i7 8 core improvement over 6 core

seanfl wrote on 12/10/2014, 2:57 PM

Building a new machine in the next two weeks. Various threads on these forums talk about the great performance of each, wondering if anyone has spent time comparing the i7 5930k ($580) and the i7 5960x ($1049). I'm trying to decide if the 8 cores would provide another 30% improvement in rendering speed. My current machine is an i7-2660k from May, 2011 with 16 gigs of ram and a couple of newer SSD's.

This video (at 11:26) shows rendering with Vegas and the two chips at stock and overclock.

If my math is right, looks like a 16-18% performance boost going from 6 to 8 on this specific example.

Any other thoughts between the 6 core and 8 core? I keep my machines for 2-3 years and use it for audio and video editing.

Thanks for guidance.
Sean
Broadcast Voice Over Talent
http://www.seancaldwell.com

Comments

dxdy wrote on 12/10/2014, 4:09 PM

I went through the same questions, and decided to go for the 5960 with an AMD R9 290 in for GPU support. I see some improvement in render speed at stock clock, but not a huge leap.

I ran a test this morning with the 5960/R9 290 with my most common workflow:

Canon MXF 50mbit/sec 4:2:2 color space input, frameserved to TMPGENC encoder with MPG2 output (for DVD). TMPGENC didn't use the GPU (they are CUDA only).

The 5960 rendered in the exact same amount of time as it did on my old 3770K with a GTX 660ti - TMPGENC uses the CUDA GPU heavily.

Both machines running at standard clock rate, with 16 GB RAM, 3 hard disks (OS, input, output), both running Win 7 Pro x64.

Just another point of information on an already murky area.

A lot of it will depend on what your input and output formats are, what plugins you use, and most obliquely, what GPU you put with it.

Tech Diver wrote on 12/10/2014, 5:14 PM

As was said, you will probably see some improvement with Vegas. However some of your plugins may take better advantage of the hardware as might other applications that you might have. For example, After Effects heavily uses every core it can find, so it would definitely run proportionally faster with the eight cores.

Peter

NickHope wrote on 12/10/2014, 11:44 PM

dxdy, when your machine has been overclocked and settled down it would be great if you (or anyone else with an 5960x and R9 290 or 290X) could run the 4K SCS Benchmark with GPU enabled. I'm very keen to see how much better those GPUs are for timeline preview than my HD 6970. Also to see if your results match Jeff Bauer's on that thread.

dxdy wrote on 12/11/2014, 11:32 AM

Nick, I'll be happy to do so. The pre-holiday season is wildly busy, but as soon as I can I will report.

Fred

seanfl wrote on 12/11/2014, 2:36 PM

Can anyone give me a general idea of how much rendering with assistance from a newer graphics card (the R9 is mentioned a lot in these forums) will benefit most projects? Is it a 20% improvement? 60%? My current system does not have a graphics card, only onboard graphics (i7-2600k)

Then there was this thread that discussed using nIntel quick sync with Vegas.
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/Forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=855372

Workflow would be HD video from a Canon SLR outputing to HD for youtube or other online distribution.

Thanks.
Sean
Broadcast Voice Over Talent
http://www.seancaldwell.com

Pete Siamidis wrote on 12/12/2014, 12:50 PM

"Can anyone give me a general idea of how much rendering with assistance from a newer graphics card (the R9 is mentioned a lot in these forums) will benefit most projects? Is it a 20% improvement? 60%? My current system does not have a graphics card, only onboard graphics (i7-2600k)"

On my pc it's about a 4x speed improvement using an NVidia 970 and a stock i7-4770k. The encoding part is still all cpu but it still uses the gpu when it's composing the clip. My source is 60mbps 4k video from a Sony AX100 with Filmconvert added which is very processor intensive, so for example a typical video shoot for me takes about 15 hours to encode wtih gpu enabled and about 60 hours without gpu assist. Your mileage may vary as they say, but to me gpu assist is basically critical.

OldSmoke wrote on 12/12/2014, 1:30 PM

It depends on the render codec you want to use. OpenCL in MC AVC and Sony AVC is broken for the R9 200 series; the last workable series was up to 7xxx or even only 6xxx. The R9 290 is fast with anything else that uses OpenCL, especially preview. Have you tried frame serving to Handbrake for YT?