Reposting to see if anyone has an answer to the "improvements" in HyperThreading.

I'm not sure it will make your render times shorter. My guess would be that it will allow you to make *another task* while rendering, like playing a game, etc... but the render time should be quite the same.

Anybody from SoFo to answer that???

I just recently built a 3.06 HT machine and it does render faster, but I suspect most of that is because I went from a AMD 1400 (who knows how fast that is really since AMD always names their CPU's ambiguously). One thing I have noticed is that I can do virtually anything else while rendering is going on so it is not so annoying to be rendering a long time. I can play games, watch other videos, read email, compile programs, edit in Word, etc. I think it's worth the cost just to have this facility. My old computer was not "available" while a render was going on. I don't think Vegas uses the HT technology, but there sure is an advantage to having it imo.

Tom

The confussion in part comes from marketing hype. This article is pretty good on explaining what it is... and isn't.

http://arstechnica.com/paedia/h/hyperthreading/hyperthreading-1.html

To boil it down further my understanding is in order for the CPU to really take advantage of multi threading the APPLICATION (in this case Vegas) has to be written in such a way to make it possible.

Consider the following: Many news readers are multi threading. That simply means they can be downloading from 4 difffernt newsgroups (or servers) at the same time. On the surface it sound impressive, but don't confuse it with downloading four times faster. In fact all that's happens in this example is each "thread" gets 1/4 of your bandwidth. So if you got a 100Kb a second connection, each thread in this example would be downloading at roughly 25Kb a second, so combined you're getting four things downloaded at once, but it would take just as long to download them.

Normally multi tasking or whatever buzz word is used means that your computer has an easier timer of doing more things at once... they don't get done faster, only more at once. In true multi threading (or hyper threading) the application is smart enough to split the job into multiple tasks, each generating its own thread. Then you are doing more than one thing at once and the same application... if so written. If or not Vegas 4 can/does this I don't know. The article above is interesting, but may raise more questions than it answers.

I just upgraded from an XP2000 and to a P4 3G with the canterwood chipset I tell you what a difference. I have both machines running now my wife uses the Athlon now. Well I took a Veg I am working on it is a 4 1/2 minute music video, lots of chroma key work with full screen transparencies. I did a bench mark between the two started them both at exactly same time and the P4 took 27 minutes to render and the XP took nearly 40 minutes to complete. These computers both have a Gig of ram although the P4 is running on a 333 FSB while the Athlon is running 266. I have started that same video rendering on the p4 and started a render and then open a second instance of vegas open that music veg up and start previewing the play back and it was not much different with the render going on in the back ground! Here's another thing I noticed when you go to task manager if you set vegas's Process priority all the way up to real time the computer is very usable try that with a XP or non HT P4, you will be lucky if you can get your mouse to move once a minute. That there let's me know HT works very effectively. I would have to say that the biggest benefit for us Vegas users is to be able to render a project but still be able to use the machine for serious work. No more waiting for starting renders before you go to bed. Definitely a time saver. I still have to compare the system with HT disabled to see how much it helps rendering speeds. Also they are very overclockable I have mine running at 3.25 Ghz and it is staying at a mild 93 F haven’t had the balls to try and take it faster, not bad huh nearly an extra 200Mhz for free!

I have a dual Xeon with HT. I render about 10-15% faster with HT enabled. Not only that, but I can render, capture, and surf the net, work on a spreadsheet, type a memo, yadda yadda w/o problem. I have read much of the discussions over the past several months that rendering may actually slow on some computers with HT enabled, certainly hasn't been the case with mine. I have a Supermicro P4DC6+ Motherboard with a home built system. I have tested encoding speeds, and quality with Vegas, Procoder, Sorneson squeeze, CCE basic, TMPGenc and Cleaner XL 6.0. HT is faster with all of them, with Cleaner, Procoder and Sorenson benefitting most from HT.

JTH

SoFo definitely had ad copy stating that Vegas was optimized for use with the 3.02 Intel HT chip. That's why I've been wondering what actual effect this new hardware has.

What I'm seeing here (and thanks guys) is a 15 to 30% potential increase in rendering and a total release of "render hold time", which is cool.

