GPU Acceleration Hardware

Regarding the Quadro 5000 for Vegas 11: from a hardware standpoint, the GTX 560 is almost as powerful, and the GTX 560 TI is more powerful. In my tests with PPro CS5, the GTX 285 was very close in performance to the Quadro 5000. Unless Vegas 11 uses special software features unlocked by the Quadro drivers (which is the case for high-end 3D rendering apps), the consumer cards are faster. One caveat is the Quadro uses ECC memory and is also effectively underclocked, so it is designed to run for long periods of time, at full utilization, without any rendering errors/artifacts.

GTX 590
1024 Cores, 327.7GB/s (2 GPUs on the card, uses 365W, min 700W PSU required); PPro only uses 1 GPU, so unless Vegas can use 2, the GTX 580 is most powerful card which can be utilized at this time.

GTX 580
512 Cores, 192.4GB/s

GTX 570
480 Cores, 152GB/s

GTX 560TI
384 Cores, 128GB/s

Quadro 5000
352 Cores, 120GB/s

GTX 560
336 Core, 128GB/s

GTX 285
240 Cores, 159GB/s

http://www.geforce.com/Hardware/GPUs
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product...o-5000-us.html

Some benchmarks from Premiere Pro CS5.5:
http://www.studio1productions.com/Ar...remiereCS5.htm
If the Radeon 6970 can be reasonably well utilized for rendering, it could run around the same speed as the GTX560-580.

Radeon 6970
1536 Cores, 176GB/s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twM0vtKME7w

For PPro, ~900MB was required for the GPU (see also the Studio 1 link which discusses performance with PPro). While in many cases more memory equals higher performance, this is not true for GPU rendering with PPro. Video frames are copied into GPU memory and processed with 'shader' code. The shaders tend to be relatively small (memory wise), so even many stacked effects won't use up that much memory. I would expect the H.264 encoder to be the largest shader program, and you only need one in memory. Batching, process synchronization, etc., also effect total throughput. The best way to find out is to perform benchmarks with varying amounts of available memory.

Again, with my quick tests with a Q5000 vs the GTX 285, they ran about the same speed in PPro CS5 (Q5000 has more cores and more memory but less memory bandwidth (120 vs 159GB/s)). While memory tends to be relatively low cost, benchmarks will show if the extra cost is worth it.

http://www.studio1productions.com/Ar...remiereCS5.htm

The ~$90 card with 1GB RAM performs within a few seconds of the $525 card with 1.5GB RAM (the $90 card is also slower & has less cores, but also uses less energy).

Each application behaves differently- specific benchmarks will be helpful.