Lower CPU usage during render with Win 10 upgrade

dka56 wrote on 2/13/2016, 12:38 PM
So I've been establishing a baseline with my current setup to compare with a RAM upgrade. Today I ran 2 renders of a 90 sec clip and using AVC mp4 my CPU usage was 38-40%, with MPEG-2 it started out with 100% then trickled down and hovered at around 78-80%.

Before the CPU would ramp up to 98-100% and pretty much stay there, needless to say now the render times are quite slower...any thoughts?

avc was AVCHD 1920x1080 60i
mpeg-2 was default 1920x1080 24mps

Something else I noticed, every so often if I open a video it will display one frame with multi-color lines through the image and not play. Started with the upgrade and maybe this is useful info.

Edited to add, I did a few more renders, wmv, mpeg2, mp4...the render times are almost double what they were.

Are there any compatibility issues with Vegas 10 and Windows 10?

Comments

dka56 wrote on 2/14/2016, 9:15 AM
This is what I have discovered so far:

With the start of this Win 10 upgrade, my first render was slow, the 100 or more enders before that were fast with Win 7 so it's likely something with the new or updated OS.

What I finally noticed during rendering was my CPU temps climbed quite high, to 98-99 deg C. I used my MB utilities along with the task manager and right when the temps hit above 95 deg, the CPU percentage dropped enough to keep temps in check.

I'm using the stock cooler and I have just ordered a new cooler and this should take care of that. However I'm curious as to how or why the OS may be commanding the CPU differently or maybe it's something else..just seems very coincidental.


Everything is clean,all heatsinks are free of dust.... maybe the updated OS is more sensitive to temps and has a tighter control on things....which is fine by me. I never experienced any slow down before so there's a chance with Win 7 that my temps did get high and I didn't notice and nothing was done to control the temps.

I didn't try to OC my CPU but I believe I may have had the turbo feature enabled to a 4.5 max but not sure with Win 7.

After a bios update which is recommended by ASRock for using Win 10, my temps have stabilized and the CPU usage has stayed between 98-100% but the render times are still a little slow compared to Win 7..but not as bad as when I first started using Win 10 so hopefully I'm on the right track.

I'm hoping with temps below 90 deg things will work better so I will update after the new cooler is installed. Could be a thermal paste issue...dunno, but it's just to ironic it happened after the update.
dka56 wrote on 2/14/2016, 5:29 PM
I tried Win 7 compatibility with no change....any thoughts on this?

an mp4 render only uses 40% of my CPU now, a 3 min video renders in 7 min...used to be maybe 3 or slightly less.

This started only after my Win 10 upgrade, no other changes.
astar wrote on 2/15/2016, 4:03 AM
Is GPU assist on or off in preferences? I would think off with an NV670, the GFLOPs are decent when compared to a lower end AMD card. But if the driver is bad with regards to OpenCL, you will not get benefits.

Did you update your system drivers from NV, audio card manufacturer to Win10 drivers post upgrade?

dka56 wrote on 2/15/2016, 10:13 AM
I need to update my profile, my mistake. My current card is now a GTX 980 SC. I don't see a tab to allow GPU assist in Vegas 10, if so I have missed that.

I did update pretty much all my drivers but not my Nvidia driver....thanks for that tip.
dka56 wrote on 2/15/2016, 12:25 PM
I updated my Nvidia driver and no change, actually it may be slightly slower.

1:30 AVCHD video clip to MP4 render to AVCHD 1920x1080 60i, no FX, just straight from the camera to a render I'm averaging 8 to maybe 10 fps render speed.

CPU usage was 38% and drops right out of the gate. I'm saving to a WD Caviar Black 1TB drive, same speed to my C drive which is SSD.

I thought MP4 was the faster render, perhaps my rendering settings?
dxdy wrote on 2/15/2016, 1:37 PM
Do you have lots of room available on your disk drives? There are scratch files that get created during rendering.

dka56 wrote on 2/15/2016, 3:39 PM
I do, at least 300GB. I did find the Check GPU tab but it was only under the Custom, System tab with Sony AVC/MP4 selected, however it reads......No GPU Avail.

astar wrote on 2/15/2016, 4:11 PM
GPU assist that I am referring to is in Vegas > options > preferences > Video tab > GPU acceleration. This should be set to indicate the GPU installed (if multiples) that you want to use for computation assist (OpenCL). Again NV support of OpenCL is less than steller, even if the card has high GFLOPS, its the driver support of OpenCL that determines the benefits in Vegas.


