But this chart list benchmarks for virtually every graphics card

Benchmarks like this one have no value when it comes to video editing, especially with Vegas. The fastest card in that test would not be the best card for Vegas.

For most editing in Vegas, you won't see a major difference in the performance of either card.

Vegas uses OpenCL for timeline playback and all of Sony's plugins are GPU accelerated. If you do straight cuts only and no FX then yes, you won't see the difference.

@ushere
The big difference between the R7 and R9 is memory bandwidth, 128 vs 512. If budget allows, buy a R9 290, it doesn't have to be a 290X.

thanks - appreciate the reply.

@ushere

One thing to keep in mind. These kind of cards are rather long and you need a big case the fit one in. Also make sure you have a good power supply, 850W to 1000W.

And don't be shy to buy one from eBay. I bought both of my cards from eBay and they are working fine. Editing is not as stress full as gaming and a good used card will do the job.

@old smoke

I'm curious. What's the advantage of having 2 cards rather than one and how is the display processing distributed? thanks.

wwaag

I am using 4 monitors and that just requires two cards. I also like to balance the load between the cards, but that is just me.

@Steve actually charts like this are more useful with regards to Vegas.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7457/the-radeon-r9-290x-review/18

Luxmark v2 or v3, looking at CPU + GPU performance, probably the best "benchmark" for vegas as the app stands now.

Basic time line playback will not see much benifits from GPU, its when you start using effects or CC that require math that can be completed faster on the gpu than the cpu. Effects in FP32 mode will show a marked increase in GPU utilization. However, a slow GPU can actually hold back a system. To slow of a cpu and memory bandwidth, and the system will not feed the gpu fast enough. The same goes on the flip if the gpu is to slow.

This balance is why I believe most people actually experience better performance and stability on cpu only. Most users with the correct balance in their configurations will praise gpu acellertaion. But there is a triangle of cpu, memory, and gpu that needs to optimized.

Mutilate gpus I can see working well because one can handle video display and other set for compute only in vegas prefereneces. The resources on the compute only device would have all VRAM available to compute, and not sharing the way a single unit does.

As others have stated, you want to look at OpenCL benchmarks for Vegas Pro performance. CompuBench actually has an OpenCL benchmark for Video Composition. You can test your card and see how all of the cards stack up here:

CompuBench for OpenCL - Video Composition

The top 4 ranked cards are all AMD with AMD holding 13 out of the top 20 positions against NVIDIA. That's because NVIDIA puts all of their time into CUDA and not OpenCL.

~jr

I saw this thread just in time as I'm thinking of swapping my GTX 970 for one of the AMD R9's.

The Nvidia has never worked well in Vegas, it causes frequent crashes and glitches. I currently have to keep GPU acceleration off at all times. Would this swap to the AMD make sense? Would my i7 4790 & 16gb Ram have a proper "balance" with the R9 like you describe?

I would love to have proper GPU acceleration during editing, and faster rendering, could switching cards help me with this? I learned too late that Nvidia isn't always friendly with vegas ;)

i'm sort of in the other boat re. beaker09.

i've found nvidia pretty reliable compared to my brief encounter with amd - that was some yeas ago mind you..

i've been running with gpu off for all rendering - on a i7 4770 i'm not too sure whether it would be faster with a r9 with gpu rendering on anyway?

what my holy grail is is tl playback. if i could be assured my tl playback would improve 'immensely' then i'd get a r9 280. however, i still don't have a definitive answer...

rendering is really of secondary importance in my workflow - i simple do it in downtime or overnight.

WIth a I7-4790, the 290, 290x, 390, 390x would be good choices for general 4k/HD YouTube type work. There really is not much difference in 290 series vs the 390 equivalent cards. I think the 390 is mainly a redesign of the 290 that deals with heat, noise, and power consumption. The hardware stats and computational benchmarking seems almost identical with only 5% increase on the 390x.

It will be interesting to see how a Fury X runs with Vegas, as that card has an unbelievable increase in memory bandwidth, and a 35% jump in Single point calculations. The FuryX is the card I think AMD wanted to release as the successor to the 290x, but in my reading of the tea leaves, could not meet demand for the new memory. So to meet the demand they optimized the 290x chip and released it as new chip, and gave them all 390 designations to cloud the waters. Clouding the waters or allow fathers to buy their kid the 390 they want with out breaking the bank. :)

Here are some benchmarks on the 390 Fury X. I tend to look at the Luxmark stats, and the Vegas Benchmark. Luxmark stats with CPU+SINGLE GPU, are a good ranking view. The vegas benchmark is outdated, and the complexity of the benchmark file needs to be updated to show the performance advantage of the 390 fury x. Swapping the XDCAM for XAVC, or running the tests in FP32 Full mode would do it.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9421/the-amd-radeon-r9-fury-review-feat-sapphire-asus/16


The successor to the w9100 running the unlocked Fiji XT chip, and large amounts of HBM will most likely be a 4k dream.

If you move from NVidia to AMD, make sure to read the previous posts on how to do this the right way. Just yanking the card and install the new one, and you can run into driver issues. You need fully uninstall the NVidia card back to windows default drivers, then install the AMD card.

Yes, without a definitive answer that my GPU acceleration problems (during TL playback) would be better, I'm skeptical of changing anything, especially the brand of my vid card. With GPU on using my GTX 970, I get frequent crashes while previewing, and visual glitches. If I was even 99% sure the AMD R9 wouldn't have this same issue, I would make the leap!

I render 2-3 times a day though, short 10-15 minute YouTube videos. If each of those renders is shortened by 50%, I could save an hour or more of valuable work time. Or play time!

I'm a guy whos new to Vegas, and editing in general so I'm putting a lot of faith in you folks who have been using it for ages. Would this make sense for me to do? My Nvidia isn't doing me any favors at the moment. Simple 10 minute videos are taking almost an hour to render.