Good GPU for video editing and rendering

SV Pro doesn't support Nvidia cards past the Fermi generation (GTX 5xx and older). They'll be recognized in the Preference > Video > 'GPU acceleration of video processing' drop down menu, and the CUDA support option will still show up in Render profiles but it will make no difference. With some profiles it will increase render times as Vegas tries to offload work to the GPU. Back when Sony was transitioning from SV 8 to SV 9 if I remember correctly, Sony decided to no longer pursue implementing support for CUDA, which is a proprietary NVidia technology. While they still offer it as support, the codecs only support the Nvidia cards up to the Fermi generation of that time. This is an ongoing thing between Sony and Nvidia: Nvidia feels it's Sony's responsibility to provide support for the current gen of cards; Sony feels it's Nvidia's responsibility to get on board with Open CL.

This question has been asked many, many times on the Creative Cows Vegas and Sony Vegas forums, and answered by the long time SV users. And there are many threads showing relevant render results from users with various cards. Very helpful

AMD cards are supported in Vegas - some better than others. Yes, vid rendering is very CPU dependent and Xeon's are great options, or even 4 core multithreaded i7's if you're on a smaller budget. Without a capable CPU then the benefits of a good GPU become less. (Common sense) But when picking a card for Vegas, the thing you want to pay attention to more are GFLOPS and Stream Processors \ Compute units. Clock speed and Memory are as important as they are for any card, but for editing it's all aobut the computational power. Cards that have been successful for Vegas users are the AMD R9 2xx and 3xx series cards. The 290x and 95x are popular choices and can significantly reduce render times - that's on certain Vegas profiles. Forget about getting any GPU render support on the Main Concept AVC \ AAC render profile. You just won't see reduced render times there. The Sony AVC profile with the AMD cards is fantastic. So it is highly dependent on the profile. However, timeline editing is of course pre-rendering, so the AMD cards will still work great in regards to smooth editing.

Here is a chart put together by Aaron Star. The green highlighted cards are ones that Vegas users have had a lot of success with. That's success both in rendering and smoothness of timeline editing. And it makes sense if you look at the GFLOPS. Note the 295x and Fury's insane GFLOP numbers.

EDIT: The link isn't working. I'll upload the Excel chart to a cloud server and provide the link

https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=6B1B1D78F12EDDEF!81891&ithint=file,xlsx&app=Excel&authkey=!ANhFm9zQ0FzUNwc

I DL'd my own copy of the chart and added just the relevant info for the 380, 380x and 390. If you're looking at cards, retailers usually just mention the Stream Processors in the quick specs, and a simple calculation is to divide Stream Processors by 64 to give compute units - a good indication of how well the card will serve you in Vegas. And of course you can get full specs form the manufacturer's site, but it's a good quick determination.
So for example a 390x offers 2816 Stream proc's- you can see from the chart it is accurately listed at 44 units.

Here's a synthetic benchmark of the difference between how an Nvidia and AMD card would perform in Vegas. The first chart - Luxmark 3 - Hotel numbers - are the ones to pay attention to as they're Open CL based.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9421/the-amd-radeon-r9-fury-review-feat-sapphire-asus/16

I personally love Nvidia cards. I love their low power draw and their excellent performance. It's just a shame they aren't fully supported for Vegas users.

I've been working with Vegas since SV 8, originally using an old dual core i3 with only 6GB RAM!! It was painful! I'm using an i7 4790 now, and while not a purist editing CPU, it performs well enough for my needs. I'm a hobbyist. And I've only got a GTX 650 Ti. It's only within the last 3 years that I started to get interested in which GPU will help in Vegas. I couldn't have bought a worse GPU for Vegas. Literally one of the worst. But that was before I did any research. And now this weekend finally I'm picking up a GPU. I'm looking at 390's over this Black Friday weekend. It's a good compromise for me between my budget, my specs and performance. The 8GB VRAM is major overkill for me, but the 390's got a decent 5120 GFLOPS and 2560 Stream Processors, and that's the clincher for me. And I just picked up my first 2K monitor yesterday, so the card would perform OK in 2K games. Not that I'm a big gamer at all. Black Friday GPU deals are shit so far. I'm in Canada and the prices are way higher than the US. With tax and shipping I'll end up paying about $470 - but they're only about $30 off so far this weekend.

Here's a comparison benchmark of 10 cards in Vegas. Also includes some Luxmark 2 numbers

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7481/the-amd-radeon-r9-290-review/14

A relevant Creative Cows discussion on the GPU topic. Pay attention to Rofrano's comments. He's the co-dev for Boris Continuum Suite for Vegas, and as knowledgeable as they get on Vegas next to their engineers. It's a long thread but good reading.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/977679

And here's a long, long, long thread on the GPU \ Vegas topic
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/975715#975715

As far as gaming goes you can find eons of benchmarks, and opinions that are far more knowledgeable than mine. I just come at this from the editing angle because that's mostly what I do.

So my advice would be to just get the best AMD card you can afford from whichever of the better manufacturers. For me that's Sapphire, MSi or XFX. XFX has fixed they're heat problems from what I can tell. Sapphire making the better cards imo.