Dual processor support with Vegas 3.0

tracking59 wrote on 4/16/2002, 2:21 PM
VEgas 3.0 claim Dual processor DV rendering support.
I do not think its true.
because after install another CPU in my system.
The performance does not improve at all.
I did go to option to enable Dual CPU support.
but the performance is the same as I did not
enable that option.
Does anyone know why?
CPU utilization on 1 CPU is 99%
CPU uitilization on 2 CPU is 60-70%.
Should it be 90%+ on 2 CPU too?

Comments

Nat wrote on 4/16/2002, 7:31 PM
I heard that the second CPU was used to render only the Audio. So if your project doesn't use heavy audio, it shouldn't change anything.
I'm not sure about his though.
Control_Z wrote on 4/16/2002, 10:05 PM
If you search the forums you'll find there are some limited functions that benefit from SMP but I don't remember if it's audio or whatever. Most important to video editing - rendering titles, transitions, stills, etc. always gave me the same results as you - basically VV3 was ignoring the 2nd cpu.
tracking59 wrote on 4/17/2002, 2:12 PM
thanks guy, I though i can cut down proccesing
time by add another cpu. Oh well vv3 should not
claim smp support.
HPV wrote on 4/17/2002, 8:48 PM
Someone from SF said that with the Vegas 3.0, one proc will decompress the DV stream while the other does the DV rendering. Can anyone confirm this?

Craig H.
Cheesehole wrote on 4/19/2002, 4:46 PM
they said that when rendering, one cpu does the processing to create a frame (all the compositing and effects) and mix the audio, while the other does the DV compression.

dual cpu's are utilized while editing too. I typically get 65% up to 100% cpu utilization while interacting with the interface and playing at the same time. they are also utilized if you use lots of video AND audio effects while playing back. (about 65%-75%), and if you render and edit at the same time (multiple instances of Vegas), or render with two instances of Vegas.

they make a huge difference to overall system responsiveness while multitasking or otherwise. Windows does a good job load balancing so you can continue to work on your system while rendering. burn cd's... edit your project (yes edit the one that is rendering so when it's done you are ready to render more!)

kosstheory wrote on 5/25/2002, 12:59 PM
I have gotten excellent results with the following system:

Dual AMD Athlon MP 2000+ processors
ASUS A7M266-D Motherboard
1 GB PC2100 DDR RAM ECC

When Rendering From DV to DV I achieved 100% CPU usage on both CPUs for the duration of the render, which was quite fast! I was in awe! Seeing those frames shoot by on the preview was a sight for sore eyes. I've never seen anything quite so beautiful.

A lot of people say that the AMD Athlon MP processors are not stable enough to compete with the P4s. This baby is rock steady! I can throw anything at it, and it just gobles it up, and keeps on trucking. And I saved hundreds!

One thing that I am a little concerned about is the CPU usage during other types of renders. Like the mpg2 file I'm rendering right now. The CPUs are only being used to 50%. I suppose that the main concept mpeg2 encoder has no optimization for dual cpus? Looking at the performance tab of the task manager, it looks like CPU 1 is at about 80% and 2 seems to vary between 20% and 30%. There was an earlier post that stated that dual processor support for activities other than DV encoding might use one processor for decoding, and one for encoding. I suppose what the performance tab is showing might be proving that this scenario is true.

I hope that future releases of the main concept mpeg2 codec included with vegas will utilize the dual cpu configuration more efficiently. It is a puzzle why 100% of atleast one of the CPUs isn't being employed. As it is 80+20=100. So, I would probably get about the same results with a single CPU when doing anything other than DV encoding. Oh well. Maybe they should advertise it as "Limited" Dual CPU support, until it's further optomized?

Just my 2 cents