more on the order of 4x faster with the 970, although this test does show that it helps even for 1080p footage.

I guess to summarize more simply for others reading this, there are basically two gpu use aspects to Vegas Pro, the encoder and the timeline. The encoders on Vegas Pro are still stuck in the dark ages and only support Fermi based gpu's on the NVidia side (don't know about AMD side). The other aspect is gpu support on the timeline and Vegas Pro is better there. They use opencl so any effects that support opencl will use your new gpu. That's why encoding videos can still be faster when using a card like the NVidia 970, because Vegas Pro will use the gpu to decode the h264 video and apply effects before then letting your cpu encode it.

Pete
You are right. The improvement you see in timeline performance and render is related to the Nvidia cards OpenCL capabilities; while not as good as AMD, they do support it.
AMD cards up to the HD7000 series are supported by the MC AVC and Sony AVC codecs but newer cards are not which is why I frame serve to Handbrake for MP4 renders. Nevertheless, timeline and FX does use OpenCL and that is why, at the moment, the R9 series is better in that area

And again, thanks for testing it. Is your 4770K running at stock speeds? Btw; a single GTX580 and a 3930K @ 4.3GHz will render to MC AVC in about 36sec.

Yeah my 4770k is currently at stock speed. I'm not surprised that your 580 beats it. In my case it's the cpu holding everything back, all the cpu cores get pegged to near 100% and the cpu fan kicks up really high. Meanwhile the 970 is barely being used, it's fan stays slow. The h264 decompress and compose effects steps in my case don't tax the 970 too much at all on the Sony test case so it mostly idles while the 4770k struggles to deal with encoding, hence the still longish times compared to your 580. It's a shame they don't have a modern encoder that uses the gpu, but so it goes.

On my 4k 100mbps content it's a different story, I get around 4x speed improvement there because I use h264 decompress->Film Convert->sharpen on the compose frame steps and Film Convert is very gpu intensive. I'd be curious to compare my 970+4770k to your 580 on 4k 100mbps material with Film Convert. I know Film Convert is very gpu intensive because it gives you the option to use either your cpu or gpu, and in cpu mode it's basically unusable on my 4770k whereas with gpu enabled the 970 tears through it nicely. Basically without my 970 a typical 15 hour overnight render of one of my video shoots becomes an almost 60 hours ordeal!