Re: Sony Vegas 11 Choppy Renders

Hmm... other than the obvious interlacing effects on the PC, this plays at full speed, totally worst-case, on my PC. That's with the preview at Best(Full), and the project set to Best rendering quality and 32-bit. No effects applied, Vegas 11, GPU acceleration on, and with an ATi HD6970, which isn't all that different than yours. My CPU is an AMD 1090T, six full cores at 3.2GHz... maybe a bit faster than yours (you have six integer cores, but only three FPU cores, in essence), but you should be plenty fast.

Some folks like nVidia. When Vegas 11 came out, I benchmarked the HD6970 versus the nVidia GeForce GTX570... both came in at about $300. The AMD/ATi won every test, sometimes significantly. Both worked fine in Vegas, but the nVidia crashed on a number of OpenCL tests and benchmarks as well. Yeah -- that's going to be totally due to the software, and it's probably already fixed, but that led me to select the ATi, and I've been quite happy with it. So I think you're ok here.

Assuming you see this ok in Vegas 10 and/or a media player like Windows Media Player (which will play AVC and MPEG-2 with video acceleration on Windows 7, so virtually no load on a good PC).

I know OpenCL doesn't really handle SLI/Crossfire in the way folks expect it. That should show up in Vegas as the two different OpenCL devices, not one unified double-speed device, when you have acceleration on, but that's one place I'd look. What happens when the GPU is off, or you disconnect the Crossfire cable?

Could also be that Vegas is just confused about the resources on the Bulldozer chips. Make sure you have all the AMD and Windows patches for Bulldozer. I have a four-core Bulldozer as my lab and multiple audio recording rig, but I have not tried it with video at all. Works just dandy at recording 16 track audio (96kHz/24-bit)... yeah, I know that's not being helpful. And in fact, that's all integer. Video decoding and rendering is FPU intensive.

-Dave