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Sony Vegas Pro 11 is the latest release and now only runs on Vista and Windows 7. So for professional use let’s just say your only real option with Vegas 11 is Windows 7 as our experience with Vista hasn’t been all sweetness and light.

We installed Vegas Pro 11 on two workstations, an aging HP xw8400 and a factory fresh Dell T7500, basically the difference between an a previous generation 2Ghz Xeon dual core and current generation 2.93GHz quad core. It’s clear that that latest version running on Windows 7 needs all the horsepower you can throw at it. While Vegas 10 running on XP didn’t have all the latest features it still ran pretty good with very few hiccups on the older xw8400, even with a handful of Universal Audio plug-ins running. We imagine there are a lot of folks still working on these systems, especially in a tight econonomy trying to squeeze out every last rendor before pulling the trigger on a system. If that sounds like you, stick with Vegas 10 running on XP. Windows 7 runs well on the xw8400 but Vegas 11 starts to choke a bit. On the newer system it runs beautifully.

While Vegas Pro 10 claimed to have GPU support for accelerating H.264 renders we were hard pressed to notice the difference. Vegas Pro 11 is a different story. The GPU acceleration really works and it’s noticeable, especially on older systems. We tested the Quadro 600, Quadro 2000 and Quadro 4000 on both the older xw8400 and the new T7500 workstations. The xw8400 got a welcome boost in render performance and the quality of the output was very good, no real discernible difference with CUDA cores turned on and off. The T7500 is a pleasure to use with or without GPU acceleration so the acceleration was less noticeable here because the system is screaming fast already. By the way, the Dell T7500 is a very quiet box by the way, a bit ugly but really nice acoustic design and quiet airflow.  read more...