I had a 460 but the video playback and things I used in Vegas were not even close to what the 7870 does but it sucks with GPU rendering. So it has some good points but the bad outweigh the good. I was wondering if a 660Ti would work better with Vegas?

Your original question is very dependent on formats in-out, the driver versions used and other things.

But as you have a fast Ivy Bridge processor it is questionable if you will gain anything using GPU assist in an "external" (= not inside the CPU) graphics card like a Nvidia xxx.

If you can use the formats from Intel Quick Sync this might give something as to speed.

My advice is to run some tests with the specific formats that you normally use to find out how to make the best settings for your system.

One thing is rendering for the final delivery format - and as this is not done so often the rendering speed there might not be so important.
More often you will render parts of - or the whole video for checking the audio syncs, the transitions etc etc. and for this task a less demanding format is often sufficient.

Example: My delivery format is 1920 x 1080 50i mpeg-2 at 32 Mbps - and that really takes some time to render - But my format for checking 10+ times a day is 1280 x 720 25p mpeg-2 which is very fast for rendering and much better suited for viewing on my computer monitors.

What I mean is: even if it is tempting to save some minutes on the final render - then is it worth all the effort ?

You write about preview too - here my cheap GTX 450 is sufficient for smooth and full speed preview of my input media (AVCHD full HD 50i about 24 Mbps) - and slightly, but noticeable better than when not using the GPU assisted preview when watching transitions etc.

Everyone wonders whether a 660 ti will work with Sony Vegas. I called up sales to see if we could build machines with this card in it. Their advice was "spend your money and then download Sony Vegas and test it." Until someone here can confirm it works, we'll have to assume that Sony Vegas 12 is not compatible with the GTX 660 ti and bugs regarding its use and performance with Vegas 12 is also unknown.

I actually need to go ask a question about rendering because my expertise is not sufficient with this. I have never done rendering on a project other than to do a final render. Do you know where I can go to find some videos on different rendering techniques?

What is your input media format(s)?

What is your final render format?
When you render something Vegas asks you what output format you want. There are a lot of templates - maybe some of these can give you an idea as to what you want?

What do you use your final result for? (Upload to Youtube - show on your TV-set? watch on your computer monitor?...)

At this point I am using an HDR-FX7 w/mini DV 1080i 60 over firewire. Great camera but I am needing to sell because of time constraints with the download to computer.
Most of the time the final render format is Main Concept widescreen to DVD Arch Mpeg 2 for DVD as most people that I burn them for only have DVD so I have to downconvert it from HD to SD..
Sometimes the final result is for a computer running XP and it goes over a school Channel 12 over media player. I would like to use the HD over the WMP but in XP I guess WMP won't recognize and HD format of m2ts. so I just downgrade it to Mpeg 2 for DVD at this point. Is this the info you want?

FYI - I'm using a z68 mobo with an i7-2600 (not the K, which may have made a difference if i had the knowledge back then). It's a fast processor but a 12.5 minute 1080p clip takes 30 minutes to render down to 720p. I was hoping that a GPU would take that number down a bit since it would be specialized for the process and for encoding, so I understand. I'm using Vegas 10 (but have 12 and am waiting for the right moment to install and that will hopefully also cut rendering times.) I too saw the 660 ti as a good price based card until I read about how nvidia changed the architecture that appears to be better for gamers and not good for video editing.

So the 570 would be a better choice???????

But after looking at the 570 and even 580 I don't like the specs compared to the 600's. So many more cudas and memory and clock speed. I do know that for me the AMD is bad for Sony Vegas.

Is a GTX 670 for 319 after rebate a good deal or even worth it? Or is a 660Ti for 80 bucks less a better deal?

spending less is more desirable and spending even less than the bargain you are counting on is even more desirable. Don't be caught upt thinking I got pay this$

I also got caught up in CUDAs. Apparently - and this is second hand information - this is all marketingspeak from nvidia. Supposedly you can have 1000 CUDA cores with a 600 series card but a 500 series card with half that amount will yield far superior results for rendering. Some of this has to do with a lower clock speed for the 600 series cores and something dealing with the GPGPU which supposedly nVidia didn't follow what it supposedly said was a big deal. Just repeating what I've heard.