HT users, another question in a question. About this render time not interfering... if you want to "Render to a new track", can you immediately return to editing while That render is proceeding?

No...But you can open a 2nd incidence of Vegas and edit while the other render is going on.

JTH

JTH -
very cool, but...
can you edit on the same VEG or do you make a working dupe?
(Experience best teacher).
And I'm currently on a 1.6 Intel system... is it time to spring for the other (new 3Gig HT) box??

You're right experience is the best teacher. So with that in mind, and saying I've never tried, I don't think you can or should if you can. I guess it would really boil down to what you were doing. If you're working on two different instances of Vegas of the same VEG file, and assuming you save both, with the same name, how are you going to tell them apart afterwards? I don't think you can even do it... file sharing issues. You may be able to read the VEG file and write to it in one Vegas session, but only be able to read in the 2nd running at the same time as the first, I'm guessing you couldn't write to it, so you wouldn't really accomplish anything. But remember I'm just guessing. <wink>

While Intel currently has the P4 3.2 Ghz, it and other chips of that generation lare nearing the end of the cycle for 32 bit processors. All the hype is about bandwidth and throughput (the speed of the front side bus) or how fast data can move between the CPU and memory, currently still somewhat of a bottleneck. Sometime late this year or early next AMD is suppose to release their first 64 bit processor, code named sledge hammer. Of course applications like Vegas would have to be modified to take full advantage. Once 64 bit CPU's and much faster memory arrive on scene along with applications rewritten to take advantage of it, thing should speed up rather briskly.

Like with everything else software can get ahead of hardware and the other way around. There is always some bottleneck. We've come a long ways in the last 20 years or so speed and power wise, but still got a long way to go to approach speeds invisioned in science fiction shows like Star Trek.

Speed and computing power is relative. A fast 'super computer' can process several trillion instructions a second. That's real world.

The character Mr. Data of Star Trek fame was suppose to have 100,00 terabytes of memory (rougly the capacity of 50,000 200 GB hard drives) And Mr. Data had 800 quadillion bits storage... with his processor capable of processing 60 trillion instructions a second. Someone once caculated that a average human in computer speak could hold 3.1 terabits of information compared to Mr. Data be able to store about 250,000 times that much.

Hmm... twenty years down the road. Windows 12, Vegas 24, typical PC will cost under $100, have 100 Ghz CPU and 50 GB RAM and and 5 terabyte harddrive. Maybe. :-)

Actually....Yes, you can work on a veg file while rendering the same veg in another instance. However, as alluded to, the tricky part will be how you want to save the file. You would have to rename the file, and then you really wouldn't be working on the same veg, would you. Or....wouldn't you.....

JTH

true... while rendering a project you can pop open another Vegas and open the same Veg and edit away. I find myself doing this when I want to see how my project is coming along, but I don't want to stop editing. I'll render the first few minutes and edit on the second instance. I save to a new file with a 01, 02, 03 on the end etc... It is smart to do that anyway when project files are so small compared to the amount of time you put into them :)

I am confused a bit here - the original question was about how VV was with HT. I haven't seen a lot of responses that deal with that. At least for me I don't want to play games or surf the internet if I am working. If I am editing I am not sure I would want to open two, or more, instances of VV to edit the same file. I would rather know if HT affects things such as real time playback, real time preview with filters applied, firewire output (as in does HT allow for more real time *preview* output via firewire), supersampling faster, 30i > 24P conversion faster and does it *speed up* render times for doing a PTT.

As far as the render and work idea - yeah that is awesome but I also think it is something that could be made better in the program itself. Nesting would help as would 'background rendering'. And yeah - certianly if you needed to open ,say, After Effects to work on an effect while rendering than that would be good to know. I could see frame serving as an added speed increse if so coded too.

As I said in my first post in this thread, HT increases speed in my dual Xeon 2.4 Ghz system approx 10-15%. I have a notebook computer with a 3.06 Ghz P4 with a 533 mhz FSB with 1 GB or Ram, (alienware 51m), and my dual Xeon with HT soundly beats it in speed with rendering, compositing, etc.... I hope this addresses your particular concerns.

JTH