@paul w - yeah did that but the fact the VP11 GPU page states GT-2xx is supported seems to contradict what I'm experiencing with the trial of VP11 config.

Cliff

i'm confused... so it says:
"...GPU-accelerated video processing requires an OpenCL-enabled GPU and NVIDIA driver 270.xx or later with a GeForce GT 2xx Series or newer GPU..."

but in another place (cannot find it now) they said that it only works for nvidia cards with Compute Capability >=2 - which excludes gt 2xx (CC 1.2) and gtx 2xx (CC 1.3) series!

i've got 275.33 drivers installed with my gtx260 and cannot turn the acceleration ON in the menu. so, i'd say the CC>=2 applies.

@Cliff
I see your point. Its misleading. Should be more clear on the same page that is has to be 2.0 Compute Capability or higher. That seems missing in the large print. Got me too, now looking for a new card :(

Paul.

@DavidMcKnight

"They also have NVIDIA GTS-450 video cards, which is a $120 video card, certainly not a powerhouse. "

Yeah! That's the card I have.
For me, it actually was a budget card since I got an EVGA for $60.

Been playing with Vegas v11 all day, I am one happy camper! I had one particularly dense project using multiple layers of AVCHD video and a number of filters, the preview rates on my six-core 980x machine in v10 were just barely acceptable, in v11, it's real time. It's a whole new ball game, great job SCS!

I just ordered the Radeon HD 6870. Psyched!!!!!!!!!!

I've been drooling for preview accelleration since V3.

it appears that SCS is finally having to make specific hardware requirements instead of being an NLE for every hardware configuration. Of course that means I have to pony up for another video card after having had the GT-220 for less than a year but it's probably best in the long run.

And AMD Radeon isn't an option since as far as I can tell, no other apps I work with - Including Photoshop can't utilize the Radeon card's GPU technology - only nVidia's.

Marton, it’s DDR3. I have tried it with many different veggies. By now I have found one that was skipping frames in the preview. That one had a very large number of tracks, each track with track-level effects applied. What surprised me was that it was slow even at the beginning when only the bottom track had anything on it, and that track had no effects applied.

That means that Vegas processes track-level effects to every frame of every track, even if there is no media on the track at that frame. That is very disconcerting. What a waste of resources!

All other veggies were very fast and smooth in their preview. The same veggies had hard time previewing in v. 10.e, so the CUDA does make a big difference.

Cliff, I don't see it that way, to me it's no different than before: It will still run great on any computer just as before but the better the system the better the performance.

- Ray
Underground Planet

"It appears that SCS is finally having to make specific hardware requirements instead of being an NLE for every hardware configuration."

I don't believe that having a video card with a supported GPU is an actual requirement, it is an option only if you want to take advantage of GPU accelerated processing. For anyone making money with Vegas, what's $150 or so for a decent video card, particularly if it allows you get get work done much faster?

I can see quite a difference as well on my dual core laptop. Raw footage from my Nikon D5100 DSLR can preview without any dropped frames at about 75% CPU usage in quarter sized preview mode. That is one heck of a lot better than it was.

And AMD Radeon isn't an option since as far as I can tell, no onter apps I work with - Including Photoshop can utilize the Radeon card's GPU technology - only nVidia's.

That is because nVidia has published detailed specs on CUDA, all the way down to what is comparable with assembly language in microprocessors. It even has an assembler built into its drivers, so if the software does not know in advance what it is supposed to be doing, it can produce the necessary code on the fly and CUDA will run it.

AMD, on the other hand, keeps everything secret. The only thing they support is OpenCL, a high level language, which gives the programmer no control over the efficiency of his code. And you have to know what you want to do when you are writing the software, which makes it much less flexible.

As a programmer, I have rejected supporting AMD video cards years ago. Clearly, I am not the only one.

