Vegas, Windows, and GPU renders

[pope 0]

Hello all;
I'm re-working our DZ editing stations and upgrading both hardware and software.

I've installed Gigabyte HD 7970 (3072MB, GDDR5) Graphics cards and am currently running Vegas Pro 11 on Windows 7 Pro, and final output is to USB and sometimes DVD. No overclocking.

As I'm looking to increase our output speed, I'm re-considering our software configurations, and wondering if an upgrade to Vegas Pro 12 and/or Windows 8 will aid in this speed increase...?

I should note that I'm not interested very much in which operating system is better between Windows 7 Pro or 8 (those are my 2 options). These computers are solely purposed for video editing with Vegas Pro (and Premiere depending on edit needs and source input).

Can anyone make suggestions for making these computers lightning fast with our current options? (We could upgrade software, OS, etc) Hardware will be more difficult to upgrade.

[So far, initial testing in VP11 with 7970 graphics card is speeding up our renders by +/- 25%, But I'd like to increase that percentage if possible. Any opinions/advice on software/configurations to aid in delivery time will be appreciated.]

Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge!
Cheers!
pope

[parachutist 2]

I've found some hardware compatibility improvements and better memory management with Win8, however, neither of those really helps when using Vegas to edit, so no, I'd say you'll not see any speed upgrade with windows8 for video processing.

Chris

[Nastyn8 0]

After reading about Sony's GPU acceleration quite a bit, it seems that Sony's implementation was optimized for the NVidia 5xx series cards and AMD's HD 6xxx cards. Buying the latest and greatest card will actually yield significantly slower render times than these older cards which Sony specifically developed the acceleration for. The GTX 570 is your best bet for GPU acceleration (yielding 3x faster rendering than CPU only for some people).

On the GTX 570, which seems to be the best supported card, certain (old) drivers apparently work best http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=868248