System performance after Graphics card upgrade

marcel-vossen wrote on 4/16/2016, 4:22 AM

Hi there,

I have just replaced my Geforce GTX 550 Ti with an MSI AMD R9 380 graphic card to improve my preview and rendering speeds.

I don't notice a lot of difference in the previewing though, if I click on different parts of my timelineit takes a while for the system to pick up, sometimes the preview freezes etc.

I do have some NewBlue color effects on the footage and 4 videotracks with 1080p video, pictures and text layers and 4 audio tracks.

My system is an i7 2600 with 16Gb of RAM and my footage (1080p MP4) is on large 4Tb normal harddrives.

Could it be that the harddrives are the bottleneck in this system, and that it might be a good idea to buffer the stuff I'm working on on one of my faster SSD drives?

Does a slow drive also influence the rendering speed?

Or maybe I have to install or configure other things apart from installing the latest drivers from the AMD site?
Maybe something important in my system BIOS that I don't even know about?

Thanks for the input!

PS: My CPU usage during rendering is only 30-35% and the memory usage for Vegas 12 is also just 2Gb

Comments

Stringer wrote on 4/16/2016, 10:52 AM

Did you turn off GPU support in Vegas, restart Vegas, then turn GPU support back on?

OldSmoke wrote on 4/16/2016, 11:34 AM

Is your motherboard supporting PCIe 3.0 and is the card running at that speed?

marcel-vossen wrote on 4/16/2016, 11:38 AM

Hi Oldsmoke,

My board should be able to do PCIe 3.0, but how do I test if it's running in that mode?

marcel-vossen wrote on 4/16/2016, 11:40 AM

Hi Stringer,

My GPU was turned off in Vegas because my Geforce card would not handle it well (buggy) so i turned it on now. The only thing I can choose though is 'Advanced Micro devices (Inc. Tonga)' it says nothing about AMD or R9 380?

What should Dynamic RAM preview be set at BTW?

And number of threads ?

john_dennis wrote on 4/16/2016, 12:03 PM

"[I]The only thing I can choose though is 'Advanced Micro devices (Inc. Tonga)' it says nothing about AMD or R9 380?[/I]"

Tonga is the name of the chipset for the R9 380 GPU. Select it.

marcel-vossen wrote on 4/17/2016, 2:10 AM

Okay, so I set it to GPU mode, it makes the previewing a bit faster, but with some shots from my Gopro (MP4 at 2k) it still has trouble even playing the timeline in Draft quality.... Just feels like I'm missing something?

My mainboard should be able to do PCIe 3.0, but how do I test if it's running in that mode?

And should I change the other settings in vegas too?

During rendering my CPU is only stressed for 30-35%, it sure looks like Vegas is not using the power my system has...

Marcel

Wolfgang S. wrote on 4/17/2016, 7:05 AM

The performance during preview will be seen with effects or transitions mainly. Do not expect a huge improvement for your footage in the timeline without such effects.

For rendering the actual world seems even stranger. Here the GPU will help in some parts, but I think it was never an major improvemtent that we have seen from GPU supported rendering in Vegas.

The main aspect to improve the timeline playback performance in Veags is still the CPU. But even here we see some clear limitations today - high GHz are still important.

So I understand your frustration - but be aware that Vegas has not been updated in these major aspects since long time now.

marcel-vossen wrote on 4/18/2016, 9:47 AM

Hi Wolfgang,

How can CPU be the bottleneck if it's only 30-35% stressed during rendering then?

I did a little test in my timeline with a piece of footage that I can preview very well, 1080p material and my CPU will be used 25% during playback. HOWEVER if I try to playback a piece of 2k footage from my Gopro, the performance is terrible, it only previews with 2 frames per second and my CPU is only used for 12%.....I'm confused now!

If I throw in a CPU that is 3 times better, I guess it will still only be used for 30-35%?

Marcel

OldSmoke wrote on 4/18/2016, 10:06 AM

Which version of Vegas are you running? There have been performance issues specifically related to GoPro footage in Vegas Pro.
Also the i7-2600 does not support PCIe 3.0, only 2.0. It has 16 PCIe which means you cant use any additional add on card other then your graphics card or the system will slow down from PCIe x16 to x8 or even lower.

marcel-vossen wrote on 4/18/2016, 10:17 AM

@Oldsmoke

I'm still running Vegas 12 , got into a VAT fight with Sony and lost the opportunity for buying Vegas 13 at the sales ... :(

Aha, my system is several years old now, and it also has a Revodrive in one of the other PCIe slots...

Is there a way to test this? Can I check how fast the card is actually performing?

And if I buy a new modern Mainboard with an Intel Core™ i7-4790, Prozessor for example, will this combination be much faster?

The board I own is an MSI Z68A-GD65

OldSmoke wrote on 4/18/2016, 12:30 PM

You have listed VP11 in your system specs, do you still have it? Is it the 32 or 64 bit Version? VP12 is exactly the version which has major issues with GoPro footage. There is a fix for it, I actually came up with it. The trick is to use the mc_dec_avc.dll from VP11 and use it in VP12. You can download it here https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39278380/mc_dec_avc.dll and replace the one in your VP12 with it.

All desktop processors will have the same issue, 16 PCIe lanes only. You have to jump to a socket 2011 or 2011-v3 wit an extreme processor. The 5820K has 28 lanes but should be sufficient for you. The card takes 16 and you will have 12 remaining ones. the 5930K and up has 40 lanes and can handle 2x PCIe x16.

You can use tools like GPU-Z to check your link speed, it should be 8.0Gbps for PCIe 3.0.

marcel-vossen wrote on 4/18/2016, 1:10 PM

@Oldsmoke Thanks! I'll get to work with that!

Update:
The trick with the dll sure works, my preview speed for the Gopro footage has improved significantly! Thank you!

Makes me wonder though.... if the older version of the DLL is better, why on earth did they replace it in vegas 12, is that a joke from Sony to annoy us? :)

Marcel

marcel-vossen wrote on 4/19/2016, 3:07 AM

@Oldsmoke

"You have to jump to a socket 2011 or 2011-v3 wit an extreme processor. The 5820K has 28 lanes but should be sufficient for you. The card takes 16 and you will have 12 remaining ones. the 5930K and up has 40 lanes and can handle 2x PCIe x16."

Does it have to be Intel all the way for this? Years ago I also built PC's based on AMD CPUs, they were cheaper and sometimes even better at the time....
They still seem to be much cheaper, is this an option? Or is that asking for trouble at this point in time?

Marcel

OldSmoke wrote on 4/19/2016, 6:18 AM

The last AMD based system I build is 30 years ago. I still see them as cheap which usually comes at a cost. The general rule was, that you needed twice as many cores on an AMD to be equal to an Intel CPU; maybe that has changed. So for me personally I wouldn't do it.