Just try to install VEGAS 21 (build 208 or lower). And check is a problem still persist? Because with 22 version there is some issues with memory leaks due to development of new video engine. Especially if you have Intel iGPU or Intel ARC in decoder options enabled. Actually the fastest timeline was in Vegas 13, then in Vegas 17 and then it became to be more problems. But VEGAS 21 (builds 19x - 208) is stable and good in many senses.

 

I occasionally encounter a VRAM bottleneck when working on large projects, especially when the project media contains 600+ video files. While this is rare, it does happen when I'm editing films with a substantial amount of video material. especially those that are 4K-heavy or entirely based on 4K footage. Vegas Pro typically consumes nearly all the available VRAM on my RTX 3080, often hitting the 12GB limit. This causes lags and slower playback performance on the timeline, which can be quite frustrating.

That does sound and look like you're running out of Vram and the drivers are swapping between Vram and system ram. Nvidia GPU's especially have a hard time operating like that compared to Intel and AMD GPU's. It's possible that some of your media or an fx or function is causing a memory leak and that will be fixed in the future. In this instance though if it is a memory leak it's not a runaway memory leak that will use all your shared GPU memory and in this case you would benefit from 24GB Vram.

Your upgrade may help defeat some current Vegas bugs that will be fixed in the future. AMD have more GPU driver problems and Vegas users who once had AMD GPU's who move to Nvidia GPU's seem happier.

I have to comment, and push back on "AMD have more GPU driver problems". I've been using AMD/ATi since before starting with VP14. And while there have been some issues along the way, here we are now reading about Nvidia issues, but no one seems to mention those along with "Nvidia have more GPU driver problems".

I've had my 12GB card running at 11.9GB and still keep going on with work in my projects. Whenever it would hit that high, I never thought of doing anything else but continue to work and incremental save as I always do. And yes, I am well aware of RAM swapping.

All this 'AMD has more issues', is anecdotal at best, usually mentioned by those that don't have an AMD GPU. I can say the same things about Nvidia GPU's and their drivers. And since there are more Nvidia cards here, the problems are more prevalent. Ever read about 'get the Studio drivers'? Or 'revert back to a previous driver build', etc.? If there were issues with AMD drivers all the time, I guess I am fortunate to not have experienced much of them. And if I do have an issue (the color shift in Vegas Effects, which with the latest AMD driver is fine), I always report and post it in the user forums here.

I haven't heard of any NVIDIA driver issues or recommendations to roll one back in quite some time. The only issue in recent memory was a preview bug affecting mobile GPUs only and that was resolved 1.5 years ago? There's no real difference between studio and gaming drivers.

As I wrote, I actually use and AMD GPU, and have been using one, so can not comment on using a Nvidia GPU, and never do because I don't have actual working knowledge of it. I leave that to those that actually use one.

I've been using both an Amd 6900xt and an Nvidia 4090 in the same machine for about a year now and have not had any driver issues with either during that time. I recall Vegas-only red-blue color swap issues with Amd quite some time ago and Nvidia issues after that with Vegas FX not being applied till after the FX dialog was closed. On all my laptops with Nvidia gpus I have had issues ever since I can remember which continue to this day; Vegas remains in memory after exit for around a minute or so... I believe a developer mentioned in a thread once upon a time that it had to do with graphics drivers being put in charge of Vegas shutdown. And if you wonder why Microsoft took over graphics settings, you can thank Nvidia for that... their drivers were actively interfering with both Intel and Amd graphics which forced Microsoft to put their foot down.

My biggest issue with the Nvidia 4090 is that its render performance is substantially lower than my 6900xt on vp21 build 208 and earlier. And since then, Vegas seems to have leveled the playing field somewhat by making both Amd and Nvidia renders slow. I suspect that relative render performance is an intentional Vegas design issue since DaVinci Resolve consistently renders faster with the 4090 compared to the 6900xt.

My 2nd biggest issue is that Vegas preview was more jumpy doing multi-cam cuts while plugged into Amd hdmi, improved somewhat plugged into Nvidia, while being perfectly glassy smooth plugged into an Intel Arc. But that issue seems to have gone away with vp22. Unfortunately, however, vp22 render performance is so bad for both Nvidia and Amd that I cannot use it yet for my hour+ Multicam projects.

My 3rd issue with Nvidia is that it's the worst power-hog I've ever encountered. I have a 1000 watt ps in my 11900k machine but had to take out the ultra-efficient Arc 380 and 770 gpus because the 4090 consumed all my power connections. I just ordered some splitters so the relatively efficient 6900xt can share it's power lines and allow me to get at least one of the Arcs back in.

