anyone try new amd 7950/7970 or nvidia 680 gpu's with Vegas Pro 11?

[joker454]

Just curious if anyone has tried the new Amd 7950/7970 or NVidia 680 video cards with Vegas Pro 11 to see if they speed up Mainconcept h264 encoding better than existing NVidia 5 series cards. I have two identical machines except one has a 560ti and the other a 580 and the Mainconcept h264 encode time while much faster than cpu alone is identical between the two machines, so I was wondering if the new video cards performed better.

[drapeama]

Having a good GPU can improve your rendering times. Mine is an entry-level of Nvidia and helps a bit, so I assume a 500$ worth GPU would significantly improve the rendering speed.

[joker454]

Well it's tough to say without testing, hence why I asked For example my 560ti and 580gtx both improve render speed, but both do so by the identical amount. So in that case the far more expensive 580gtx offered no improvement to the cheaper 560ti on my render tests, although both improved compared to cpu only. I've read that the current 680 may not be as good at cuda work compared to the 580 so I was curious if anyone had some hands on experience with it. Also I'm curious about the Amd 7970. I almost bought one on a whim yesterday to test, but figured I'd wait some more in case someone else has tried it and since price cuts are coming to the entire new Amd gpu line anyways.

[Daniel Rutter]

The GTX 560ti Twin Frozr is what I have, and it craps all over my rendering times. Without this card, I'd still be rendering slowly on my i5 2500k machine.

This card is a damn good gaming card as well. First decent graphics card I've had EVER.

[joker454]

Yeah the 560ti speeds up my h264 encoding about 4x compared to just using my 4.3ghz i7-2600k on it's own. It's awesome, I couldn't run my websites without the gpu encoding assist! But I'm looking for even better performance naturally

From what I've been reading the current NVidia 680 will be a downgrade on compute performance compared to the current NVidia 580 because it's focussed on gaming performance. Some benchmarks here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/n...-680-review/17

Apparently they will have another 680 card closer to the end of the year that will be more focussed on compute performance. So I guess I'll wait on that and pass on the 680 right now. Regarding the Amd 7970 I did read someones notes on Sony's forum. He didn't comment on h264 encoding performance, but he did say how it was the only card that gave him 30fps playback on the timeline irregardless of what effects he had going on, compared to getting around ~22fps with the 580 and less with a 570. So that part seemed promising, but ultimately he got rid of the card and suggested avoiding it because he had many compatibility issues with it

[Krane]

Yeah the 560ti speeds up my h264 encoding about 4x compared to just using my 4.3ghz i7-2600k on it's own. It's awesome, I couldn't run my websites without the gpu encoding assist! But I'm looking for even better performance naturally

Aren't we all. You just have to decide if the added cost is worth the investment.

From what I've been reading the current NVidia 680 will be a downgrade on compute performance compared to the current NVidia 580 because it's focused on gaming performance. Some benchmarks here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/n...-680-review/17

In that case, it is best left to gaming don't you think? I don't follow all the alphabet soup of cards, but most gaming cards don't do video well.

Apparently they will have another 680 card closer to the end of the year that will be more focused on compute performance.

In that case I'd wait. Nvidia has announced a newer more productive line of cards scheduled for release soon.

So I guess I'll wait on that and pass on the 680 right now. Regarding the Amd 7970 I did read someones notes on Sony's forum. He didn't comment on h264 encoding performance, but he did say how it was the only card that gave him 30fps playback on the timeline irregardless of what effects he had going on, compared to getting around ~22fps with the 580 and less with a 570. So that part seemed promising, but ultimately he got rid of the card and suggested avoiding it because he had many compatibility issues with it

Sony employs Open GL technology so they should provide a list of their compatible cards at their website. Adobe certifies their line of GPU cards which means they've been tested to performance standards.

[joker454]

Cost to me is totally worth it, I'd buy an Nvidia 690 today if I knew it gave me faster encoding performance. But so far I've yet to find anyone that has used a 680, 690 or 7970 on Vegas Pro 11 encoding so I have no clue if they offer any performance improvement. Part of the problem, as least with the Kepler gpu's, is that their double precision floating point performance is actualy worse than Fermi's. I don't know how much double precision float math is actually used during Vegas Pro encoding of h264, possibly none for all I know, so there is no way to know for sure what the performance changes will be between the 500 and 600 series of cards until someone actually tries them out. Nvidia does have a new card due end of year that improves double precision float performance though although it's still unkown if it will be a consumer Geforce card, or a pro Quadro card. Regarding the Amd 7970 cards, one persone told me they got so many blue screens with that card that they gave up on it, which is a shame because it's compute performance is actually really good. But I don't trust Amd drivers either, always had problems with them in the past. Anyways in the meantime I increased my cpu overclock, used to be 4.3ghz now I'm running it at 4.7ghz so that gives me some new speed for now until more info is known about the new gpu's. It's still running under max specs at that clock speed (heat and voltage) so I'll probably try 5ghz in the near future. I do wish that Sony would support Intel's quick sync though, maybe that would give even better perfrormance that gpu's do since it removes bus bottlenecks from the equation.

