Vegas Pro 11 is designed to take advantage of GPU acceleration for video FX, transitions, compositing, pan/crop, track motion and encoding. The series of test discussed below used an AMD FX 8150 8-core processor, 3.6 GHz, 8GB RAM, running Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit. The benchmarks evaluated preview and rendering with OpenCL GPU acceleration enabled on the AMD FirePro v4900, V5900 and V7900 and compared to the comparably priced NVIDIA Quadro 600, 2000 and 4000.
The Vegas Pro project consisted of seven segments in the timeline of varying complexity and length. Measurements were made of Final Render times, as well Preview performance at using “Best/Full” preview settings and the average “free run” frame rate.
At IBC 2011 AMD announced the FirePro SDI-Link for system integrators and ISVs to design fully featured SDI- and GPU-based solutions with ultra-low latency between AMD professional graphics cards and industry-standard third party SDI input/output cards (e.g. AJA, Bluefish444, Blackmagic Design, DELTACAST, DVS and Matrox).
SDI - Serial Digital Interface - is the primary digital format connection standard in the professional broadcast industry for uncompressed digital video for live feed productions (such as a live TV show), as well as for editing and monitoring video at the highest possible quality. It carries everything (video, audio, and time code) over one cable, with a bandwidth of nearly 1.5 gigabits per second (i.e. you're getting raw HD output before any compression is applied.)
Using the SDI-Link technology and the new FirePro V7900 SDI card, you get incredibly low-latency, high throughput GPU acceleration of real-time video and broadcast FX pipelines. The uncompressed digital video streams come in over an industry-standard SDI input card. The data is transferred to the GPU for real-time OpenGL/DX11/OpenCL processing (visual effects, color grading, encoding, editorial, graphics etc). Then again with virtually zero latency the processed video is passed back to the SDI card for output.
The four key components of the FirePro SDI-Link solution are:
AMD DirectGMA technology (PCI‐Express ‘peer‐to‐peer' transfers that completely bypasses any need to traverse the host's main memory or utilize the CPU)
Support from 3rd-party SDI I/O vendors
The SDI-Link SDK for ISVs to develop custom solutions for end-users
Supported FirePro video cards beginning with the V7900 SDI
Below is a quick overview from Bluefish444 of how they are using their SDI I/O PCI card with their new Lightspeed driver for the AMD FirePro SDI-link running Virtual Spectator software for real-time graphics on uncompressed video
“Guernica” is the title of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war mural inspired by the destruction of the Basque town of Guernica by the Nazi air force during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, in which roughly 1600 people were killed. I saw this cubist-style painting when I visited Madrid in March of 2008. It is a haunting, muted, mostly black and white painting that depicts the suffering and brutality of war.
Then this month, I came across German artist Lena Gieseke and her “3D Exploration of Picasso’s Guernica”. It provides an unique and stunning perspective for viewing the painting in 3D. Definitely check out the Maya-rendered movie which takes you through the painting.
FireUser.com is a community resource for CAD, visualization, 3D, video and engineering professionals to learn about the latest acceleration and display technologies and news with a focus on the AMD FirePro workstation graphics line.
