Did you reboot the machine before each render?

@john_dennis No not needed, it does not make a difference, sometimes I do reboot, most of the time I close Vegas, check if no process is hanging, and start Vegas again. It seems that Vegas 20 (and 19) is quite good at cleaning up their process footprint, this was not always so in older versions.

I have installed a trial version of "Process Lasso" to experiment, but their affinity setting behaves just the same as my own attempts, affinity is also ignored.

Considering how expensive this processor is, the results are worrying. This raises more questions.....

1. Are the results the same in win10?

2. What are the results with processors that have more P cores than 8? For example the old 10 core intel and 16 core AMD? Theoretically, their performance should be higher, because then it seems that E cores are unnecessary for rendering.

3. Is it possible to give the same test of playing the timeline benchmark from Vegas? And change in the Gpu I/O tab and turn E cores off and on?

I did a quick retest with dynamic RAM preview max = 6531MB (=10%) instead of zero as before

This shaved off a few seconds. I also disabled my mem XMP profile, this is not worth it for the 1s gain I had.

test set: "classic" 4K Sample Project to 1080p (25P) -

60s NVENC: 8 P cores (16 Threads) + 8 E-cores (8 Threads)

61s NVENC: 8 P cores (16 Threads) + 8 E-cores (8 Threads) Vegas Affinity set to P cores

38s NVENC: 8 P cores (16 Threads) + 8 E-cores parked by Gigabyte DRM fix tool

59s QSV: 8 P cores (16 Threads) + 8 E-cores (8 Threads)

58s QSV: 8 P cores (16 Threads) + 8 E-cores (8 Threads) Vegas Affinity set to P cores

37s QSV: 8 P cores (16 Threads) + 8 E-cores parked by Gigabyte DRM fix tool

59s MC: 8 P cores (16 Threads) + 8 E-cores (8 Threads)

63s MC: 8 P cores (16 Threads) + 8 E-cores (8 Threads) Vegas Affinity set to P cores

44s MC: 8 P cores (16 Threads) + 8 E-cores parked by Gigabyte DRM fix tool

@pierre-k Only troubling if you have a processor whose cores all have the same clock rate independent of their thermals and you cannot implement a work-around. Closest I can come with the 11900k is to assign lower per-core assignment priority to interior cores and go with liquid cooling. Which works fine till I run out of cores and they all get saturated. Running interior cores at a lower clock looks pretty good. Core Temps look just like the utilization charts... if better manual tuning was possible, bumping up the e-cores a little more might further improvement but it looks pretty darn good as it is.

Btw, getting ready to post my results to the Sample Project and noticed my fresh install of Vegas set my DRP to 0. Setting it to my usual 5% of 32gb ram got me slightly better numbers:

Sample Project 24/48 FHD (1080p 25p) render: Nvenc: 0:49; Qsv: 0:48; MC: 0:52

I find the narrow spread between MainConcept and hardware render curious. I have Vegas set to use the Nvidia as gpu and the Intel Xe for decoding. Task Manager shows that the MainConcept render is heavily assisted by the Nvidia 3060 doing substantial vram buffering. Seems different. Will have to look into that.

Considering how expensive this processor is, the results are worrying. This raises more questions.....

1. Are the results the same in win10?

2. What are the results with processors that have more P cores than 8? For example the old 10 core intel and 16 core AMD? Theoretically, their performance should be higher, because then it seems that E cores are unnecessary for rendering.

3. Is it possible to give the same test of playing the timeline benchmark from Vegas? And change in the Gpu I/O tab and turn E cores off and on?

@pierre-k

1. I cannot test in windows 10, anyway, the schedular should be better tuned in windows 11 according to MS for the hybrid processors. No improvements will come to 10 I assume. I already found some registry settings in Windows 11 for tuning multimedia, game, sound etc. scheduling. Not sure if Vegas falls in a category or is recognized.

2. The old processor core types are not as powerful as the P-core golden cove architecture, P-cores have several improvements and a different architecture, is a 10 nm x86 core die, higher top speed, more cash etc...

The Idea of having hybrid processor is not that crazy, both in function and marketing:

function: it makes sense to move background threads to "background cores" (aka efficient E-core), and Apple also uses hybrid processors (if I am not mistaken).

marketing: E cores are small in size and you can squeeze a lot in which makes for the uninformed buyer more cores = better, regardless of real performance per core, something AMD likes to play out vs Intel

3. I had like 17.5 frames

 

 

Sample Project 24/48 FHD (1080p 25p) render: Nvenc: 0:49; Qsv: 0:48; MC: 0:52

I find the narrow spread between MainConcept and hardware render curious.

@Howard-Vigorita Constrained by GPU. You have enough available CPU to make GPU encoding unnecessary at 1080P. Only the last 7 seconds of the project, a transcode, will greatly benefit GPU encoding over CPU encoding. In Resolve as an example, almost all projects I CPU encode, because the bottleneck is always GPU processing. Why use an inferior encoder for no benefit. This won't be true for transcoding.

Techno-philosophical question of the day.

If one is parking e-cores to improve Vegas Pro performance, why not just buy an i7-12700K?

Techno-philosophical question of the day.

