There have been a few posts about this. Seems getting the balance right between your CPU and GPU is important of you want to achieve max performance. In your case, it could simply be your CPU is processing footage faster than your 560 card.
Reading around the forum, it seems not uncommon for some users to switch off GPU settings within Vegas and get better results.
I think of it (in utterly simplistic terms that my brain can handle) like a horse pulling a small car. If the car engine is tiny, the horse will help pull the car, if the engine is better, the car will push the horse! ouch. :)
Im my own case, my horse is pulling my car very nicely, Intel i7 930 and GTX570. Both in preview and rendering speeds. About a x3 gain.

Paul.

This is a real Holy Grail search, to find the Sweet Spot. But then into the mix I insist in throwing in GPU enabled FXs and NON GPU enabled FXs. What do I do then?

This is really complicated. And way beyond posting my system specifications.

G

Rather than calling it a sweet spot, maybe it would be more accurate to call it a sweet area or region. I dont see it as a definite 'point' where all is fine and dandy. But a range where the CPU and GPU both play ball and get along fine.
Its hard for me to say whats going on because i dont see it here on my machine. There are issues with v11 for sure, but speed is not one of them for me. Its flying compaired to v10 and 9.
I now want to make a 'helpful' comment here, as this seems to be the law now, but i honestly cannot say what is going on with CPU/GPU interaction other than my rather silly (and i hope slightly funny) analogy i wrote before. Power balance, maybe thats a good term to use. Its not a bottleneck as some have suggested, the bus can handle this, its just a non balance of shear computing power and we are seeing varing results in performace as a result of different hardware. Thats my 10p's worth and basic understanding of a source code we cannot examine.

Paul.

tack on thought..
To illustrate this, my system has almost exactly the same hardware as the test machine used in the Sony Press Release (car advert) benchmark. I downloaded the test project and media, ran it, and i get almost exactly the same results in both preview and rendering times (within 1 second) as they do. So, this tells us what.. It means the results are reproducable with the correct hardware. But the motherboard was not specified, so that could be and probably is different. I have no idea what they used and to be honest i dont think it matters that much. CPU/ GPU and RAM (to a certain extent) seems to be key to 'power balance'.

Paul.

Yup, Paul: Sweet Area or Region. My "Spot" is too specific.

G

Okay, let's pretend I'm a caveman that just crawled out of my cave, (so anything I ask will sound smarter than that), are you guys talking about adjusting (as in overclocking) either the CPU or GPU or both. If not overclocking, which I hate doing because I can never get it right, what type of tweaking are you talking about.

Also, as you can see from my specs, I have an ATI Radeon HD 5850, with a dual monitor setup (two Viewsonic 27" monitors) which I would consider a mid-range graphics card. Is there a relationship between better hardware and fewer crashes - specifically in THIS case of Vegas Pro 11 not working right. I know there are crashes because some bugs need to be ironed out, but would I notice fewer crashes with a higher end graphics card. (Just thinking about my X-mas list)

And finally, if no one really wants to get into the nuts and bolts of this "sweet area or spot" between the CPU and GPU, where can a caveman like myself go to read up on something like this....besides the Sony knowledgebase that is.

Thanks!

"Okay, let's pretend I'm a caveman that just crawled out of my cave.."
We are all cavemen (and women) when it comes to v11 with GPU!! This is new stuff.

"are you guys talking about adjusting (as in overclocking)"..
No not really, i dont think overclocking is a solution for anything unless you like games, even then its only a relatively small gain. Talking more about the hardware itself.

"Also, as you can see from my specs"...
Well done for listening to SCS's request. This is helpful to them and costs us nothing to do.

"Is there a relationship between better hardware and fewer crashes"
Thats a tough one. I dont think anyone can answer that for sure. A lot of this is speculation and I dont think even SCS know whats really going on. But one thing for sure is, they must be aware of the problems and are working on it. Lets see what the next Build version brings us, hopefully before xmas!
It could be there is a relationship between hardware and crash level. The most popular answer to crashing right now is 'driver updates'. Well, it has been noted that even after driver updates, some users still have crash issues. But it could help in some cases. So anyone with problems should at least try that option.

"And finally, if no one really wants to get into the nuts and bolts of this "sweet area or spot" between the CPU and GPU, where can a caveman like myself go to read up on something like this"..
We ALL want to get to the nuts and bolts of this!. Make no mistake, we want this resolving so we can all max our NLEs and get best stability too. A lot of the guys on here use Vegas for their income, not just a hobby. So stabilty is prime! Then followed by speed. Problem is there is limited understanding about the actual processes involved between CPU and GPU in Vegas. All i read on here is guesswork at best, based on knowledge from other systems. SCS are the only people that can understand the nuts and bolts because only they have the source code.

Hope this helps.

Paul.

Thanks Paul, I appreciate your responses!

As you mentioned, the first solution to try is updating your drivers, and while I don't think codecs are considered drivers (maybe they are?), I have a feeling that they are next on the list of things to check.

I think I mentioned in one of my earlier posts that I have codec issues across the board, not just with Vegas. In some graphics programs, I notice that if I move an adjustment slider, my desktop icons temporarily turn white. And when opening or closing various video viewers, my whole desktop will flash for a second.

In VidBlaster, I couldn't get the live Chroma Key function to work until I added one specific codec (Cedocida)

Sometimes I get the urge to wipe my main hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch. But I've done that several times in my lifetime, and don't look forward to doing that again unless absolutely necessary.

Anyway, I still think I'm going to ask Santa for a new Graphics card! Thanks again for your responses.

"while I don't think codecs are considered drivers (maybe they are?)"..
No they are not. They are a separate module of code designed to do a specific task, encode video in the case of rendering in Vegas.

"I notice that if I move an adjustment slider, my desktop icons temporarily turn white"
Nasty! something other than Vegas at fault here. Sounds very much like Windows display driver issues.

"until I added one specific codec (Cedocida)"..
Sorry i have never heard of that codec, but the general advice is never install any codec unless you absolutely need to. Vegas already has some excellent codecs built in for nearly all major rendering tasks.

"Sometimes I get the urge to wipe my main hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch"
Agreed, you may end up doing this. Its the only sure fire way of a clean install. Lots of backing up of work needed!!!

"Thanks again for your responses"
You are very welome.

Paul.

Lee,

Do you have a specific model of card in mind?

Larry