Bigger gains possible from eliminating running tasks. That is one of the reasons I haven't "upgraded" to XP. With W98SE I can eliminate everything running except Systray and Explorer. With XP you can't. It insists on having ten processes running many of which demand internet access. Combine that with running Virus guards, go fetchers for the internet, and "I am going to run whether you click 'no' or not" software like Quicktime and Real and you have system hogs. Eliminate all you can, even if temporarily while editing and rendering and you will get a performance increase. I have one computer for editing and one for everything else.

John

I found it intriguing that once, when rebooting with the network card disabled in device manager, that my XP installation came up with only 4 processes running instead of the usual 18 or so. I did not, however, see any noticeable gain in speed.

One thing to realize about Win98SE is that many of the same processes we see in XP's process tab were there running in Win98SE. They just weren't visible as separate processes from the kernel itself.

I also have a separate workstation for critical editing only, but for two other reasons:

1. improved security (no e-mail or web access other than driver downloads)

2. slow down the Windows rot (that has many causes)

The performance loss from background processes on a clean machine is peanuts compared to what can be gained from having a modern graphics card do the heavy lifting though.

We have already seen Magic Bullet render 17 times faster in Vegas with an nVidia card.

It's certainly likely that Spot would be consulted about a turbo boost like this, but of course he couldn't say anything about future Vegas releases.

I think it is absolutely guaranteed that FCP 6 will have it, and Premiere Pro 2.0 may also have it (we should know that early next year).

I don't see how this wouldn't in 2006 become a mandatory feature for professional NLE use at least, considering the vast time savings and use of standard, very high volume hardware that gets cheaper and faster by the month.

Like PCs used to be....

Moore's law is now officially dead.

It has been replaced by

Core's Law:

"If you can't make the CPU faster, put 2/4/8/etc. cores on one chip."

and

More's Law:

"If you can't make the CPU faster, offload more work to the graphics card."

Let's take advantage of both, nobody likes to wait anymore!

Not all background processes are created equal. It only takes one of the "wrong kind" to cause problems. The Black Viper site used to have excellent lists of which normal Windows processes can be disabled or switched to manual. Most of the tweaks only affect boot time (which should only take about 20-30 seconds from power on to read-to-use, on a well-tuned PC). All of them affect memory usage, but the savings on a 1GB memory PC are negligible. The key things that make a difference in performance are:

1. Indexing. Turn it off.

2. System restore. I still enable it because I am constantly screwing up things, but you can get a big performance gain by disabling it.

3. All anti-spyware and anti-virus programs. Norton is particularly evil and I have "fixed" many friend's and client's PCs simply by disabling some of the background functions. If you download the XP security enhancements, use a NAT router, make sure Outlook security settings are set to max, practice "safe-downloading" of programs (don't download from unknown sites), and don't open email attachments unless someone has told you to expect them, you really don't have too much to worry about.

John,

Amen to that!

Just one addendum. I have had problems with employees receiving e-mails with attachments, and because these purport to come from friends, they think the message must be safe... These are of course spoofed messages sent by malware on their or somebody else's machine.

I even get "Non Delivery" reports from other domains, for some of my mail addresses that are inbound-only.

I really should get rid of the last e-mail links on my sites, and just offer message boxes for anybody who wants to contact me (I already do that for specific inquiries).

interesting, but i'll just point out that those are "in general" performance comparisons. Some of those cards have features other don't and some require people to masivly upgrade.

it's just an upgrade chart though. Pick your card on the chart & it will tell you the average boost by switching to a different card. If you put in 3d cards from 1999 in there the chart would be the same.

You don't even need those cards to have the benefit of 3d power. Any card that supports OGL or DX can do what those can. I'm betting the non-gamers workstation 3d cards would be better for any "pro" app that uses OGL/DX but those would rank lower on those charts.

the benefits have been provin forover a decade & the standards have been there over a decade, it's just that MS mess with those standards & people/companies got confused. A decade later we have two standards that are basicly identical exept aren't compatible at all.

You don't even need those cards to have the benefit of 3d power. Any card that supports OGL or DX can do what those can. I'm betting the non-gamers workstation 3d cards would be better for any "pro" app that uses OGL/DX but those would rank lower on those charts.

I did say the THG comparison was simplistic, as there are many factors.

OpenGL is nicely standardized, as is arguably DX9 (for Windows users). I haven't seen any recent cards, either gamer or pro cards, that don't support both standards, but perhaps they exist.

It's a given that a pro $2,300 Quadro FX4500 card will have better OpenGL performance (in many areas) than a $350 or so GeForce 7800GTX card that otherwise matches it in other benchmarks.

The predictions of inadequate reliability of gamer card drivers have been disproven, and even some top 3D software vendors are not afraid to recommend gamer cards for many (but not all) professionals.

To oversimplify a bit, pro workstation cards are focused on texels (texture elements) while gamer cards are focused on pixels (picture elements).

I don't give a second thought to background processes. Windows Task Manager (XPpro) says I currently have 71 processes in the background, yet my average CPU load is 4% (and this is an old AMD 2100). In other words, it doesn't matter very much any more.

I do turn off all those sneaky "automated" tasks, though, such as antivirus updates, defragging, indexing, virus scanning etc. I do so because I want to be fully aware of what my system is doing all the time, and I also don't want some CPU-intensive task to automatically kick in at an inopportune time.