If one is parking e-cores to improve Vegas Pro performance, why not just buy an i7-12700K?

@john_dennis Indeed, but Vegas Pro is not the only NLE I use, I also use my PC for photo applications, sound fix and gaming. And talking about Vegas pro, parking my e-cores is a sure way (=guaranteed and reproducible) to almost render 2x faster. And strangely enough sometimes without disabling the e-cores I get the same fast rendering; this happens mostly whenever I run something in the background - such as windows own task manager to monitor CPU core usage (as mentioned before in this post) ...

I could be wrong, but I think the Vegas team should be working together with Intel and Microsoft to get to the bottom of this, it may be "just" a matter of cloaking the render process as something requiring the P (performance) cores rather than shoving some threads to the E-cores at random. It is not like that the P-cores are starved from Vegas, otherwise when running extra programs would slow down the rendering, but it does not, on the contrary, strangely enough it speeds up the rendering.

By the way, last week I submitted an official ticket on this matter at Magix support:

Ticket#2022092117004289

Here some arguments (apart from Vegas Pro!) on i9-12900K vs i7-12700K

13.13% faster CPU speed?
8 x 3.2GHz & 8 x 2.4GHzvs8 x 3.6GHz & 4 x 2.7GHz

4 more CPU threads?
24vs20

2MB bigger L2 cache?
14MBvs12MB

19.94% higher PassMark result?
41317vs34449

5MB bigger L3 cache?
30MBvs25MB

22.5% higher multi-core Geekbench 5 result?
17279vs14105

20.13% higher Cinebench R20 (multi) result?
10511vs8750

I am curious what CPU Multi Core points can you get on Cinebench R23 on your 12900K at stock speed? I just did a rendering 20 pass to complete the test on my 12700K @5.2 all P core, 5.3 @ 6 core and turbo boost 3 cores @5.4. The rendering get me 24,525 points. CPU draw maximum power of 270 watts.

It has been a month since I submitted Ticket#2022092117004289 on the issue, I had zero response from magix/vegas customer support. As Vegas claims that their development priority will focus more on stability and performance, I am baffled by their silence on a clear performance issue with the latest Intel hardware (E-core P-core hybrid CPU's).

Still no response on Ticket#2022092117004289 apart from a customer satisfaction survey on the same ticket. Yes I am very happy with the way that ticket is handled, may I suggest one thing Magix: handle it, respond to it, or at least have the guts to say the issue cannot be solved, it is like it is. It is 2023 now, almost 4 months later...

Unless a software engineer (programmer) hears of this, I doubt a frontline support person will realize the issue as an important one, unfortunately.

I am just getting back into this and building a 13900K system in the coming weeks and will definitely be trying the 'open task manager' thing on the first few renders for sure. Might go with the gigabyte thing in the end, but if task bar does it, thats cool.

I never used the gigabyte drm tool, but from what I hear it was designed to help older games (code) ignore those e-cores. And maybe that is the problem, many companies owned this software, times are tough, maybe they just have to go in and overhaul something still....or a few simple tweaks might help.

Maybe other things than task manager could make it work too. Seems what the quirk in the code is, its 'mostly' working right but missing something.

For someone to go to these lengths, repeat the issue over and over, and prove its fixable and drastically...I mean DRASTICALLY reduce render times is amazing. For them to not acknowledge it in any way is depressing and sad.

Is there anyway we can help by trying to alert a staff programmer? I for one love my render times can almost be cut in half with some 'tweak' like that...ridiculous to ignore it.

Still early days, but I am running a Vegas 19 and Vegas 20 (365) benchmark and my new Alder Lake Intel PC (i9-12900K with RTX 3090) is rendering slightly slower than my old i9900k with RTX2080 TI, which is weird as my new PC runs almost 50% faster in 3DMark.

So, I started investigating, and now I am able to render Vegas 20 almost 2x faster with my new PC IF the task manager is running concurrently with Vegas during the rendering (eg. showing all the cores ...)

Is this some Vegas-Windows 11 core affinity or scheduling issue P-core E-core? It can be reproduced, and it seems independent of the use of the graphics card or not (Intel rendering or NVENC).

Can someone else confirm this with an Alder Lake Intel processor and Windows 11?

Updated 15/9/2022, read further, solution is to limit Vegas to P-cores...

found this article online, and seems to be an interesting and bad bug/not working as intended thing from intel. I don't know about the raptor lake, but will find out in a few weeks I am sure.

https://www.xmg.gg/en/news-tips-and-tricks-rendering-e-cores/

As a i5-13600K owner I have seen no speed difference with E-cores enabled when Vegas is not in focus with Windows 11. The computer is set to high performance power mode though. I've been watching it closely with Intel Extreme Tuning, MSI Afterburner and HWInfo as I've also been testing overclocking of both CPU and GPU with an eye to improve Vegas performance while still managing heat as it's an air cooled system. (ended up with modest voltage and clock boosts of the P-cores).

FlaBob, feel free to play with this benchmark, too the times I'm seeing are I think reasonable for this CPU and a NVIDIA 2080 GPU (:35s for QSV to 1080p are in line with the good E core disabled time in the test by Bitman above):
https://forms.gle/PCD4TT1ynEXKwpD17