That's a pretty significant difference.... large enough so that I would suspect a setting wrong somewhere. It sounds like you rendered one in the "good" setting and one in the "best"

My tests (be them right or wrong) show 8.1 being about 15 or 20 percent faster.

My tests (be them right or wrong) show 8.1 being about 15 or 20 percent faster. That's all??

There sure ought to be a LOT more improvement than that to justify the obviously huge amount of effort put into the re-write for 64 bit.

Here are some benchmarks, between 8.0c and 8.1 on my brand new Vista 64 system (quad core 2.4 Ghz, 6 GB RAM).

Source: 17 seconds of HDV, in two .m2t files. No plugins. No-GOP rendering was disabled in order to force it to render in mpeg2 mode. The right 1080/60i project properties in "best" quality were used.

WMV 720/30p export at 6mbps (encoder was multithreaded)
8.1: 1'02" secs
8.0c: 1'.06" secs

MainConcept MP4 720/30p export at 4/10 mbps (encoder not multithreaded)
8.1: 46" secs
8.0c: 47" secs

Sony AVC MP4 720/30p export at 5mbps (encoder was multithreaded)
8.1: 48" secs
8.0c: 42" secs

Main Concept HDV 1080/60i (encoder was not very well multithreaded)
8.1: 30" secs
8.0c: 23" secs

Did ANYONE ever say it would be faster?

I was at the NAB party when the 64bit version of Vegas was announced. I was down the back, there were a lot of people who wouldn't shut up but I think I heard every word that was said and "faster" was not one of them.

That said from my experience from decades ago on older micros and minis it shouldn't be that dramatically slower either.

Bob.

I am using an asus dsgc -dw server board with two xeon E5345 quad cores @ 2.33 ghz ,4.0 gb of ram, nvidia quadro fx 1500 video, wd sata drives, dual viewsonic monitors. I am currently running a dual boot of xp pro x64 and vista ultimate x64 on seperate drives. I have vegas 8.0c and 8.1 installed on each os. I just rendered a 1:04:43 file that was two seperate clips captured from my 8mm digital camera. very slight editing involved. I saved the project and rendered it in xp with 8.0c then 8.1. I then rebooted to vista and did the same. The rendering times were as follows xp 8.0c --6:44, xp 8.1- 6:19,---vista 8.0c- 9:27, vista 8.1 - 9:32. I set the preferences and options the same on all rendering in best. I must not have vista setup for max performance, but it does answer the question if 8.1 works with xp. in my case it works MUCH better

lefty51,

On your Vista Ultimate x64 system, is SP1 installed?

Did ANYONE ever say it would be faster?Well, yes. The 8.1 release notes claim "faster performance." Also, virtually everyone who has posted here talks about faster performance.

If it isn't faster, then what exactly is the point???

While there might not be a huge difference in render times between v8.0c and v8.1 on relatively "standard" sized projects, on those projects which were "memory bound" in the 32-bit version, v8.1 offers a massive speed-up.

I created a 6-minute HD project a couple of years ago with about 50 huge panorama .PNG still images which were about 10,000 x 3,000 pixels each. I did Ken Burn's style moves on them all using Pan and Crop, added titles and did some color correction on about half of them. On any of the 32-bit versions of Vegas using my Quad-core with 4 GB RAM (only 2 gig of which could be used by 32-bit Vegas), it took about 3 hours to render because of the massive images and all the swap file activity. Using v8.1 in Vista64, it rendered in less than 15 minutes using most of the 4GB of RAM.

Not only were the renders faster, v8.1 feels faster than v8.0c overall. There is the issue of v8.1-compatible plug-ins and 64-bit codecs, but on those projects which can be done using only the tools available within Vegas, I will be using v8.1.

"Did ANYONE ever say it would be faster?"

I saw lots of people say that, over and over again. They were all users posting in this forum. Most of them said something like, "64 bits is twice as fast as 32 bits". Most of them never gave any reference or source for their statements. When i pointed out that almost all audio/video operations are 32 bits or less so a 64 bit process wouldn't help at all, none of them had any response. *shrug*

Try with:

1) Complex projects
2) HD source media and very high res still images
3) Very heavy codecs, like for example, AVCHD
4) 32-bit (128 bpp) project mode

In most of these cases I find a significant difference in performance. I do know 64 bit mode basically concerns memory management, but often this has to do with performance too, as a side-effect. Consider this:

a) A 32 bit task can address no more than 4 Gbyte of RAM, a 64 bit one can. Also, due to some Windows limits in memory management, 32 bit tasks CANNOT actually address all 4 Gbyte of ram (but only 2 Gbyte or so) even if you have them installed on board.