@Reyfox The problems with Nvidia GPU's and Vegas to do with memory leaks and decoding problems is a Vegas problem, unrelated to drivers or hardware

@Howard-Vigorita If you're doing ongoing render speed comparisons with Resolve you have to keep in mind Resolve uses both your 4090 encoders while Vegas and Voukoder currently only use the 1. You'd have to force single encoder via your choice of encode or resolution until Vegas,Voukoder are updated. When the new Vegas decoder was introduced playback speed went from sometimes 10x slower to equal to Resolve, but if they fix the processing and encoding speeds in Vegas it will still be slower than Resolve if not using the dual encoder, and that would not be an honest comparison when looking at efficiency

Too big. Those 600+ clips balloon to up to 10x their packed size during decompression. No consumer hardware has a fighting chance against that.

Break up your renders. I like 9-10 minute chunks, and use them in a Nested Project, which itself carries a significant learning equity. Once you've done this for a while, it will become automatic, like riding a bicycle.

If you're doing ongoing render speed comparisons with Resolve you have to keep in mind Resolve uses both your 4090 encoders while Vegas and Voukoder currently only use the 1. You'd have to force single encoder via your choice of encode or resolution until Vegas,Voukoder are updated.

@UltraVista Not sure why you think Vegas uses only one available 4090 Nvenc encoder... task manager shows large utilization on both encoder engines on my 4090 desktop system. Btw, my 6900xt also has 2 encoders while my Radeon7 uses 3. Looking at my 3060, 1660, and 5700xt, I only see 1. But I don't consider delivering anything from Resolve or Vegas gpu renders because the quality measures so low. I do Vegas gpu spot-check renders along the way, however, and find that Vce goes somewhat quicker than Nvenc or Qsv. But I recently did some quality analysis with av1 Nvenc 4k transcodes using ffmpeg7... I was astonished that it's quality measured similar to MainConcept hevc while running much quicker. So I'd want to change my workflow if Vegas could output anything like that. And hopefully start using vp22 for my hour+ 4k multicam hevc-media projects... if the gpu render speed-up allowed completion overnight.

@Howard-Vigorita Did you find the same high quality for NVENC HEVC?

I did notice AV1 uses more NVENC processing and thus lower speed compared to HEVC, but this is a good thing if quality is even higher. From what I've been able to deduce from task manager is that 50% VIDEO ENCODE in task manager = 100% encode from a single NVENC or 50% of a dual NVENC. Although there is Video Encode 1 and 2 they mirror each other.

I've done tests with pushing highest frames possible into native Vegas encoder and Voukoder, this usually involves low resolution media encoded to 4K and I've never seen the encoder obviously using both encoders such as here with Resolve. I think it would be possible to disable dual NVENC encoding of HEVC and AV1 in Resolve by editing encoder profile but haven't tried.

@UltraVista I used the dropdown to change the Copy engine display in task manager to Video Encode 1 to see activity on both 4090 encode engines. Looks like this while rendering Nvenc Av 1 on Voukoder with decoding on the 6900xt...

I did that render using the lossless 4k 10-bit hevc clip in my signature which is 627 mbps. Took 1m 29s with Magix Av1 which is cpu-based. Voukoder Nvenc at the same 50mbps output bit rate took 43s. As great as the 6900xt is, I wish it had Av1 hardware rendering like the 7000-series.

@Howard-Vigorita You're right the graphs aren't perfectly mirrored, but currently Vegas and Voukoder can only do the work of a single NVENC for whatever reason. Encoding HEVC 4K, Top is Resolve via Voukoder, and bottom Resolve Native, The Native encode is over 100fps faster. I guess comparing Vegas and Resolve via Voukoder is good for comparison.

I measure dramatically lower quality transcoding to hevc with Resolve, no matter what encoder I use including the Voukoder plugin. And the best transcode quality from ffmpeg x265, with Vegas MainConcept Hevc not far behind.

With vp22, which is optimized for single gpu operation, I get the quickest renders with my 6900xt doing all the other graphics. But 4090 Nvidia Nvenc Av1 rendering might change everything for me... going to bench it on one of my 4k hevc multicam projects and maybe change my workflow.

I wish someone with an Amd 7000-series gpu would chime in here about their experience trying it for Av1 gpu- accelerated rendering with Voukoder or ffmpeg.

