Is the GTX 750 Ti just terrible for editing? (Vegas Pro & Premiere Pro)

[jjboxall]

Hi. I've recently completed my first ever build which includes a GTX 750 Ti and an AMD X8350 Black Edition. I am a first year film student at university and I completed this build mainly for the purposes of flawlessly smooth editing in Vegas & Premiere, and I do run a gaming channel on YouTube as well.

Here's the problem. When I tested out Sony Vegas Pro 13, I was horrified to find out that my preview viewer still lags slightly (although a lot less than my i5 laptop with integrated graphics) while playing back even 2 track footage (gaming footage with face cam). Furthermore, when I go to render the 6 minute video I am expecting a GPU-Accelerated render of maybe around 2 or 3 minutes as I have seen with my friends, but instead I am getting around 15 minutes with the CPU taking an absolute battering, being at around 90-95% and getting too hot for my liking (although I do need to invest in another fan). The GPU, for preview AND rendering only hits about 12% usage at maximum. Surely this is not right? Just for your information I have enabled GPU-Acceleration in the software, the program recognises the graphics card, and the render setting I am using is basically the YouTube 1080p preset with very minor tweaks. On the render setting screen, it recognises my GPU and says 'CUDA available'.

So, having done some research I discovered that Vegas primarily uses OpenCL, and perhaps I had not picked the best graphics card considering I prefer to use Vegas. Maybe 12% usage of the GPU is the best I am going to get. I then tried Premiere Pro, enabled the GPU Acceleration in there, and added my GPU to the .txt file so that Premiere would recognise it. I have to say, the preview is a lot smoother and the GPU is getting used for playback as well although still not very much, with the CPU on around 70%. However, when I render & export using Premiere (again, the YouTube 1080p preset) as a .H264 file, the export time is just as long and this time I'm getting 0% of the GPU being used!

So, my question is, is there something I'm missing? Or have I just bought the wrong GPU for what I need? I just want to know whether to sell the 750 Ti and try another GPU. From what I'm reading, it sounds like the 750 Ti might be more of a gaming GPU but that's not what I'm after, I have a PS4 for that. Although I do want the ability to run games at a decent rate just in case.

You may also like to know that:
- I am using a shop-bought copy of Windows 8 but with a torrented activation key (It still updates, but won't let me upgrade to 8.1 unfortunately)
- I have the latest drivers installed; I have installed the latest stuff from the disc that came with the GPU, and have also tried installing the drivers from the internet that are compatible with my version of Windows.
- In Premiere, I did try queueing and selecting GPU-accelerated export, but it still remains on 0% during the process.
- I am using 8GB HyperX Fury RAM.
- I am fairly new to all this, most of the stuff I have been talking about I have only learned quite recently!

Sorry this was so long, but I really did try everything I could before resorting to posting a thread like this online. All advice is appreciated, thanks!

 

[THM01]

Hi,
I'm a video editor and 3D artist, and hope I can help you out a bit.

Short answer: GPU acceleration with a 750 Ti is super negligible for rendering compared to the CPU and RAM's role. Although I don't know for sure, I suspect your low RAM + outdated CPU is causing a throttling/bottleneck issue, or simply just maxing out. What's the RAM doing while you render? Make sure to configure how much each core gets RAM wise.

So in brief, I would upgrade your RAM amount to 16gb first and then if you still are unhappy, go the video card upgrade route and then CPU upgrade.

Longer answer:

I forget how Vegas does previews, but I assume they are RAM previews and therefore your RAM is very important. Your RAM basically slowly "fills up" with the temporary preview. Make sure you are "purging" your memory and disk cache regularly while working on a project. Also having plenty of space for a disk cache and a separate hard drive for scratch disks is helpful. I'll easily have 100 GB+ in disk cache at a time.

I would highly recommend adding more RAM as your first upgrade to your computer. With video editing, RAM is going to be your best friend and the cheapest overall upgrade compared to CPU and GPU.
Also, less important than the amount of RAM but something to consider is the frequency. You say you're using HyperX Fury RAM, but that comes in different MHZ frequency. If it's 1333 mhz then you'll have issues. 1600 MHZ is the base for video editing IMO, and higher is better but anything over 2,000 is not worth the $ if you're on a budget, price for performance goes down after 1800ish MHZ for video editing in my experience.