b) When a task runs out of memory if it doesn't crash it starts a heavy swapping from disk which makes it crawl: this happens most often in 32 bit mode than in 64 bit one, since 32 bit tasks can address less memory than 64 bit ones. I have some projects which make 8.0 crash while render perfectly with 8.1. I have some projects which render 3-4 times faster in 8.1.

c) Since 64 bit internal registers store twice data as 32 bit ones, some operations (but not all) run faster, because they take less clock cycles to execute (ideally half), expecially when they must process a huge amount of data per time unit (128bpp mode).

d) Further, even the swapfile in 64 bit mode can be bigger than 4 Gbyte and be managed properly by Windows.

I know in some cases there is no difference between 32 bit and 64 bit Vegas but in many other cases the difference is noticeable.

Hi everybody.

My point was that lots of people made lots of assumptions. I've neither read nor heard anything from the developers claiming render times would be faster.
It would seem a bit strange to take SCS to task for not delivering something they never said they would. I guess one could argue they should have hosed down any unrealistic expectations.

My view is that yes, for some things 64bit systems with lots of RAM will be much, much faster. I don't know if that translates into faster rendering of video. The point to it would seem to be better previewing of HD as more could be buffered into the larger amounts of RAM.

Bob.

Lefty51,
Have you made sure you have the number of threads set to 8 in the preferences of Vegas 8.1?

Very good example of where 8.1 shines. Thanks John.

Rob

Actually, I was under impression that the 64bit version would be better scalable with the number of cores (and offer a bigger number of threads), so - using a machine with 8 cores, and provided the number of threads is no less than 8 - it should be almost twice as fast as the 8.0c? Can someone confirm?

I can't test it on my machine, as it only has 4 cores anyway - so my speed advantages of the 8.1 are marginal. But yes - the more complicated the edit is, the more agile the 8.1 seems compared to 8.0c.

Here's an analogy for you. Think of 8c as a truck with a 1 ton capacity and 8.1 as a truck with a three ton capacity. Which one will get a two ton load across town faster?

Rob

Sorry Rob - poor analogy.

If using only SD would it help to go from 8.0b to 8.0c if I only have a P4 HT 3.0 ghz with 4GB ram?
Thanks very much,
Randy

Not really. The analogy just illustrates what John Cline is saying. 8.1 is capable of lifting a heavier load so under that sort of circumstance 8.1 should be faster than 8c. The analogy is perfectly fine.

The threads and cores aspect of it is a different matter. If 8.1 can make good use of 8 cores then it might be faster on small jobs too, but that's always going to depend on whether all parts of your processing chain can make use of those 8 cores.

Rob

yes it is sp1

I have noticed (on average) that 8.1 is about 12..15% faster in rendering, compared to 8.0c.

This is on Vista 64bit and a Quad Core QX9650.

The ONLY way to pump more speed from 8.1 is to use 8 cores, then you could achieve about double rendering speed compared to 8.0c, that can only run on 4 cores.

Christian

"The ONLY way to pump more speed from 8.1 is to use 8 cores, then you could achieve about double rendering speed compared to 8.0c..."

I'd love to see some evidence to support that bit of common sense. Lefty should make sure he has 8.1 set to use 8 rendering threads and then try those tests again on his 8 core setup.

Judging from other reports in this thread it seems like 8 cores isn't the "only" way to get more speed out of 8.1. Having more than 4GB seems to make a difference on renders that need it.

If you've got 4 GB installed, a 64bit OS gives you another GB, or about 33% more memory than you had under a 32bit OS. That's nothing to sneeze at but it might be that even more memory would keep the render out of the page file, which could make a big difference. Basically you're looking at an extra GB shared by all processes running at the time.

On the speed difference between XP and Vista, I'm sure it's faster but I'd be looking for ways to decrease Vista's memory footprint. I'll bet the numbers could get closer.

Rob Mack

Hi,

I went from 4GB DDR3 to 8GB on my quad, and did not notice ANY speed improvenet in 8.1. Nothing.Went even back to 4 GB just to experiment.

This does not mean that during some circumstances - when the project is SO large that the available memory for the application is the limiting factor - then you could see some additional improvement.

But very few and special projects are such. I have tested this with my larges project ever, 9 video tracks (all with audio), 4 additional audio tracks, 3 tracks for titles and overlays, and about 100 stills (pgn) at about 8Mbyte each. No effect from 4G to 8G. And I tweaked the memory settings. No effect.

Christian