What are reasonable component upgrade expectations? (GPU vs. CPU)

Per-Lichtman wrote on 5/20/2020, 1:20 PM

I’m currently using Vegas Pro 15 with the following system and will soon be able to upgrade either the CPU or the GPU. I’m looking for a sense of what I might reasonably expect from both because VP is a somewhat unique performance case on my system (which is mainly used for music composition and audio editing).

CPU: i7-3820

Motherboard: ASUS P9X79

OS: W7 64-bit SP1

GPU: GT 630 2GB (not sure if it’s Fermi or Kepler but render speed and playback framerate improve if I disable GPU

acceleration).

RAM: 56GB

Because of this, my CPU upgrade options are basically limited to the i7-4820K or i7-4960x.

https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/P9X79/HelpDesk_CPU/

But in regards to GPUs, I have more options than I know what to do with (since the motherboard support PCIe 3,0) - and very little understanding of how much advantage each might provide.

Assuming I were to spend ca. $100-200 picking up a used or new GPU, would it be likely to improve either my rendering or playback performance in 23.976 FPS 1080P or 2K projects more than the CPU upgrade above? I looked through NVIDIA’s chipset compatibility document and it seemed like the chip generation (Turing, Volta, Pascal, etc.) had the biggest effect on feature set but I have no idea what specifications have the greatest effect on VP15 performance. Help would be greatly appreciated. :)

A lot of my VP 15 work will be using Pan/Crop to explore fine art paintings provided as stills up 18,000 pixels across their widest dimension, as either 8 bit JPEGs or 8 to 16-bit uncompressed TIFFs. Grading and FX use will be minimal and typically it will just be two layers crossfading at most.

Mostly, work will go straight from input images to the VP15 workspace (perhaps with lower res proxies during editing) without a digital intermediate video format - and will then be output straight to a YouTube friendly encode.

Many thanks in advance!

Comments

fred-w wrote on 5/20/2020, 2:47 PM

Nothing in that price, as far as GPU, upgrade the CPU unless you'd want to spend for the Nvdia 2080ti or AMD Vega 64 or Radeon VII..... those GPUs would make a difference, otherwise you're throwing your money away. Or upgrade the software.

Chief24 wrote on 5/20/2020, 3:39 PM

What you really should be thinking about, is saving up for a new system.

Yes, you say your going to do 1080p24, and possibly 2K projects, but that platform is old.

I had the Sabertooth X79, starting out with the 3820 (4 core, 8 threads - non-overclock). The only thing the 4820K does for you is possibly an extra 100Mhz about on the speed, and overclocking. The 4960K takes it to 6 cores, 12 threads and overclocking. Plus, both of the two 4xxx series processors provides the PCI-e 3.0 availability, which the 3820 did not. But, the biggest issue is, trying to find one of those processors, especially new, at reasonable prices. I am not a "Big Fan" of buying from E-Bay and other such sites, and would definitely heed the old adage of "Buyer Beware!"

For graphics, depending on what your "Upgrade" cycle is, if you want to stay on the lower end, my recommendation would be the RX480/RX580/RX590 from AMD; GTX 1660/1660 Super/1660Ti/1060 or at the highest RTX 2060/2060Super. Even though AMD has updated drivers for the newer 5xxx variants, not a lot of data has been published for their usage in NLE's, reliably. Though should you opt for one of them, probably the 5600 or XT variant?

Though, you planning to spend approx. 100-200 ca., I would say the RX 580.

Again, you have to make the final decision, and can only get "recommendations". If you want to get a fairly good idea of how various GPU/CPU combo's work (though probably being shown for Vegas Pro 16 & 17), is do the search for the "Benchmarks" currently being kept up to date by @JN-.

Good Luck!

JN- wrote on 5/20/2020, 4:03 PM

@Per-Lichtman Benchmarking thread here.

”What you really should be thinking about, is saving up for a new system.”

I'd second that.

fifonik wrote on 5/20/2020, 5:01 PM

GPU.

Your current one if really slow for video editing. When upgrading later you can keep the GPU.

Many things related to GPU usage changed in VP16 & 17. So you will not have GPU decoding (that is important for 4K, should not be bottleneck for FHD). You still will have GPU acceleration for plugins and encoder.

@Chief24's GPUs list is a good starting point. You can go a to bit cheaper cards like RX470/570 that would be OK for FHD (I have had 50+fps preview in Best | Full with i5-3570+RX470 in VP15 for FHD m2ts) but this would not be very smart as investment in future.

If you think about upgrading VP, note that VP17 requirement is Windows 10, not Windows 7.

UPDATE: You should let people know preview/render speeds with your current workflow/system that you are trying to improve.

I'd expect your CPU alone should be able to preview at project framerate with no issue. In case your drive is fast enough (it could be bottleneck when working with many hi-res still images).