Glad to assist if my hardware fits your requirements. See my signature.

Using ffmpeg ...

I have tested AV1 some time ago across all 3 devices, Intel, AMD and Nvidia with respect to quality. Not speed because my Intel A770 gpu resides in a 4x slot only.

I have downloaded your hevc test file so can use that, that way there can be no question re: source file.

However. If my previously used source file is acceptable then I can immediately show my results for quality in 4k.

Immediately just arrived ...

@johnny-s Thanks, that's great. Looks like the Nvidia & Amd are pretty similar in quality for the input used. Lossless input better represents how good they get. Users have been finding Intel av1-svt showing anomalies for some material so I'm a little distrustful of av1-qsv... I see it comes in a little lower quality overall for you too. Btw, can Amd render 10-bit av1?

My only disappointment is I just benched Nvenc 4090 av1 with Voukoder on 2 shortest of 30 song-regions of an similar hevc multicam project with vp22. Only took 4.5 minutes off a 36.5m MainConcept hevc render. I was hoping to cut it in half. Looks like I'll be continuing my current bigger project in vp21 b208... but maybe rendering it with Voukoder Av1 Nvenc if YouTube's good with it.

So AMD excellent at both HEVC and AV1 and it really does seem like CPU encodes for high resolution H.265/AV1 just doesn't make sense any more unless encoding for efficiency and smallest file possible at highest quality.

@Howard-Vigorita I worked out what's going on with Resolve, it is using split encoding by default since 19.1 which seems like a bug as split encoding further reduces quality and it probably should only turn on by default for 8K video where speeds get so slow using non-split encode. If you or @johnny-s could do a quality comparison some time it could be seen if Vegas or Voukoder even should have split encoding.

"Btw, can Amd render 10-bit av1?"

From May 2024 ffmpeg build ... "encoder-AV1-amf.txt. ... "Supported pixel formats: nv12 yuv420p d3d11 dxva2_vld"

Doesn't appear to, but I haven't checked the most recent build.

AFAIK split encoding is a required setting to use the 2 encoders. Deselection of it allows single encoder plus some higher quality, slower presets etc.Typically "fastest" and "fast" presets and split encoding are used for dual encoder renders.

Dual encoding entails a bit lower quality.

I don't know if VP or Voukoder have a split encoding setting. If not then no dual encoding is possible.

@johnny-s I think it's the faster setting, which has no place in an NLE as a default encoding setting except maybe 8K. Resolve has such a bad name as far as H.264 encodes, now they want same award for HEVC and AV1

At High quality only P1 and P2 can be used, Fastest and Faster presets I assume. This can explain lower quality plus other limitation mentioned in the document ... see below .. "features not compatible with split frame encoding" 

Extract from link ...

"NVIDIA Video Codec SDK 12.0 features

Video Codec SDK 12.0, which was released in November 2022, contains support for NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPU hardware, along with the new features detailed below.

Split encoding 8K60

Video Codec SDK 12.0 on NVIDIA Ada GPUs support a feature called Split Frame Encoding for AV1 and HEVC, which can encode frames with resolutions greater than 4K using multiple encoders, whenever available. With this feature, the frame is split into two parts. Each part is sent to a different encoder, if the GPU contains multiple encoders. This helps improve the overall encoding performance. 

This feature is enabled automatically only at high resolutions, under the conditions shown in Table 3. Note that splitting the frame across independent encoders may result in quality that is suboptimal compared to that achieved by encoding the entire frame on the single encoder. Therefore, this method of performance improvement is not enabled across all presets and resolutions.

Table 3. Preset and tuning criteria that determine when split encoding is enabled

If certain features in NVENC are enabled, split encoding gets disabled automatically regardless of whether the tuning and preset conditions outlined in Table 3 are met. The features not compatible with split frame encoding are listed below.

HEVC

Weighted prediction

Alpha layer

Subframe mode

Bitstream output into video memory

Picture timing / buffering period SEI message insertion onto DX12 path

AV1

Bit stream output into video memory

Multiple NVENCs for higher throughput

Some NVIDIA Ada GPUs have more than one NVENC. This enables support for encoding more streams in parallel. When encoding a single stream, frames are sent to a different NVENC sequentially.  Therefore, using multiple NVENCs does not improve the throughput when encoding a single video stream but can increase the overall throughput when encoding two or more video streams in parallel. On GPUs with multiple NVENCs, different frames from different streams will get scheduled across multiple NVENCs, keeping all NVENCs fully utilized, thereby increasing the throughput. "