Sony Vegas Pro 11 - GPU Acceleration

Five steps to GPU power in Vegas Pro 11
by Gary Rebholz

"The new GPU computing features in Vegas Pro 11 can make a big difference in your daily workflow. But some users are asking, what is GPU computing and why does it make such a difference? In this article we’ll take a look at the new GPU capabilities of Vegas Pro 11 so that you can understand exactly what they are and how you can get everything out of them that they have to offer."

"The first step to using GPU performance in your Vegas Pro projects is to understand just what the technology is and how you can access it. GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit. The technology had its infancy way back in the 1980s and really started coming to life as 3D graphics started becoming more and more popular, not only in professional graphics but also significantly in the computer gaming world."

Full Article: Five steps to GPU power in Vegas Pro 11 

Benchmarking GPU Acceleration in Vegas Pro 11

"Vegas Pro™ 11 leverages the processing capabilities of modern GPUs (Graphic Processing Units) using the industry-standard OpenCL™ framework. Rather than being tied to a single manufacturer or technology, this hardware-agnostic approach enables Vegas Pro 11 users to enjoy remarkable performance improvements across a broad range of popularly-priced, widely available GPU devices. By utilizing the amazing parallel computing resources of the GPU for video processing, the main CPU is freed up for other tasks, such as video decoding and user interface display."

Full Article: Benchmarking GPU Acceleration in Vegas Pro 11

Supported cards for GPU-acceleration

To take full advantage of the GPU-acceleration in Vegas Pro 11, you will need a supported card with at least 512 MB of GPU memory.

NVIDIA
Requires a CUDA-enabled GPU and driver 270.xx or later.

GeForce GPUs:

• GeForce GTX 4xx Series or higher (or GeForce GT 2xx Series or higher with driver 285.62 or later).
• Quadro GPUs: Quadro 600 or higher (or Quadro FX 1700 or higher with driver 285.62 or later).

NVIDIA recommends NVIDIA Quadro for professional applications and recommends use of the latest boards based on the Fermi architecture.

AMD/ATI
Requires an OpenCL-enabled GPU and Catalyst driver 11.7 or later with a Radeon HD 57xx or higher GPU. If using a FirePro GPU, FirePro unified driver 8.85 or later is required.