So I have been a long time user of PD 7, then PD8, now PD9.

I have an i7 920 desktop, 12 GB RAM, dual ATI 4870 cards in crossfire, ASUS motherboard, windows vista ultimate 64 bit
and Catalyst 10.11 with 10.11 Avivo package and OpenCL.

I turned all hardware acceleration on, not a problem for me to select hardware acceleration (it also seems that PD9 supports openCL parralell processing acceleration of rendering.)
I also have the fddshow codecs installed.

Anyway, the first thing I did is open up a 38 minute AVCHD movie project I made in PD8 a few months ago.

Manipulating the project was not percievably faster than PD8. I did like the HD preview, except I was getting choppiness in the "full HD preview mode" (I dont think I should with the amount of GPU/CPU resources I have). It got better when I enabled ATI parrallell processing acceleration (OpenCL), but still hiccups every 15-20 seconds under movie preview.

I decided to render the project for my blackberry, where the application immediately crashed. I tried running it without hardware acceleration (GPU) and it rendered.

Then I decided to do a full AVCHD render, but with custom settings (15500 kbps average bit rate, 17500 kbs max bit rate on AVCHD), and that immediately crashed.

I the re-rendered it in the standard AVCHD setting (1920 x 1080) and it did do it in about 39 minutes, about the same time to render as when I had PD8 (this is understandable, since the GPUs used for hardware accelerated encoding hadn't changed).

So, so far, I don't notice any appreciable speed increase (although I have not used much magic motion, transitions, editing yet), and it did pause several times while manipulating the previous project a little.

As far as memory usage, total memory usage never exceeded 3.2G (I have 12GB DDR3). Under produce of AVCHD, I saw main processor loading of 25 to 100%, yet in the ATI Overdrive section, the GPU active percentage was mostly 0% (although I know it is using the GPU, since it does render faster with GPU acceleration on, although crashes sometimes).

Bottom line, there are still application crashes which tells me the exception handling hasn't been looked at that much for PD9, even though the base engine was moved to 64 bit (or perhaps when you fix a bunch of things, you break others?)

All in all, was it worth $70 for the upgrade? (I would rather pay $40 (instead of $70) and not get the bonus holiday pack)? Dont know yet if it was worth it. probably too expensive to upgrade at this time from PD8 because of my crashes... although the feature list is nice. I like how you can unlink the audio/video and move around, as well as displaying, in a more intuitive way, the transitions.

Overall, I give it a B or B-, due to the crashes and the high cost of upgrading. For $40 it is worth the upgrade I think.

Alex