I have an older GeForce 8800 GT video card that will not benefit from the improvements made to Vegas 11. I don't mind upgrading my card and I don't care if it is ATI or nVidia (I am looking for timeline improvements so ATI may be the way to go).

With that said, I was hoping you guys could help me answer a question: I want to run three monitors at the same time (one for the timeline, one for modules, and one for preview). Currently I only have 2 of my three monitors hooked up to my main editing machine and have never tried to run three at a time. One has HDMI and the other two have DVI. Do you have any recommendations on a single video card that can pull this off and benefit from the changes made to Vegas 11?

My machine is an 8 core (two quads) PC. I would like to keep the budget at under 300 USD. Any ideas?

j razz

@Red Prince - Thanks for your insights! :)

This isn't looking good as far as I'm concerned. My less than 1 year old Dell Precision M4500 i7 laptop with Quadro FX880M graphics card isn't compatible with Vegas Pro 11 GPU requirements. I might as well stick with what I know will FULLY utilize what I have - and it ain't SCS.

Effing shame IMO. I had high hopes - again dashed on the rocks of disappointment.

Back to using Adobe's archaic workflow :(

"Quadro FX880M graphics card isn't compatible with Vegas Pro 11 GPU requirements"

Upon what information are you basing this conclusion?

Wait a second Cliff, I just want to get this straight because I'm confused: Were you using Vegas 10 on your Dell Precision M4500 i7 laptop with Quadro FX880M graphics card?

- Ray
Underground Planet

Not a big shock, the older cards not being supported. The other NLEs released with GPU acceleration this year lacked such support. And it's probably 'bout time I replaced my GeForce 8800GT anyway :-)

In fact, I was waiting for the actual results and specs on Vegas 11, before upgrading. No shocks here, either, but it is interesting to see nVidia skew toward rendering, AMD skew to preview/editing. Can't has both?

Hey Jeremy (Jrazz),

You're looking at ATI if you want 3 off of a single card. nVidia may have 3 ports, but they can only drive 2 displays simultaneously off of the same card. Now, the new line of nVidia and ATI cards are due out within the next 3-6 mo. and with them will be some pretty dramatic improvements in performance. they're moving to 28nm cores on nVidia (and ati I think). which means better performance and lower temps and more cores for processing on the same sized die, etc... etc...

So you may want to wait and see what the ATI 7000 and nVidia 600 series bring to the table ( that's what I'm doing ). I have 2 GTX 260's that currently won't help me with Vegas, but are great in some of my other Cuda accelerated programs, and I am hopeful that nVidia will support triple display from a single card in their next generation of cards.

Dave

I just did a test with this config:

i7 970
12 gb ram
GF 560 ti
Win7 64 SP1

I did a fresh install with all updates and latest drivers.

I installed both 10e x64 and 11.0 x64 trials

I made a project in 10, 1920 50i with some AVCHD clips. I made a cross dissolve between 2 clips and 3 PIP's on top, all 3, 1/4 screen size. All clips had different colorcorrections on to force a degration in playback performance.

In 10 I could play back at full fps in preview auto, at best auto it went down from 25 to 9

In 11 i could playback full fps at best auto - SO NICE!!!!!!! :-)

I tried this test frst because I have had problems wth playback performance, but will try with rendering too.

The 560 ti card is half price as the 580 so I think it is a ok buy.

I noticed that the auto playback quality feature is by default disabeld in 11.

So far great job Sony!!!!

Ulf

Ulf: if you use "auto" then Vegas IMHO will set the preview parameters to whatever it finds "best" - and it is hardly possible to compare the FPS results.
Could you do the tests with fixed settings - like No Scale Video to fit + No Adjust size etc. + Good + Half or what you like ?

Einar
Karlslunde

TLF said: "My GeForce 8500GT must be bleeding edge ;-) Premiere Pro CS5.5, released earlier this year, supports it."

You are wrong, here are the "Supported NVIDIA graphics cards for GPU acceleration"

http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/tech-specs.html

Jøran