[Krane]

Cost to me is totally worth it, I'd buy an Nvidia 690 today if I knew it gave me faster encoding performance. But so far I've yet to find anyone that has used a 680, 690 or 7970 on Vegas Pro 11 encoding so I have no clue if they offer any performance improvement. Part of the problem, as least with the Kepler gpu's, is that their double precision floating point performance is actualy worse than Fermi's. I don't know how much double precision float math is actually used during Vegas Pro encoding of h264, possibly none for all I know, so there is no way to know for sure what the performance changes will be between the 500 and 600 series of cards until someone actually tries them out. Nvidia does have a new card due end of year that improves double precision float performance though although it's still unkown if it will be a consumer Geforce card, or a pro Quadro card. Regarding the Amd 7970 cards, one persone told me they got so many blue screens with that card that they gave up on it, which is a shame because it's compute performance is actually really good. But I don't trust Amd drivers either, always had problems with them in the past. Anyways in the meantime I increased my cpu overclock, used to be 4.3ghz now I'm running it at 4.7ghz so that gives me some new speed for now until more info is known about the new gpu's. It's still running under max specs at that clock speed (heat and voltage) so I'll probably try 5ghz in the near future. I do wish that Sony would support Intel's quick sync though, maybe that would give even better performance that gpu's do since it removes bus bottlenecks from the equation.

No, no, clock speed is so last generation. CPU performance is in cores and hyperthreading. And as for rendering and graphic performance, that too is a function of cores. Therefore, the more cores, the better.

[joker454]

No, no, clock speed is so last generation. CPU performance is in cores and hyperthreading. And as for rendering and graphic performance, that too is a function of cores. Therefore, the more cores, the better.

Cpu clock speed within a cpu generation is important of course, crank it higher and performance goes up as long as it's in within spec, if it overheats it will throttle itself so too much overlocking can actually hurt performance. The i7 2600-k I use loves to be overclocked, I ran it conservatively at 4.3 ghz for over a year, now I just bumped it up to 4.7ghz which it handles with ease as well at around 72 Celcius full load. I agree that comparing cpu clock between cpu generations doesn't always tell the tale, as in a 3ghz Pentium D ran slower than a 2.2ghz Conroe.

Core design especially on gpu's makes a huge difference as well, it not just about the core count. It's why the 512 core NVidia 580 can outperform the 1536 core NVidia 680 on some compute tasks. You really have to look at the whole package.

[techboyfish]

Yes. I have used Diamond MM AMD 7970 card which is the best in the market. You can play the latest PC games supporting DirectX 11.1

See this link for details: http://www.diamondmm.com/7970PE53G.php

[Dr. Benway]

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/...puacceleration

There's a list on the right hand banner. So nVidia recommend Quadro but they're not cheap.

The GTX 570 is respected = GPU Engine Specs:480CUDA Cores

GTX 690 GPU Engine Specs:3072CUDA Cores!!!

As for the 7970...?

[Krane]

The GTX 690 is a gaming GPU, not recommended for editing.

[joker454]

Still need someone to do a direct test to really be sure as the core counts can't be compared. If Vegas Pro makes heavy use of double precision floats then the 580 will be faster than the 670/680 cards inspite of core counts as the 670/680 models are GK104 based and hence dp floats are gimped on them. The forthcoming GK110 based NVidia card should be a monster though. Still, that Sony's own website shows 5xx based cards in the benchmark leads me to believe that the GK104 based 6xx cards aren't faster and we'll have to wait for the GK110 cards later in the year.

[Krane]

Still need someone to do a direct test to really be sure as the core counts can't be compared. If Vegas Pro makes heavy use of double precision floats then the 580 will be faster than the 670/680 cards inspite of core counts as the 670/680 models are GK104 based and hence dp floats are gimped on them. The forthcoming GK110 based NVidia card should be a monster though. Still, that Sony's own website shows 5xx based cards in the benchmark leads me to believe that the GK104 based 6xx cards aren't faster and we'll have to wait for the GK110 cards later in the year.

You're not listening. A Corvette is fast from you house to the market but is not the best car to go grocery shopping in. If you want to best card for editing, look for a card thats designed for editing.

[joker454]

You're not listening. A Corvette is fast from you house to the market but is not the best car to go grocery shopping in. If you want to best card for editing, look for a card thats designed for editing.

That's not necessarily true, these cards serially process data in a massivelty parallel fashion, they are vector processors and are very suited to video processing as they are game processing. That they are gaming cards does not preclude them from being excellent video encoding cards as the data loads are similar. Much of the video game post process related code that I worked on for many years as a video game graphics programmer is similar to what video encoding/processing needs are. What's potentially holding back the 6xx cards is the limited double precision float performance of the current models compared to the previous 5xx models. But even with that it's not clear what the result will be because we don't know how much dp float (if any) Vegas makes use of during encoding. Hence someone needs to actually test the card to be sure.

[Krane]

That's not necessarily true, these cards serially process data in a massivelty parallel fashion, they are vector processors and are very suited to video processing as they are game processing. That they are gaming cards does not preclude them from being excellent video encoding cards as the data loads are similar. Much of the video game post process related code that I worked on for many years as a video game graphics programmer is similar to what video encoding/processing needs are. What's potentially holding back the 6xx cards is the limited double precision float performance of the current models compared to the previous 5xx models. But even with that it's not clear what the result will be because we don't know how much dp float (if any) Vegas makes use of during encoding. Hence someone needs to actually test the card to be sure.

On the surface that might seem true, but in reality its all in the tuning my friend. To continue the car analogy: an engine thats tuned for hauling (higher torque/rpm ratio) would not be good for high speed sprints.

While it is possible to use a Corvette as a towing vehicle, under load and over time it would prove ineffective and ultimately destroy your engine. Similarly, a gaming card would not prove practicable over the continuous long term use scenario typically necessary in an editing configuration.

[joker454]

Well let's just agree to disagree Anyways I just bought an NVidia 670 so I'll post some benchmarks later to compare it to cpu alone, and to an NVidia 580.

[joker454]

Well scratch that...with the 670 installed Vegas 11 just gives an unknown error when trying to encode, and fails. So I guess my question is answered, stick to the 5xx series of cards