For video editing, 16gb RAM is a MUST have, 32GB is the sweet spot for price/performance as long as you have a decent CPU.

The GTX 750 Ti is absolutely not meant for video editing by any means. If you're going the GTX route for affordability, I would recommend a GTX 780 as a good performance (I've used it for video editing with good results) but I'm not sure of the current prices.

Quick tip: Nvidia has two main lines of cards, the GTX series and the Quadro series. GTX has more bang for the buck but is meant for gaming and isn't as compatible or reliable as their Quadro cards which cost waaay more but are certified to work under high levels of stress on just about every major multimedia application.

Next, rendering speeds are dominated by the CPU typically. Although there are exceptions and caveats, a general idea for performance in rendering is more cores is better than higher speed, higher speed is better than GPU acceleration. Also, your 8350 AMD processor is built on old technology (32nm) whereas Intel has 22nm tech in their newer series (smaller nm is better). For many reasons, Intel is almost always a better bet (not being a fanboy, just true). Also, as far as GPU's go, NVIDIA is better than AMD as well (which is more fanboy of me and more contested, haha, but most would agree).

Also, I'm not sure where you are in school or if they are very Mac-centered, but I've always had muuuuccch better results with Premiere and Adobe products than Final Cut or Vegas. A full length movie with Will Smith called "Focus" just came out and was edited with final cut, it took 4 years to edit, and it looks bleh in my opinion. Vegas used to be more widely used but the Premiere/After Effects dynamic link and functionality of today just destroys anything Vegas was better at in my opinion. If you ever work on feature films you're probably going to get into Avid Media Composer and other Avid products which is a whole different ballgame (but personally I love premiere for anything).

As far as Windows 8.1, don't torrent... and get windows 7 instead on your next computer unless Windows 10 is as great as they say it is. Windows 8 is awful.


Hope this helped

 

[jjboxall]

Hi,
I'm a video editor and 3D artist, and hope I can help you out a bit.

Short answer: GPU acceleration with a 750 Ti is super negligible for rendering compared to the CPU and RAM's role. Although I don't know for sure, I suspect your low RAM + outdated CPU is causing a throttling/bottleneck issue, or simply just maxing out. What's the RAM doing while you render? Make sure to configure how much each core gets RAM wise.

So in brief, I would upgrade your RAM amount to 16gb first and then if you still are unhappy, go the video card upgrade route and then CPU upgrade.

Longer answer:

I forget how Vegas does previews, but I assume they are RAM previews and therefore your RAM is very important. Your RAM basically slowly "fills up" with the temporary preview. Make sure you are "purging" your memory and disk cache regularly while working on a project. Also having plenty of space for a disk cache and a separate hard drive for scratch disks is helpful. I'll easily have 100 GB+ in disk cache at a time.

I would highly recommend adding more RAM as your first upgrade to your computer. With video editing, RAM is going to be your best friend and the cheapest overall upgrade compared to CPU and GPU.
Also, less important than the amount of RAM but something to consider is the frequency. You say you're using HyperX Fury RAM, but that comes in different MHZ frequency. If it's 1333 mhz then you'll have issues. 1600 MHZ is the base for video editing IMO, and higher is better but anything over 2,000 is not worth the $ if you're on a budget, price for performance goes down after 1800ish MHZ for video editing in my experience.

For video editing, 16gb RAM is a MUST have, 32GB is the sweet spot for price/performance as long as you have a decent CPU.

The GTX 750 Ti is absolutely not meant for video editing by any means. If you're going the GTX route for affordability, I would recommend a GTX 780 as a good performance (I've used it for video editing with good results) but I'm not sure of the current prices.

Quick tip: Nvidia has two main lines of cards, the GTX series and the Quadro series. GTX has more bang for the buck but is meant for gaming and isn't as compatible or reliable as their Quadro cards which cost waaay more but are certified to work under high levels of stress on just about every major multimedia application.

Next, rendering speeds are dominated by the CPU typically. Although there are exceptions and caveats, a general idea for performance in rendering is more cores is better than higher speed, higher speed is better than GPU acceleration. Also, your 8350 AMD processor is built on old technology (32nm) whereas Intel has 22nm tech in their newer series (smaller nm is better). For many reasons, Intel is almost always a better bet (not being a fanboy, just true). Also, as far as GPU's go, NVIDIA is better than AMD as well (which is more fanboy of me and more contested, haha, but most would agree).