Another benchmark tool is Luxmark v2. If Luxmark will render a scene with CPU + GPU enabled, then you know OpenCL is functioning correctly and should be used for Vegas operations as well.


Is your GPU installed the correct slot for your motherboard, and is it running at true PCIe3x16 speed?

GPU-z does a good job of showing GPU interface speed/actual operation speed, GPU utilization and heat while running renders.


winsat mem from an Admin Command line will show your memory bandwidth. You can do a before and after when upgrading memory.

Memtest86+ will show any errors with the memory installed and there should be no errors through at least one pass of 10 tests. You should always run memtest86 after any changes to memory speed, or installation changes.

Speccy can help to show memory profiles supported, as well as things like Hard drive interface speed capabilities and actual speed the interface is running at. Speccy is also does a good job of showing heat issues on the system over all.

dka56 wrote on 2/15/2016, 6:07 PM
Yes, the 980 is running on a PCI-E3x16. I do not have the GPU acceleration under my Video tab under preferences. Perhaps this wasn't part of Vegas Pro 10.

Is Vegas Pro 10 fully compatible with Win 10?
astar wrote on 2/15/2016, 10:39 PM
Nope. Vegas 11 that became a thing under preferences. I missed that you were on VP 10. Since Windows 10 is years past your version of Vegas, try the trial of VP13-B453 and see if your render times are better. You can have both versions installed.
dka56 wrote on 2/16/2016, 6:13 AM
I will try the VP13 trial..I missed on the earlier upgrades.
dka56 wrote on 2/16/2016, 8:48 AM
So I gave V13 a try..... :)

CPU rendering is slightly faster than with GPU assist, at least with the settings I used.

The following results were from a 1 min 31 sec clip.

i7 4790k stock, no OC, no turbo, no gpu assist

Sony MP4, best quality, AVCHD 1920x1080 60i 1 pass was 2 min 5 sec, was over 4 min.

Sony MP4, best quality, AVCHD 1920x1080 60i 2 pass was 2 min 14 sec.

MPEG-2, best qual, HDV 1440x1080 60i 1 pass was 57 sec, didn't note previous time but it wasn't near this fast...but generally just over 2 min.

Both are similar with WMV at the highest setting but I'm not as concerned as much with that format.

At least we know what the issue is..., thanks for the help.
dka56 wrote on 2/16/2016, 9:39 AM
I wanted to add my MP4 render still didn't get near 95 to 100% CPU usage but was up around 60% instead of 35 to 40 but still rendered twice as fast.
dxdy wrote on 2/16/2016, 10:08 AM
Each component of your system (CPU, memory, disks, GPU, etc.) is designed to run as fast as it can, but components often have to wait for another component to finish a task.

If your CPU utilization is not 100%, then the CPU is waiting for disk/memory/GPU to finish something it was asked to do.

It could be that Win 7 was better at reading/writing to disks on your machine than Win 10 is. In that case, if disk was the bottleneck, then CPU would indeed be see higher utilization under Win 7.

In wandering about the web, I also see posts saying that Win 10 installed as a fresh install runs faster than Win 10 upgrade over the top of a Win 7 install.
dka56 wrote on 2/16/2016, 3:35 PM
Could be that it's writing to a platter drive, may be the bottleneck but for web videos It's rendering faster than real time speed so that's a big plus....overall it's much faster. I did write to my SSD C drive and the speed was the same so I'm curious as to the bottleneck with MP4 render if that's what it's doing.

Once I get the turbo mode enabled and a slight OC I will compare notes again.

My web page browsing is much faster with Win 10 upgrade than Win 7.
dka56 wrote on 2/19/2016, 12:11 AM
Just curious, how long is the trial version of V pro 13 good for? I opened it today and I have a vertical portion of the right edge of the screen running down the screen....about 2 or 3 inches from the right edge.

It's basically the right edge of the screen, with the minimize and the "X" doubled on to the main screen, and extending down.