Former user wrote on 5/20/2020, 10:42 PM

Because of this, my CPU upgrade options are basically limited to the i7-4820K or i7-4960x.

https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/P9X79/HelpDesk_CPU/

What ever is fastest, Rendering speed and timeline playback requires CPU

Assuming I were to spend ca. $100-200 picking up a used or new GPU, would it be likely to improve either my rendering or playback performance in 23.976 FPS 1080P or 2K projects more than the CPU upgrade above?

If you open new project, import video, and press play, VegasPro does not use GPU at all in assisting playback, so most important is fast CPU. It does use gpu video decode on vp17, but that is an on or off feature, it's the same on a gtx1060 as it is on a rtx2080ti

I looked through NVIDIA’s chipset compatibility document and it seemed like the chip generation (Turing, Volta, Pascal, etc.) had the biggest effect on feature set but I have no idea what specifications have the greatest effect on VP15 performance. Help would be greatly appreciated. :)

GPU power matters less with VegasPro because it's so slow at rendering . Features are more important such as high quality hardware encoding. Nvidia Turing is best for that. Hardware encoding is very popular right now, so you wouldn't want an AMD card that does low quality slow encoding.

You might look at 1660super,1660ti, 2060 (from slowest to fastest), If you are more familiar with Pascal cards the 1660ti is like the new Gtx1070 but with better hardware encoding. You could benefit from a faster gpu with adobe premiere or davinci resolve, but if you have no intention of moving to another editor nothing to gain. As an example my GTX1080 was using 99%GPU for 3.5hours yesterday doing an encode on Davinci Resolve so my GPU was slowing me down. VegasPro GPU use is very low. 2nd hand 1070/1070ti/1080 are good cards

BruceUSA wrote on 5/20/2020, 11:09 PM

Because of this, my CPU upgrade options are basically limited to the i7-4820K or i7-4960x.

https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/P9X79/HelpDesk_CPU/

What ever is fastest, Rendering speed and timeline playback requires CPU

Assuming I were to spend ca. $100-200 picking up a used or new GPU, would it be likely to improve either my rendering or playback performance in 23.976 FPS 1080P or 2K projects more than the CPU upgrade above?

If you open new project, import video, and press play, VegasPro does not use GPU at all in assisting playback, so most important is fast CPU. It does use gpu video decode on vp17, but that is an on or off feature, it's the same on a gtx1060 as it is on a rtx2080ti

I looked through NVIDIA’s chipset compatibility document and it seemed like the chip generation (Turing, Volta, Pascal, etc.) had the biggest effect on feature set but I have no idea what specifications have the greatest effect on VP15 performance. Help would be greatly appreciated. :)

GPU power matters less with VegasPro because it's so slow at rendering . Features are more important such as high quality hardware encoding. Nvidia Turing is best for that. Hardware encoding is very popular right now, so you wouldn't want an AMD card that does low quality slow encoding.

You might look at 1660super,1660ti, 2060 (from slowest to fastest), If you are more familiar with Pascal cards the 1660ti is like the new Gtx1070 but with better hardware encoding. You could benefit from a faster gpu with adobe premiere or davinci resolve, but if you have no intention of moving to another editor nothing to gain. As an example my GTX1080 was using 99%GPU for 3.5hours yesterday doing an encode on Davinci Resolve so my GPU was slowing me down. VegasPro GPU use is very low. 2nd hand 1070/1070ti/1080 are good cards

You gave very bad advice. Vegas use GPU acceleration on playback since version 11, just so you know. Your comment about low quality rendering with AMD card is also none sense. Please get your fact straight before you gave such bad advice.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/vp16-performance--115045/

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/cpu-render-vs-vce--114009/

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/davinci-resolve-14--111383/

RogerS wrote on 5/20/2020, 11:23 PM

For the photos I don't think Vegas properly supports 16 bit files, and it is not ICC-aware, so I would convert all to 8-bit sRGB files before starting. You might have drive speed bottlenecks with very large photos, so consider adding a SSD system to the mix for project files.

Beyond that, consider a 4GB or up graphics card.

I don't think what you're doing is very demanding on hardware and wouldn't invest beyond the minimum you need to get a full-speed preview.

Former user wrote on 5/20/2020, 11:36 PM

You gave very bad advice. Vegas use GPU acceleration on playback since version 11, just so you know. Your comment about low quality rendering with AMD card is also none sense. Please get your fact straight before you gave such bad advice.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/vp16-performance--115045/

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/cpu-render-vs-vce--114009/

VegasPro is terribly slow compared to other editors relative to power of cpu. I think in your case you have a 12core cpu? So even though vegaspro is so inefficient and slow you have the raw power to render a higher rate of frames to the gpu, but this gentleman will be buying either a 4 or 6 core cpu running around 3.6ghz so vegas will render slowly with cpu to serve slowly to gpu which means low gpu resource requirment and much less need for a high performance expensive gpu. Voukoder reduces delay for rendered frames to be sent to encoder which is encouraging because if a 3rd party plugin can do it so could VP18.