Vegas Pro 14: Graphics card not available under GPU accleration

eric-q wrote on 3/20/2019, 11:47 PM

Hello. I recently built a new PC with an nvidia GTX 1660ti graphics card. When using Vegas Pro 14, the card was originally listed under "preferences->GPU acceleration of video processing", but I was testing rendering options and set that option to "off". Since then, only the "off" option is available; my card is not listed no matter what I try. I have looked for the "allow gpu rendering" in "preferences->internals", but that option doesn't exist at all. I have (twice) re-installed Vegas Pro 14 (Build 270) and re-installed my nvidia drivers (currently on 419.35).

Can someone help me figure out why my card is no longer an option under GPU acceleration and how I can get it back?

Thank you in advance.

-Eric

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Comments

eikira wrote on 3/22/2019, 2:36 PM

That's not a shame, it is an old program made before there were NVENC options available and the Cuda as an option was not what is should be and that's why the card makers stopped their developments.

That is not true. NVEnc was avaible since about the GTX 7xx Cards with acceptable quality, before the quality was crappy but still it was avaible even earlier.

The fact alone that i can use NVEnc on my GTX960M which was released early 2015 and VP14 in mid 2016 makes your statement wrong. And btw. CUDA is still a thing and technically could be used by any software which does not want to be limited by the CPU.

In stead of a shame it is erics own choice made because he is a new user and uses as a beginner only version 14 Pro with options of former years.

The shame is towards VP14 for not enabling NVEnc, that was what i meant and therefor its just sad he cant use the power of the GPU to make his workflow a way more fun experience.

Since VP14 is enabled for 200 bucks you can upgrade to VP16, which is a good price for the time savings in the future if you @eric-q plan to use the software on a weekly basis for your video projects.

eikira wrote on 3/22/2019, 2:42 PM

Maybe as this problem is restricted to V14(270) and your required output requires QS then render out using the GPU and pass the rendered file through Handbrake which will use QS to produce say MP4. You can continue editing in VP whilst HB works in background. Not ideal but adopted this approach until I updated via humble bundle. You have a later version of VP so problem academic / interesting.

Well i just tried if VP14 is ok to upgrade in the shop to VP16 directly, and the shop gave me this message "Congratulations! The upgrade offer has been activated successfully."
So there is no real need to wait for Humble Bundle for VP15 to get it cheap to upgrade to VP16 than.

But i found your mentioning quiet interesting about Handbrake. Have you tried that also with OBS?
Or isnt Handbrake able to use NVEnc? There would be no need to use QS if NVEnc is avaible, so it would fit at least to use QS for preview hardware acceleration in Vegas itself and NVEnc to render the final product through Handbrake.

Shadow wrote on 3/24/2019, 11:27 AM

Driver 416.34 is the latest where GPU acceleration still works with VP14. Later drivers do work with VP13, so this seems to be a bug with VP14...

j-v wrote on 3/24/2019, 12:21 PM

I confirm this finding of @Shadow.

And because that driverversion give the same options for the later VPro 15 and 16 versions as with the latest Creative Nvidia drivers, I can say that this driver version is a very good solution for users that have and use also version 14 as well as the later Magix versions of VPro with the same Nvidia GTX 1050 GPU as me (on laptop).
I cannot compare it with newer cards.

eric-q wrote on 3/24/2019, 11:31 PM

First, thank you all for helping me with this. I feel I understand this situation much better. However, it appears that I can only mark one post as the solution, and I've marked the one suggesting I roll-back to Vegas Pro 14 build 252. I selected this answer because it was the only one that actually solved my initial question (even though it was the wrong question to be asking). It was also the only one I could actually do (as I wasn't able to roll back any of my Nvidia drivers to the ones suggested) that didn't require purchasing a Vegas upgrade.

For what it's worth, I did try the new Nvidia Creator-Ready Drivers (419.67) and ran some benchmarks with different rendering profiles. There was no substantial change to any of the rendering speeds (results below). I find this curious, but it's doubtful I'll pursue it much further. For now, my GPU is showing up as an option in "Use GPU to accelerate video processing", which was the initial question. I'll continue to use Vegas Pro 14 for now with CPU rendering, and if I like it, I'll consider upgrading to a more-recent version in the future (hopefully one that can use my graphics card to speed up rendering).

Thank you all again!

-Eric

-----------------------------------------
My Rendering results:

Sample video duration: 1:00.02

Vegas Pro 14 Build 529:
- Nvidia Gamer Driver 419.35:
- Render profile: MainConcept AVC/AAC Blu-Ray 1920x1080-60i, 25Mbps
   - System reports only "CUDA available"
   - Rendering times:
   - CPU only: 1:50
   - OpenCL: 1:50
   - CUDA: 1:50
- Render profile: Sony AVC/MVC AVCHD 1920x1080-60i
- System reports "No GPU available"
   - Rendering times:
   - CPU only: 0:59
   - GPU if available: 0:58

- Nvidia Creative Driver 419.67:
- Render profile: MainConcept AVC/AAC Blu-Ray 1920x1080-60i, 25Mbps
   - System reports only "CUDA available"
   - Rendering times:
   - CPU only: 1:54
   - OpenCL: 1:53
   - CUDA: 1:55
- Render profile: Sony AVC/MVC AVCHD 1920x1080-60i
- System reports "No GPU available"
   - Rendering times:
   - CPU only: 0:59
   - GPU if available: 0:59

eikira wrote on 3/25/2019, 1:07 AM

For what it's worth, I did try the new Nvidia Creator-Ready Drivers (419.67) and ran some benchmarks with different rendering profiles. There was no substantial change to any of the rendering speeds (results below). I find this curious, but it's doubtful I'll pursue it much further.

Well, its because CUDA is not NVEnc. And NVEnc is as such unfortunally not avaible in VP14. And the drivers clearly are targeting the performance of NVEnc.
You could try the same Project with the Trial of VP16 and it should be done with your GTX1660 in about 50-55 seconds.

eric-q wrote on 3/25/2019, 12:52 PM

It's not so much the difference between the Gamer-ready and Creator-ready drivers, it's that regardless of what I've tried (CPU-only, CUDA or OpenCL), there is no change to rendering speed. I would have thought that, even on a newer card, using the OpenCL or CUDA libraries would have at least resulted in some improvement over pure CPU-rendering. Instead, it appears that no matter what I select, I'm getting CPU-only. At this point, I can only conclude that Vegas Pro 14 is simply unable to use these libraries with my newer card to accelerate rendering, which, as far as I know, is precisely the kind of hardware abstraction that OpenCL (for example) is supposed to provide.

-Eric