Last year when Sony released the latest version of their professional video editing software, Sony Vegas Pro 10, one of the welcomed new features was GPU support for faster video rendering times. With GPU support, Vegas is able to tap into the processors of certain video cards to speed up rendering. And those certain video cards were CUDA enabled cards from Nvidia. With Sony’s latest update, they will also begin supporting GPU rendering for ATI cards.
A couple of important things to note though. First, Vegas Pro 10 supports GPU rendering for only one format; Sony AVC. So if you render to any other format in Vegas, GPU acceleration is not available. And second, GPU rendering in Sony Vegas isn’t exactly the speed godsend many people were hoping for. At least not yet. In Sony’s words, when rendering to the Sony AVC format using GPU acceleration, the speed increase is anywhere from 5 to 20%. Not exactly a huge jump, rather a slight (yet still welcomed) improvement.
The new Sony Vegas Pro 10 updated (version D) will be available for free to current users by the end of April. Aside from the new GPU rendering support for qualified ATI video cards, the update also includes improved track grouping options, native support for Sony NEX cameras and Blu-Ray burning from the timeline.
Awesome! Awesome! Awesome!