If you also use After Effects then NVidia is the way to go when upgrading the video card. In the UK a GTX 460 is about £100 which isn't a huge upgrade cost considering the extra power it provides. Anything above £150 might be better spent on a CPU upgrade.
The word "laptop" comes to mind as your primary problem. A laptop is always an inferior device for video editing. You can't upgrade, it can't likely hold enough memory, and I would never go back to editing on a single monitor, much less lower resolution. In fact, I'm stating to think of adding a third monitor.
I have never actually bought a desktop PC. Back in 1993, I was an Amiga user (and engineer), but someone loaned me a PC for a contract job. And never paid. So I kept the PC, and as faster things came available, I added them. Changed main boards, hard drives, graphics cards, keyboards, optical drives, monitors, cases, power supplies, etc. many times, but never all at once. That's the real power of the PC: the modularity.
It cost quite a bit to upgrade a laptop... the one I have (partly funded by non-video work) cost $1285 new, and these days, it's pretty outdated, but not likely to get updated anytime soon. It's useful enough for a quicky same-day cut edit in the field (ok, it was upgraded a little over stock... it's got 4GB RAM and 1.2TB HDD).
But on the desktop, there have been multiple opportunities to dramatically improve performance on the cheap. If I can spend $300 and at least double performance, I do. Which explains the AMD Radeon HD 6870 graphics card that should arrive today or tomorrow... $300 on the nose.
I have a six core AMD 1090T... not quite an i7, but pretty fast. I plan to do a benchmark of Vegas 11, GPU vs. no GPU and vs. Vegas 10, just for fun. Stay tuned.
My nVidia GTX560 is not in the compute compatibility list, the Ti version is. I expect the GTX560 to be at level 2.0 at least. However: choosing the Sony AVC profile and the "GPU (if available)" option for rendering, does not result is actually using the GPU and its CUDA cores. The "Check GPU" button in Vegas does say it detects CUDA, but GPU uses stays at 6% just like when using "CPU only".
A ten minute movie takes about 20 minutes to render without any effects. When I use the same setting for that movie in Nero Video, it only takes 6 minutes to render and it does use the GPU (30 - 40%). It is disappointing for me to see that a more professional video editor cannot do what a fairly simple editor can. Any thoughts on how to solve this?
My system:
- i7 860
- GTX560
- Win 7 64 bit
- 4 GB ram
- nVidia driver 280.26
- Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11
I meant , when having 1 x quadro4000 and 1xquadro FX3800 in same system ( I want to replace only 1 of the 2 quadro FX3800 ) , how would vegas know it should use the quadro 4000 instead of the quadro FX 3800.
And how is vegas 11 improved with your quadro 4000 in regards of preview .
Am not interested in rendering at all since my total of 16 cores and 48 GB RAM handle rendering fast anyway ( and is done when I am doing something else at another system or when asleep or having lunch or ... )
@Weakling: Welcome to the SCS forums - nice to see new names around here -
- but pls. note that this forum is for the pro version of Vegas. Not the Movie Studio "pro" version :- )
@Jøran Toresen - actually you can get even my lowly nVidia GT-220 supported under CS5/5.5. All it requires is a simple manual hack to a text based config file with your particular CUDA based card. Why that's not possible with Vegas is beyond me. I may not see much improvement, but the fact I can add that and get some level of MPE in PPro is why I'm sitting on the fence debating the switch back to Vegas right now. I have to weigh the pro's and cons since my relationship with Vegas, as well as other's I've corresponded with privately say much the same as I feel - it wasn't a good relationship the past couple of years.
And a minor rant here: anyone stating that editing on a workstation class laptop as not being professional doesn't know what they're talking about. My Dell i7 Precision M4500 "WORKSTATION" class laptop supports up to 16GB memory (I'm currently running 8GB)
And I can run PPro on both machines with full graphics card support on either machine.
@ritsmer
My apologies for posting in the wrong part of this forum. I will try to find the correct location to post my question about the GPU acceleration not working.