Have you tried turning off "multiprocessor support" in Vegas preferences?

That would be too simple, wouldn't it?

Rob Mack

The closest I can find in the Vegas 6 preferences is a tab entitled "disable multiprocessor AVI rendering". The crashes were not just during rendering, they were often during regular editing.

In my experiences with Vegas, crashing was caused by bad third party apps, bad memory, running out of memory, IRQ conflicts, poor windows install, hard drive problems, hard drive assignments, equipment malfunction, etc. Even then nothing was lost.

JJK

JJK,

But what about a system that is stable with Vegas 5 but crashes with Vegas 6?

Good question!

vegas 5 is single threaded more so than 6 , ergo - 6 will use HT and multi cpu more than 5 ... so may be more taxing on such systems ?

except in a very few cases have I seen any benefit to HT .. and a marginal system in any form (drivers, memory timings, power, chipset, and a 100 other things) will exaberate the issue ..

Oddly enough i hear of a lot of issues with ide buss's and lockups and freezing , for now real explained reasons - with certain motherboards and/or combinations ..

Also - be aware that simply turning Hyperthreading Off in the BIOS - does nothing.

To truly (and correctly) have Windows XP to operate as a non-hyperthreading environment - you must reinstall the OS from scratch with the Hyperthreading parameter set to off. Windows will sense this during setup and load the correct hardware abstraction layer.

VP

B_JM,

I'm getting the impression that Vegas 6 is not as light on its feet as previous version were. It seems like what you are saying supports that.

Do you agree?

I uninstalled Vegas 6 and perhaps by tonight I will be able to reinstall and then test with HT turned on and off. For Hyperthreading with versions 4 and 5 gave me a slight boost in render times and definitely helped multitasking.

I have an Intel P4 3.0Gigz Ht processor and Intel 865perl Mob with
HT enabled and it is working very smooth no problems at all in V6 or V5.

Just thought you should know.


ZION

Vocalpoint - this is not correct w/ XP .. nt4.0 yes for smp (and win2k)

can't say -- i used vegas 4 and 5 mostly on DUAL cpu systems (vegas 3/4 i started with on a quad xeon sgi 540 in fact) and now am only running single cpu systems at home for 5 and 6 .. so i cant really compare apples to apples to apples ..

I have P4, 3gHz HT, Intel Corporation D865PERC board and so far have no problems with stability in 5 or 6. Did have a media manager issues that forced me to re-install 4 times, but it is working now.

With V5 , P-4 3.4 800 buss and 2 gig ram the difference in rendering speed on my system with hyperthreading on/off is 12.4 %. It is 12.4 % faster with Hyperthreading turned on. I ran this test on the same clip many times to make sure of the performance. As you can see I am happy as a pig in mud with Hyperthreading.

JJK

it really seems to be system dependent (as i mentioned) , if it works better, certainly go for it -- i for sure would ..

I am very certain that it is since I (and many others) have certainly tested this very fact over and over. There were huge debates about the perfornance gains with HT in the Nueudo forums for months...so I took a few weeks and did a massive amount of testing.

With HT on during a fresh Windows XP installation - Setup with install the multi-processor HAL - you can easily verify this with a quick peek at Device Manager.

To truly convert back to the "uniprocessor" HAL - a complete install must be done. The difference is very noticable (dependant on the motherboard/chipset your are using). I shut off HT about a year ago on my ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe and it was like night and day for speed.

IMHO - HT is just that - hype....there is little or no difference in performance...in Nuendo - there is actually more problems with higher latency and other issues when recording with HT on.

Now real dual processors...that's a totally difference story.....

VP

I have to agree with BJ_M, when you turn of HT in the bios it is off in Win XP.

Performance times obtained by testing with HT on and off using the bios method support this. Why would times change if HT was not actually off? Of course you must start with a multithreaded application.

Also, task manager will show 1 cpu with HT off in the bios, and 1 physical cpu and 1 logical cpu when HT is on in the bios.

Furthermore, I get around to quite a few tech sites and have done so for the last 10 years and have never read anything about HT NOT be controllable from the bios with Win XP.

*Most* applications that are multithreaded will show performance gains from HT as well as dual processors. Examples include Vegas 6, TMPGEnc, and MediaStudio Pro 7.

Although it is not the norm, some applications will show no performance gains or even decreases in performance with HT on, while dual cpu systems will show performance increases using the same software. It all depends on the coding of the software.

But, this has nothing to do with HT not being turned off from the bios.

- Mark

Well, Vegas 6 went for several hours without crashing after I turned off hyperthreading. in the bios. If its just a technical placebo, so be it. All I know is I changed a setting and it's not crashing anymore. I'm happy with that until the updates start coming.

You guys that are having problems can you tell us your system
specs.?

Mother Board?
Processor?
Ram?
OS?
Service Pack Build?
Graphic card?
Ect.?

Because not all of us are having crashes or lower performance
with HT on.

Mother Board: Intel 865perl
Processor: Intel P4 3.0Gig 800MHZ buss
Ram: 2.0 gig
OS: XP Pro
Service Pack Build: 2
Graphic card: Nvidia Fx5200
Vegas V6 And V5

I'm not having crashes and I do see a small margin of better overall
performance with HT enabled and a little faster rendering time.

ZION

reading between the lines - MS doesnt recommend XP for running SQL server on a HT system and the performance is marginal ..
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;322385

"This problem occurs if you install Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) on an Intel Pentium 4 computer that has more than one logical Processor. (HT)"

SYMPTOMS
A program that uses mapped file views that are larger than 500 megabytes (MB) may experience a significant performance decrease. Mapped file views are frequently used to share information between two or more processes. The performance degradation occurs in the UnmapViewOfFile function.

CAUSE
This problem occurs if a program maps file views that are larger than 500 MB in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) with HT enabled ..

RESOLUTION

Install SP2 for XP or Microsoft can supply a hotfix if running only sp1 ..

for Windows 2003, contact MS ..



NOTE: the above conditions may often occur using Vegas 6 with Media Manager

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;811366

If you remove a processor from a multiprocessor computer or turn off hyperthreading support in the BIOS, and then try to change your Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), you only have the following options: (see link)


..................................


quote: " If you run a multiprocessor HAL with only a single processor installed, the computer typically works as expected, and there is little or no affect on performance."