I'm running XP Pro.

I will check the ACPI Multiprocessor setting tomorrow.

I get the same frame rate when not using the secondary display. The frame rate for Preview and Good does not seem to improve much if I use auto to make the preview image smaller. I am using a Quadro 550 video card.

The footage is 1440x1080/60i and the project properties use the HDV 1080-60i template.

>Vegas does not appear to be making the most of the CPUs power.
>Any ideas on whether I have configured the PC or Vegas incorrectly?
>I would love this machine to be able to playback HD at full frame rate.


For native m2t files in the timeline, that behaviour for Vegas6d is wellknown, and one of the actual limitation for HDV-cutting. Intermediate files like Cineform improves the situation to some extent, and as said by fldave you have to match the file propierties to the project properties. But beyond that there is no way how to overcome that by a better configuration of the PC or Vegas Vegas at the moment.

But I think you are well equiped for the future, given the performance of your actual PC.
.

I have a very similar setup and with CF DIs I can get 25fps (PAL here) out of dual 3.0GHz Xeons. To the Secondary Display Device Preview Full no sweat, Best Full, hmm, drops the frame rate at times, need to ensure the T/L is zoomed right out, any other graphics activity can be an issue.

However unless applying FXs there should be no difference between Preview and Best. Best I think is forcing recompression with bicubic resampling for no gain with no FXs.

Ah,
one other trap, empty tracks. Even an empty track can impose a CPU hit in Vegas I think, certainly one with a short amount of video can affect the whole video.

Sorry if I'm a bit vague, nowhere near my main Vegas PC at the moment so try a few things, it should fly for you.

Bob.

Bob.

How do you know / measure the framerate that you are getting during playback?

Vegas shows you the framerate - in the preview windows at the bottom. However, if that is the same framerate for the secondary preview device - I am not sure about that.

So, what you have seen is that the framerate goes down, if you use the secondary preview device, farss? Interesting.

Bob, the empty track performance hit you mention, this is really interesting. I usually have a few extra tracks where I have parked media being "reviewed", sometimes its storaged at the extreme end or on muted tracks. Plus I have a few extra tracks for temporary moving stills/clips in and out above a transition masks.

I know that a simple 3d movement can kill performance for the entire project. But never considered empty tracks a real problem, this is not a good thing.

Maybe if those empty tracks are muted during playback they won't affect framerate. Just a thought...

I'm far from 100% certain that they DO make any difference if they're completely empty.
I was more thinking aloud of things that MIGHT be causing Payload issues, things worth trying. I think I'm like a lot of us here, pretty busy trying to make a buck so when an issue comes up you just try whatever you can think of at the time and move on. I sure usually don't have the time for detailed experiments and pages of notes!

But I can say with some confidence that the Secondary Preview does work very smoothly for me but it does pay to spend some time configuring it for best results.

Also playback of SD over SDI is very smooth.

Probably the reason both of those work so well is less CPU power is needed.

Bob.

I have been doing a bit more testing.

An observation I have made is that during playback Core 1 of the first CPU and Core 2 of the second CPU are both sitting at about 30% usage, while Core 2 of the first CPU and Core 1 of the send CPU are sitting on basically 0%. I hope that made sense. I have currently got Hyperthreading disabled, but I will test with it on and compare results

Just did a test with Dual Core functionality disabled, so essentially the PC is just a standard Dual CPU machine. I basically got exactly the same perfomance, with each CPU topping out at 50%. Maybe its a built in limiter within Vegas that it will only utilize up to 2 CPU's at 50%. That would explain it ignoring the other 2 cores when running with Dual Core functionality.

Tested with Dual Core functionality on and Hyperthreading on.

Performance seems to have improved by 1 or 2 frames a second up to around 18fps.
Task manager now shows 8 CPU cores. Only Cores 1 and 3 are showing any usage while playing back in Vegas. I hope my use of the word core is correct.

Vegas seems to be limited to using 2 cores. Anyone else notice this?

Options\preferences\video tab

"Rendering Threads" can be throttled back to save a cpu (or two) for other things while rendering. I've only seen options up to 4.

However, doesn't XP only support 2 physical cpu's? Multiple cores weren't invented when they first made XP. You have to go to the latest Server OS version for full support of 4 or more.

You may need to go to 64-bit Windows to take full advantage of the machine. But then again, Vegas probably would not be supported on that platform. At least until Vegas 7.

You have to admit, this is pretty "bleeding edge".

Well XP certainly sees the multiple cores, at least they are visible in the Task Manager. How well it allocates the CPU power is up for discussion.

