VP 13 Render performance

OldSmoke wrote on 4/17/2014, 5:57 PM

I can see many posts about VP13 but has anyone yet tested render and timeline performance? Does it finally work better with 600/700 series cards and the later AMD models? On my side, 2x GTX580 render times have unfortunately increased from 29sec up to 33sec for the SCS benchmark project; that applies to Win7 and Win8.

Comments

Terje wrote on 4/17/2014, 6:35 PM

Honestly, better wait for an update, or ten.

GPU Acceleration doesn't work with newer nVidia stuff (don't know about the older stuff). No problems using Premiere Pro, but Vegas 13 doesn't work. That is, the encoding works fine it seems, pre view on the other hand, not at all. My video, when using GPU, is stuttering, stopping, flickering, all kinds of stuff.

I guess SCS stil hasn't hired a test team and a test manager. It's like Ulead all over. Lots of new "features", but old broken stuff never fixed.

videoITguy wrote on 4/17/2014, 7:14 PM

all reports to this date imply a consistency with the code that was in VegasPro12 Build 770 - no change in that particular code base.

monoparadox wrote on 4/17/2014, 8:33 PM

Thus far, just playing around I am finding improved performance on my Radeon 7800 series (Tahiti). MC AVC is using the GPU. Timeline performance strong with excellent stability.

tom

Spectralis wrote on 4/17/2014, 8:36 PM

Oh dear, a shiny new app to control stuttering 6xx/7xx previews. Maybe the Vegas developers need to get their heads out of the Cloud and feet back on earth so they can fix the never ending GPU incompatibilities. No wonder they never mentioned anything about improved GPU support in the VP13 promotional material.

Lovelight wrote on 4/17/2014, 8:38 PM

GPU on for faster render times. GPU off for faster preview times.

V13 seems consistent with V12. Maybe, more so... :)

hazydave wrote on 4/18/2014, 1:22 PM

GPU acceleration in Vegas should work fine with any GPU supported by OpenCL. There do seem to be some issues with OpenCL support on nVidia Kepler cards -- not a failure to work, but some weird low-performance issues, versus earlier cards (non-Kepler Quatros, GTX5xxx and earlier GeForces). That's a nVidia issues, though, nothing to do with Vegas.

The rendering issue is mostly about Main Concept AVC. They didn't just support any old OpenCL device like you're supposed to (that is, after all, the point of OpenCL -- computing without concern as to the hardware). They have older AMD GPUs hard-coded in the driver for OpenCL support, older nVidia cards hard-coded for CUDA support (they do both), and anything not on that list isn't getting to help render AVC. So your Intel Phi and nVidia Tesla, no help here :-(

I think it's unlikely this is changed in Vegas 13, though I'll be checking that out this weekend. Main Concept's accelerated AVC is very good, but it doesn't seem they did anything new with it over the time they were owned by Rovi. The same list of 2011-vintage GPUs is noted for support on their web site today, and that's it. They COULD have better support for new GPUs in-house, but you'd think they might want to actually advertise that fact.

hazydave wrote on 4/18/2014, 1:26 PM

If you don't get GPU acceleration for preview, something's wrong. I see as much as a 6x improvement on rendering, when all the GPU stuff is running: say, Red Car demo out to Main Concept AVC. But a very large percentage of that speedup is due to Vegas's acceleration, not Main Concept's. Which is going to accelerate preview as well as rendering. I see a flawless 29.97fps on the Red Car demo in full size/full quality output with GPU on, and as low as <2fps (depending on the part of the video being displayed) with GPU off.

Keep in mind that you have to reset Vegas when changing the Vegas GPU settings. Of course, the Main Concept settings are set in the CODEC's control dialog.

ddm wrote on 4/18/2014, 1:30 PM

Having finally gotten v13 to actually open, I opened the old "pressreleaseproject" and played around with that for a while. Seems like the GPU for preview worked exactly the same, as far as I could tell, it plays perfectly in best/full at the :25 second mark, just like it did before. I rendered it to the main concept codec and the time was pretty similar, I can't seem to find my old numbers, but I think it was slightly slower than Vegas 12. I did have to rename my ff_vfw.dll and cfhd.dll files to get Vegas 13 to not crash instantly when I opened the "Render as" window. I'm using Windows 8.1 with the latest Nvidia driver.

NormanPCN wrote on 4/18/2014, 1:32 PM

I have looked at a few, just a few, of the encoders in Vegas 13 and they have been identical to the versions in Vegas 12.

Now those are the encoders. the things that compress the video into a file format.

The Vegas video engine, the thing that creates the video stream, compiles their OpenCL source to binary on the fly so it is harder to compare. I have not tried a comparison there and you can only do a direct comparison if you have not had a driver change. Every driver comes with new, possibly tweaked, compilers.

BruceUSA wrote on 4/18/2014, 2:33 PM

A+ what oldsmoke said. GPU acceleration is actually a hair slower than V12. I play with V13 a little and I am not impressed. I like V12 better. Most of the other features I do not cared about. However, I do like their 2K/4K XAVC codecs.

NormanPCN wrote on 4/18/2014, 2:46 PM

I just did a render test to XDCAM EX of the SCS benchmark project and it is a touch slower in Vegas 13. 1-2 seconds out of ~30 seconds. I have an AMD 7950 card with driver 13.12.

With XDCAM EX as the output this test is all about the video engine performance and not the file encoder.

larry-peter wrote on 4/18/2014, 2:49 PM

I would expect a lot of testing with a lot of different video drivers before we can make a definite statement about rendering times. VP12 worked best with Nvidia drivers that were, what, about a year old when it was released? There may be a sweet spot somewhere between the 294 series and the current drivers. Possibly whatever driver was around 3 months before Vegas went to beta :-)