Also, I'm not sure where you are in school or if they are very Mac-centered, but I've always had muuuuccch better results with Premiere and Adobe products than Final Cut or Vegas. A full length movie with Will Smith called "Focus" just came out and was edited with final cut, it took 4 years to edit, and it looks bleh in my opinion. Vegas used to be more widely used but the Premiere/After Effects dynamic link and functionality of today just destroys anything Vegas was better at in my opinion. If you ever work on feature films you're probably going to get into Avid Media Composer and other Avid products which is a whole different ballgame (but personally I love premiere for anything).

As far as Windows 8.1, don't torrent... and get windows 7 instead on your next computer unless Windows 10 is as great as they say it is. Windows 8 is awful.


Hope this helped

Firstly, thank you so much for your extensive response, it was very useful and interesting to read, particularly coming from someone experienced like yourself. I will definitely look into buying more RAM and see if that helps, and I think I'm going to look into swapping out this 750 Ti as soon as possible too. Quick one though - Having 2 sticks of 8GB RAM would be identical to having one stick of 16 right?

I have a few other questions:

You said see what my RAM is doing and configure how much each core gets, can I do this simply from the control panel or do I need separate software? I had been using a program called CoreTemp to check the CPU as well as the CTRL+ALT+ESC option, and GPU Tweak for the GPU. Once I know what I'm doing I'll run some tests and report back with the RAM figures. I am also unsure what purging is as I'm very new to the more technical side of video editing. Disk cache and scratch disks are both unfamiliar terms to me also. As for the previews, there is a setting in Vegas called 'Dynamic RAM preview' which by default is set to 200MB. Will changing this affect my previews? My RAM is 1866MHz by the way.

As I'm sure you've probably guessed, I am on a budget as I'm a student in the UK (dreadful combination). My entire build was probably around 500-600 pounds and that destroyed my bank balance. So I definitely want to change my GPU, but the GTX 780 you suggested is around £300-350 whereas I paid only around £120 for the 750 Ti. Are there any GPU's in the £100-150 price bracket that would be more efficient that my current one? Speaking to a friend who makes regular gaming videos also, he spent a similar amount of money on his build and was able to render a 5 minute video in 5 minutes, a 10 minute video in around 10 minutes and so on, with no problems. He had a similarly priced CPU and GPU to mine, but my renders seem to currently be around triple the time of the video. It would be perfect for me at the stage I'm at now to have similar results to him and with my budget. The gaming videos are slightly more of a priority for the moment, as I work on them only from home whereas student films and university projects, well I mainly work on them in uni. My university is quite Mac-heavy, but there are a number of PCs which I try to use as often as I can.

As for Vegas and Premiere, a lot of people do favour Premiere, but I just find Vegas more user-friendly and easier to operate, probably because it was the first professional piece of editing software I ever used and self-taught myself on so I'm used to it. But there is no denying that Premiere is what I will be using for my university projects, and of course the compatibility with the rest of the Adobe suite such as After Effects will be extremely useful. For my gaming videos, I will probably continue with Vegas and I think it's always nice to keep myself fresh in both programs anyway. I will be learning Avid in my second year which should be interesting.

Finally, a point on Windows 8, I know it's absolutely dreadful. I always wanted 7 from the beginning. But my plan was to install 8 which I already had a copy of, then torrent an activation code and proceed to download 8.1 where I was advised by a friend who works for HP to get an add-on to make the layout identical to 7. I'm not sure why it does Windows updates all the time but then doesn't allow me to upgrade to 8.1, but that's what I'm stuck with at the moment, until I find more money from somewhere at least! Anyway. there's not a lot I can do about that now, but I hope you can advise again. Thanks again for your helpful response.

 

[THM01]

Two sticks of RAM that work together is better than one stick, see this thread: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1779716/8gb-ram-stick-sticks.html
Also, its way more common to have multiple 8gb sticks than multiple 16gb.