In short, I've been told to take a 500 series card that I know works with Vegas than a card that has a new architecture and no known compatibility. Things to me might be different if Sony had something to say about the 600 series officially.

I have heard many things in my lifetime also but until I have proof I take it with a grain of salt. I don't doubt your word but man, does no one else on here know about this?????

Read up on the "Kepler" architecture. The 500 series was "Fermi." So I decided to know the difference instead of saying "well, 600 is higher than 500!" Use Google. Supposedly the AMD video cards smoke the nVidia GTX cards in pure processing power, not to say Vegas will take advantage. Look at the comparison of the 500 vs the 600 for video encoding - not an impressive difference at all. And the lack of compatibility is right here in the forum. Sony won't tell me any 600 card works at all, just that they will "support it."

Semantics & finger pointing...

Fact: GTX550 works well with Vegas 11 & the latest drivers. Vegas 12 on the same machine does not. Happy I didn't uninstall Vegas 11 because I needed something fast to go back to.

Zeitgeist - you've got an issue with 12 and a GPU that has been in long existence and supposedly works. At least many others say it works. I've seen one handful of people on the entire Internet say that Vegas 12 can even work with the 600 series and we're still waiting to hear benchmarks, etc. and the few who reported say the GTX 680 is beat by the GTX 580. Everything I've read so far indicates that the 500 series provides much more GPU power for video editing and encoding. I'll bet that Sony fixes the issues for 11 and 12 with 500 series cards first (which most have) before they'll deal with the 600 series. That's what really worries me. Don't want to install the card and discover what many suspect.

I must be putting in the wrong search words to find that the 580 beats the 680 in vegas. What did you type in?

But when I do go and find some info I don't like what I see for power usage of the 500 series. TOO much power which is going to make my decision a lot easier. I am just going to hope that Sony gets their act together and makes some fixes. Otherwise I think that this may be my last upgrade for a long time if ever.

I see. How terribly complicated. I wonder if a fix is scheduled before the end of the year.

Render speed for me is a BIG part of the equation when choosing editing software, so having V12 this slow when compared to V11 is unacceptable. V11 with gpu on with gtx550 is blazing fast compared to V12 with any setting.

I've just looked at this:

http://benchmark.cd3dtech.com/Benchmark/benchmark.html

There is only one 600 series card. The 670 does not fare well against the 570 and is blown away by the 580. The 570 is 20-25% faster on the CUDA rendering times. I can't say that we are comparing the right things but I've read so many articles that say that nVidia really dropped the "Direct Compute" power that helps scientific processing in favor of making great gaming cards. They apparently want two lines - but most of us will probably sooner get an AMD card than be forced to spend $700+ just to start with a good GPU for encoding. I don't know... but so far nobody is denying the details.

Read this: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/review/2162193/nvidias-gtx680-thrashed-amds-mid-range-radeon-hd-7870-gpu-compute

This is probably the best thread I've read on how the 600 series seems to be crippled for Vegas editing. Don't know until someone actually compares but they seem to know:

http://www.overclock.net/t/1265775/thinking-about-buying-a-gtx-670-for-the-cuda-cores-for-3d-rendering-anyone-know-much-about-cuda

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/354726-15-tomshardware

http://www.tonymacx86.com/buying-advice/62321-gfx-design-workstation-some-gaming-gtx-580-670-a.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-670-review,3200-11.html

This seems to be the clincher --

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2402021,00.asp

In short, if you're buying a card for GPU acceleration, it appears that the 500 series is much more suited to the task although it burns more electricity. The 600 series is energy friendly but not made to do video encoding.

Okay, so if I meet halfway by using a little more electricity but better Vegas editing power I could go with the 570 and still be ahead of the 670, right?

Now, how much memory do you think is important for the 570? Should I look for the 2.5GB or is 1.25 or 1280 sufficient? Anyone?