My only issue with waiting too long is that the "old" parts wont make any sale at all anymore. Maybe I wait for the i7-7xxx Extreme and scrap what I have. I am also quite tempted to build AMD Ryzen 1800X just for the fun of it.

Just to compare with a 6 year old PC (3930K + GTX570) - MC 1080-30p render

- GPU OFF: 3min35s / 4min12s (8/10bits)

- GPU ON: 2min01s / 2min25s (8/10bits)

- GPU ON with Cuda: 37s / 52s (8/10bits)

Only 20% performance increase for CPU over 6 years is pretty low.

GPU encoding can't be beaten yet. I hope it will be implemented soon in Vegas...

Yeah for sure, gpu encoding would be preferred. But this is Vegas Pro so not to be unless you are willing to use really old video hardware which I'm not, since I do many things with this machine besides just Vegas Pro. Still there are other apps like Handbrake which I use daily and that doesn't support gpu either, so having this extra cpu grunt for so cheap is really nice.

Here are my tests.

I want fast fast rendering, Sony AVC is the choice for that.

And fastest one is render using Intel QSV + RX 480 for preview acceleration.

These are very interesting comments about Vegas and Ryzen. However, I seem to be having significant problems with Ryzen and Vegas Pro 14. My new system uses Ryzen 1700X CPU, with 64GB Ram, Radeon 480 Graphics and a1tb Samsung 960 Evo m.2 . I thought this would be a good system for editing 4K. However, this system seems to have problems working with normal HD footage in Vegas. The problems occur with any transitions on the timeline. At the start of every transition, Vegas stops momentarily and then stutters through the transtion. This never happened with my old i7 4770K machine which only had 16GB RAM. There seems to be some issue between Ryzen and Vegas Pro 14 (same thing happens with Vegas Pro 13). No one seems to be able to provide a solution or explain why this is happening. Has anyone else encountered this problem - and if so, has anyone found a solution? My settings have not changed from those I used on my old i7 machine - but there is definitely a problem with Ryzen and vegas.

I'm using a Ryzen 1800x with 32GB of 3000mhz DDR4 and a Geforce 970 GTX. I have no such problems in Vegas, so maybe you should try to disable GPU acceleration to see if that changes anything, being that is the biggest difference between our hardware configurations.

Thanks Frosty. Yes I have disabled GPU acceleration and it makes no difference. Very strange that you have no problems. Are you using Windows 10 or 7? I'm still using Windows 7 Ultimate. The other thing I was thinking was whether it is the result of my new video cameras. I'm now using a  Panansonic HC X1 and a Panasonic FZ2500. In the past I always used Canon XA 20 and never had a problem on my i7 system. I'm shooting HD - not 4K. But the odd thing is that when I click on the properties of the individual files from the Panasonics, there are no details provided about frame height, frame width, bit rate etc. So I wonder if it has anything to do with the files from these video cameras.

I'm using windows 10 64 bit. Which format are you shooting? Maybe try a different format? I'm using AVCHD or 4K MP4 depending on the project.

Here are my tests.

I want fast fast rendering, Sony AVC is the choice for that.

And fastest one is render using Intel QSV + RX 480 for preview acceleration.

@queensoft

Thank you for the additional tests with the Sony AVC encoder, which I normally prefer. It shows, that using the RX 480 for decoding improved the Sony AVC Encoding with QSV by a factor of 2.15 ! Could you also see such an improvement in the preview when using the RX 480 instead of the internal I7-7700k GPU?

I'm using MP4 1920 x 1080 - and generally variable frame rate for a slight over-cranking. But same issue seems to happen with MP4 and 25fps or 50fps. Haven't tried AVCHD - - but if I do, it means I can't use over-cranking as it is only available in MP4. But I'll try it and see if it makes any difference.

I focus on the Sony AVC export and with the Vp11_Benchmark project I get on my i7-6700k @4.5GHz with NO additional graphic card to Sony AVC 8Bit Internet 1080p30 Preset but 12Mbps (as queesoft postet) with Auto/QSV_Speed

Vp13    48s Auto    47s QSV_Speed
Vp14    46s Auto    46s QSV_Speed

Interesting for me is, that there is a slight improvement in Vp14 B252 compared to Vp13. The difference of ~3s compared to the i7-7700k would not justify an upgrade of the CPU but if the preview speed/smoothness could be improved by an RX 480 I would think about it ...

What about the Ryzen render times to Sony AVC Internet 1080p30 ?

Motivated by the results of queensoft, I now installed my old AMD R7 250 (1GB) graphics card into my i7-6700k PC running Vp14 B270 and updated the Intel driver and installed the actual AMD driver via MS Devicemanager.

Even though the R7 250 is a quite low power card I get a similar improvement in the Sony AVC render performance and also when rendering to UHDp30 HEVC.

With the AMD Capverde used for video GPU acceleration and the Intel for the Sony AVC with QSV(Speed) it now only takes 26s to render the Vp11 bench – without the additional card it took 46s.

But even better. With this setting I get a 50fps internal preview of UHDp50 footage in an Vp14 UHDp50 project (on an UHD-monitor). Without the additional card, the preview run with ~45fps only.