Depends what your needs are.

If you wish to go for a 10bit HDR preview, you should go for the (more expensive) pro cards (AMD WX8200 or WX7100 or Quadro P or M Serie with 8GB RAM).

The AMD cards support VCE, the NVIDIA NVENC. A Quadro would be required for s3D.

Without the 10bit preview requirements I would go for an AMD card too (not any more the R9 390X since this card does not support VCE 3.0, but the newer cards).

I mainly do documentaries which I render to DVD format and 1080p avchd.

My source videos are 1080p from Sony EX1R and Canon C100 II plus 4K footages from DJI Inspire 1.

I apply some corrections with NB Colorfast2, FBmn Exposure and some vegas plugins like colour corrector or levels.

I aso use NB titler pro.

Last night I've been trying to render 15 min. documentary to mainconcept mpeg2.

It took me 12 hrs to render it correctly. VP13 was either crashing or rendering video with errors like black frames.

I have my system optimised for vegas - GPU drivers, and VP settings. Till now I was able to render video in an acceptable time.

But now after 12 hour struggling I've decided that I need to change something. Either version of VP or just switch to some other NLE.

So do you think if version 16 would give me any improvement in stability of rendering and working with my plugins?

If I buy rx580 - will it improve my rendering time or just will make my preview smoother?

Thanks.

So do you think if version 16 would give me any improvement in stability of rendering and working with my plugins?

Possibly, but there's also a strong chance it won't. You need to do the month's free trial, but it would be much better if you could hang on until the next update before you start it, which I feel/hope/guess will fix quite a lot of stuff. The current build is a typical 1st update, with lots of things not yet right.

If I buy rx580 - will it improve my rendering time or just will make my preview smoother?

A GPU that will make your preview smoother will also reduce your rendering time because the smooth preview is a symptom of the timeline being processed more quickly, and the timeline has to be processed when you render.

A RX580 supports hardware rendering via AMD VCE 3.0 which is supported by VP15 build 361 and later, but only for 8-bit, progressive HEVC files and H264 AVC/AAC files, not for MPEG-2.

What are the rest of your machine specs? CPU, RAM etc. could be your bottleneck, or might become the bottleneck after you upgrade GPU.

Is there anything inherently wrong with NVIDIA cards? I thought with the GPU Acceleration NVIDIA cards were more than compatible with Vegas.

Is there anything inherently wrong with NVIDIA cards? I thought with the GPU Acceleration NVIDIA cards were more than compatible with Vegas.

It's the implementation of OpenCL with Nvidia that isn't as good as AMD; it's getting better but still not as good. OpenCL is what Vegas uses to process FXs, most 3rd party plugins use it too but there are some that solely rely on Nvidia's CUDA and some can do booth.

NVIDIA cards take shortcuts so as to be efficient as possible at playing games. They are built for that purpose & you could say they have custom built ASIC chips to do gaming well. AMD aren't a gaming card, they are a raw computing GPU that is capable of gaming. So for gaming AMD cards seem inefficient compared to NVIDIA, but at raw computing, AMD cards are more powerful. The GPU processing done in video editors requires raw compute, NVIDIA can't make an ASIC to speed up video processing the way it does with gaming.

NVIDIA cards are further hampered by Vegas Pro in that it can only interface with the GPU via OpenCL, while Nvidia cards are optimised for CUDA. Davinci Resolve helps out the Nvidia cards by providing both CUDA & OpenCl interfaces

Having said that. It does appear the new NVIDIA RTX cards are very powerful at computation but nobody should buy them, so they're forced to reduce their ridiculous pricing.

Hi!

I'm VP13 user. I'm planning to upgrade to VP16. I hope it will be more stable than my version.
What is the best GPU option for VP16? Currently I have GTX 580.

im using VP 13 for editing and VP16 only for rendering