1866 Mhz is good, and yes changing the 200 mb will affect rendering: I'm not well versed with Vegas, but I believe the 200 mb "dynamic ram preview" is the amount of RAM that Vegas sets aside for temporary previews while working on your comp. Making that higher to say 400 mb will increase the size of your RAM preview while editing, but lower the amount available to render. Setting it to 0 means a faster render but no previews, I would assume based on what I remember about Vegas. As a side note here, Adobe just announced at the NAB Show this past week that After Effects and Premiere are now going to have the ability to change settings WHILE you preview things without interrupting the preview.. pretty neat and you should totally abandon Vegas unless your professors are making you or you are working with friends that use it too.

When upgrading your RAM, make sure to consider that all RAM sticks don't necessarily play nice with eachother, and not all motherboards support dual channel RAM. I'm not the guy to talk about the intricacies of how that works though, there are far too many different RAM sticks and Mobo's for me to scratch the surface on that topic. Just takes a lot of research on your part for your own situation. General rule to stick by: if possible, always buy a set of RAM sticks that are identical and meant to go together.

To configure RAM settings, in After Effects go to Edit --> Preferences --> Memory and Multiprocessing.
In Premiere, I believe it's just memory or something like that.
Here's a very brief guide about that: http://www.digitalrebellion.com/blog/posts/premiere_pro_memory_settings_explained.html

For info about scratch disks / disk cache, check out this link and it's near the very bottom: https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/setting-system.html#specify_scratch_disks_to_improve_system_performance.
In short, they involve temporary files to speed up your editing and rendering. Sort of like temporary internet files for your editing software.

Purging is important, it gets rid of the temporary info in your memory and disc cache. To prove and see how this works, just set your disk cache in the preferences in Premiere to something like 50gb, then check the size of your hard drive you're working from, work for an hour, then check again and you'll see a portion of that is full. When you purge, it will tell you how much you're deleting. I typically purge when I go from working on one composition to the next so that I have more temporary space available for all the new stuff.

As far as the graphics card on a budget, I'm just not the guy to talk to about that. I feel your pain though, I was there before and I had a GTX 460 for the longest time haha. Probably just best to ask that in the GPU section as a question by itself or research online. Here's one thing I found from Linus who is typically pretty good with tech knowledge but does plug products sometimes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5Npt1BSF04

On a side note, if you want to nerd out and spend an hour listening to tech stuff about video editing while folding laundry or something, this is a great watch and might answer some of your questions before you can even think to ask them, hehe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhkJLF3oyI8


As far as your render time vs your friend's, there are a couple things to consider: First, compare the render settings. Second, different games, different quality settings you play those games on, what you use to capture it, and different scenarios you are playing in those games (movement, explosions, whatever) will affect the amount of data per frame and affect render time. Third, the output settings obviously also really affect render time. I would recommend using Adobe Media Encoder's YouTube settings (which is an H.264 codec) if you are just going to be posting it online somewhere. Also, within Adobe Media encoder, there are a couple more settings that will dramatically increase/decrease the time; the main "hidden setting" you want to be aware of is the VBR pass. One pass goes quicker, Two passes goes much slower but is higher quality for the same size of the video file typically.

And as far as Vegas and Premiere again, and learning Avid in the next year, focus on TECHNIQUES more than the individual software. A pro editor could do the same thing in just about any video editing application, it would just take more or less time and some software are better for certain scenarios, etc.
For learning Premiere, check out Digitaltutors.com they have some decent tutorials however it does cost US $29 a month, but you can see a lot of tutorials on a demo account which is free.
For After Effects, anyone who knows anything will tell you to check out Andrew Kramer's tutorials at VideoCopilot.net, he's a freaking guru and truly inspirational and is responsible for teaching probably 50% of modern day After Effects users at some point or another. All his tutorials are free. He offers some wicked awesome products too- Element 3D V2 came out a few months ago and is a game changer for 3D in After Effects.

As far as your Windows 8 situation, you might have some malware especially if you have anything torrented. Check out http://www.malwarebytes.org/ it's the most reputable free scanning software that is better than most AntiVirus programs. Check pretty much anywhere on Tom's Hardware about an adware/spyware problem and I people will have recommended it, lol.

As a personal note, you're definitely on the right track learning a lot about hardware early on. It makes a big difference later down the road, and the more you understand about computers the more you'll understand about cameras and how to set up a good shot for post production considerations.

Hope this helps again, and congrats on being an aspiring filmmaker!