Vegas 10 GPU rendering Benefit ?

Shastasage wrote on 9/21/2010, 12:11 PM

I know its not out yet but when i read about this aspect of Sony Vegas 10 they don't seem to be bragging about it like Adobe has with the Mercury Engine(MPE).

Wonder if anyone has any guesses( or better) as to how they think it might compare with MPE or any other GPU supported rendering.

Sony has know about it for a bit ...and i am sure have studied MPE but wonder how important the think it is to Vegas consumers.

Thoughts?

Comments

chudson wrote on 9/21/2010, 12:55 PM

I doubt we will see much difference in anything really. Vegas needs a complete engine overhaul at this point to utilize extra parrallel processors I would imagine. This is a bolt on marketting gimick to say they have CUDA support. My opinion is CUDA support is only valid if the playback engine utilizes it for both real time playback and rendering. Not just redering to one specific codec with plugin support.
Just my 2 pennies

Shastasage wrote on 9/21/2010, 1:32 PM

This makes a lot of sense!

kinda what i was feeling when i wrote this...but couldn't put it in words like you have.

Thanks!

Mark

Hulk wrote on 9/22/2010, 7:51 AM

Well stated.

While GPU while rendering will definitely be welcome, rendering is something that can be done while you are sleeping or doing somethign else. Or on another computer. The point being that rendering is not interactive.

It's preview performance that is needed and would increase the editing experience and the creativity of the craft when using Vegas. Perhaps without recoding the entire Vegas engine part of the preview process could be offloaded to the GPU?

- Mark

John_Cline wrote on 9/22/2010, 11:55 AM

Personally, I'm going to welcome GPU acceleration of AVC encoding. I do a lot of Blu-ray authoring and will often use AVC encoding as opposed to MPEG2 encoding depending on how much material I'm trying to get on the disc. AVC encoding is sometimes painfully slow and if the new GPU encoding can at least double the speed, then I'll be exceptionally happy.

As for using the GPU to accelerate preview speeds; it's not that the GPU itself is faster, its speed comes from having multiple cores and doing parallel processing. The GPU can only speed up tasks which can actually be done in parallel and I'm guessing most of the preview tasks are more sequential in nature than parallel. Even if It is parallel, it's difficult to write code that keeps the threads in sync. If it was easy (or even possible) then Vegas would have had it a long time ago.

jabloomf1230 wrote on 9/22/2010, 8:02 PM

The MPE only benefits FX that are CUDA-enabled. It has no impact on encoding and only accelerates previewing the timeline if the FX are CUDA-compatible. As best I can tell from the preliminary information on VP 10, it only uses CUDA via the new (announced about 6 months ago) MainConcept h.264 encoder:

http://www.mainconcept.com/products/sdks/gpu-acceleration/cuda-h264avc.html

It is possible that VP 10 could also use CUDA for FX, just as the MPE does, but we will have to wait and see. I tend to doubt it, though.

LSHorwitz wrote on 9/23/2010, 6:27 PM

I would imagine that the consumer version of Vegas 10 which already includes CUDA support would be a pretty good "preview" of how much improvement in speed to expect from the Vegas 10 Pro release. Since the consumer version has been out for some time now, perhaps a new thread started on that Vegas forum would get some comments and actual measurements from people who have been using the CUDA-enabled Vegas 10 home version.

Larry