Quad Core rendering on one core ! HELP

xberk wrote on 12/10/2007, 8:02 PM

Just built another Quad Core system. This one we preserved the old boot drive and the XP system on it. How I did that is another story -- but testing out Vegas 7.0e, I expected that using John Cline's rendertest-hdv.veg I'd see times just above 2 minutes -- but I am not. More like 8-9 minutes. I checked Preferences/Video and I am set for 4 rendering threads. But I can see that the CPU usage during the test is about 25-30 % -- Never more. SO I assume I'm basically running on a single core.
Where's the other three?

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 12/10/2007, 9:08 PM

In Task Manager on the "Performance" tab, is it showing activity on just one core or is it showing activity on all four cores but just not that much. (In Task Mamger under "View" > "CPU History", make sure you have it set to show one graph per CPU.)

I'm guessing that you just blew up the hardware enumeration keys in the XP registry, booted it up and had Windows XP rebuild itself with the new hardware. I seem to remember that at installation time, Windows will load different code to support multiple processors and that just having Windows look for new hardware using the techique I described above isn't enough. You may need to do a fresh install or a repair install. Just run setup from the WinXP disc and do another install. It shouldn't mess with any installed programs, although you'll probably have to download a bunch of updates again.

John

xberk wrote on 12/10/2007, 10:07 PM

John - I really appreciate the response. At first, I was really lost on this one and I realized I didn't give anyone else that much to go on regards the system spec.
You are a prince for responding at all -- I too thought it was the fact that I had installed the XP-loaded-drive into a brand new Quad Core system. Since I didn't want to think about doing a Windows repair and/or reinstall -- I looked in the bios to see what might be up. I recalled messing around with something called the "MB Intelligent Tweaker (MIT)" -- but I was very sure I had not actually changed any setting. I noticed one setting marked "Turbo" that could be raised to "Extreme" for "best" system performance. Well -- I thought -- hey -- then I read the Motherboard book and it seemed benign to try it. I did. System would not boot. Dead. I cleared the CMOS. Reset the bios to Optimized Defaults. Re-booted to Windows a couple of times and tried the render test again. WHAM ! .. Ran it in 2 min 11 sec.
All four cores pumping. Running at 100%. --- Regards how I got the XP-Loaded-Drive to install -- not really too difficult. I'll start another thread on that subject soon if this system stays stable.

Andrew B wrote on 12/21/2007, 3:42 PM

I also have a quad-core system that seemed a bit slow. I did a test render and saw that only one processor was really working, the other three were almost idle with total usage around 25%.
Just for grins, I tried rendering a different part of my project and ALL FOUR PROCESSORS started working.
Right now I am rendering my project and have 4 processors working at about 90-97%% total usage. When the rendering process get to the portion of my video that has the 'Movie Looks HD' plug in applied, three processors drop off and all the work is being done by one processor.
How strange is that? I am using Vegas 8.0a with the latest BIOS.
I will do more testing, but found this pretty strange...

System: Intel quad-core processor 2.6Mhz (bumped up to 3.2Mhz), Intel 975XBX2 mother board, 4GB Memory (4-4-12), Ge-Force 8800GTX 768MB graphics card, Anantec 900 case, 1Kw power supply, blah, blah, blah...

Andrew B wrote on 12/21/2007, 3:56 PM

Quick Update:
When dealing with the "Movie Looks HD" area, all four processors are still working, most of the work is being done by processors 1-3, with processor 0's usage very low. The total CPU usage varies from 30%-39% during this part of my project.
After this portion however, the CPU usage bumps back up to 80%+ across all 4 processors.
So the complex plug-in caused the CPUs to reduce their usage.
Memory usage and temperatures remained constant throughout this test...so the processors were not holding back to reduce heat.

ro_max wrote on 12/22/2007, 12:20 AM

AFAIK not all (third-party) plug-ins or effects are optimized for multiple-core CPUs and it is quite normal to see a significant drop in CPU usage in these cases.

megabit wrote on 12/22/2007, 12:44 AM

Are you in 32bit video mode? If so, try to switch to 8bit and check your CPU usage rendering the same stuff; my XP installation won't use 100% of my Quad under XP when in 32bit mode, either (it does in 8bit, and ALWAYS under Vista x64 - which makes me think it's a matter of the 32bit Vegas mode not yet having been optimized as far as memory management is concerned).