I had a nosy into Vegas's hidden Internal settings panel. There is a 'Enable multi-core rendering for playback' option which defaults to disabled. Woo hoo I thought and enabled it. Unfortunately playback then dropped to about 3-4 fps.

So as far as I can see, development on multi-core support is happening, just not working in V6. It would be nice to see a V6.0e, with better multi-core support, but I suspect it will be a feature specific to V7. At least I hope so.

On a side note I did manage to open 4 instances of Vegas, and used the task manager to allocate each instance to use 2 different cores each. This worked and I can play the HD project back in all 4 at once, with 2 of the instances playing back at 8-10 fps and the other 2 at 2-5 fps. All 8 cores (HT doubles the number of cores that show up in the task manager) are now at work, and total CPU usage is at about 40-50%. I suspect that HD access speed is now as much as an issue as CPU power.

I would bet that Vegas can only handle 2 "cpus", as XP was mostly designed that way. And I agree that since XP "sees" those cores, doesn't mean it is using them efficiently.

I think with Vista, Vegas 7 and a mongo RAID, you may be alright.

Edited:
Gee, I have MSDN subscription (Vista), a 64bit processor and motherboard. All I need is the raid! (and Vegas 7, please)

Microsoft's licensing for XP is for a maximum of two sockets. That is regardless of how many cores are present in each socket. Your quad core, hyperthreaded system still only occupies two sockets, so it is ok.

Vegas 6 is working great with 64-bit Windows XP. I get better results than I ever did with 32-bit XP, and I believe it is primarily due to improvements in memory management. More discussion here. Personally I would be very reluctant to use Vista with Vegas 6. Microsoft has lots of bugs in all their OSs until a service pack or two is released (which will still have bugs but should be stable). Vista is not even released, it's still in beta testing mode. If you do opt for a 64-bit OS, make sure that all your hardware has compatible drivers available. (And if it's Vista, those will be beta drivers.) I have found the XP x64 drivers to be very stable (ATI-based video card, Asus mobo, and Asus DVD writer).

Using 64-bit Windows doesn't have any impact on how many cores are utilized because (as mentioned) XP is licensed per socket. Also, your tests about core utilization so far are only covering playback. You might want to try rendering something, for example put an FX on your HDV track and render it to the Cineform avi format. I think you'll see more than two cores being utilized. The preferences setting for number of rendering threads that fldave wrote about is key. Does it allow you to set it higher than 4? I would think you should set it to at least 4, 8 if possible.

Also be aware that not all FXs allow multithreading. Nearly all of the Sony FXs that come with Vegas do. But if you apply one that doesn't (they have a yellow icon in the dialog where you add FXs), than your render will utilize only one core during the time when that FX is being utilized. Johnmeyer posted a great discussion about the effect of FXs on render times.

Also, I notice you wrote that you have 4GB of RAM. I wonder, when you open the Task Manager, in the Performance tab how much total physical memory does it say that you have available? Using 32-bit Windows XP I would expect less than 4GB to be shown, probably more like 3GB. This is because the mobo and/or XP is taking a chunk of the address space for the drivers and the hardware kernel layer. (By definition 32 bits allows no more than 4GB of address space and the hardware and OS has to go somewhere. Unless they do some trickery like PAE [Physical Address Extension] which has its own trade-offs).

I also have 4GB on my system. Using XP x64 and enabling a bios option called "memory hole" I find that all of this 4GB of RAM is available to the OS and applications. It also means I can run two instances of Vegas and do renders with more memory available to each.

From what you said your box is only using 60% of a possible 400% of CPU. I spend a portion of each week doing performance analysis of servers and whenever the CPU is lower than expected it’s time to look elsewhere.

In general what ever can’t keep up will be the limiting factor which can be: CPU, disk, network, display (not very often) or memory (probably not in your case). I’d probably look at disk performance by timing how long it takes to copy some files around. From that you can get the speed in bytes/sec. Also have a look the system logs in the event viewer (start->run->eventvwr.msc) and make sure that there aren’t any complaints.

As others have noted could be related to cores/procs.

Good luck.

Larry

Thanks everybody for all the feedback. Unfortunately I only have the PC on loan to test out and its time to return it. Fortunately I won't be purchasing a new PC until after Vegas 7 is released. I guess it will come down to how good V7 is a to what machine I will be buying. Those new Mac Pros look awfully good.

whatever you do - unless there's something faster when you buy - buy 5100 cores - not 5000 - that Core 2 Duo chipset compared to Core duo chipset will make a noticable difference in the SSE executions(this affects vegas unless they've completely remade the software in 18 months). The 5100 series xeon procs are based on the Core 2 Duo chipset.

Just so you know.

Dave