vegas 9 and amount of cores

wilvan wrote on 9/13/2009, 1:19 PM

Did a quick test , need to complete further ( first finish project ).
workstation :
dell T7500 2 x W5580 Nehalem Xeons 24Gigs RAM (1333MHz )2xquadroFX4800 , 10K drives etc... vista64 minimum processes running - fully editing only optimised .

Did enable hyperthreading in BIOS ( 16 cores total ) , quickly loaded a running veg with 8 cores ( hyperthreading disabled as the system came ) -> vegas32 bit crashes when just previewing timeline.

Didn´t have time to futher test ( need finish project first ) , is there any limits on amount of cores for vegas9 32 bit ?
What about vegas 9 64 bits ?

( since not enough plug-ins yet 64 bit compatible , am unfortunately using vegas 9 32 bit more than the vegas9 64 bit )

Comments

Mikey QACTV7 wrote on 9/13/2009, 5:57 PM

I have a dell T7400 with 2 quad cores and 64 gigs of ram at the station. It runs very well rendering on all 8 cores 100%.

I did find out sometimes if I pull media and render to the same drive it will not use all cores to render mostly with HD files.

If I rendered to a different drive than the one with the media (same project) I got all 8 cores to 100%.

There was a back up at the read and write on the drive not at the cores.

wilvan wrote on 9/14/2009, 5:10 AM

Hi mickey , thanks for your feedback .
Maybe my explanation was not well done.

W5580 is a nehalem quad core of which there is 2 -> 8 cores when hyperthreading is disabled and runs fine on both vegas9 32 as 64.

enabling hyperthreading ( in BIOS ) , there is 16 cores
vegas32bit -> crashes when just previewing
vegas64bit -> still to be checked

hazydave wrote on 9/14/2009, 9:27 AM

I think what you see there, pulling and rendering to same drive, is just a case of HDD thrashing.

I ran into this several years ago on a project with only my old AMD64x2 processor. This was an HD project, with HDV and Cineform video, along with quite a few 6Mpixel-8Mpixel stills pulled from DSLRs. I had only 2GB of DRAM.

I naievely figured, for long renders to HD output, I would be best off using my fastest drive, which was a 7200rpm SATA. What I got was a fairly unstable system, and the renders were taking forever.

On further investigation, I noticed that neither core was running at 100%... that meant than something else, not CPU, was the bottleneck... hard to believe when rendering AVC out, but true. It turned out that I had reduced my drive throughput to be dominated by seek times, not those nice linear 100MB/s runs.

Moving the output to a separate drive was a big fix. Once I got those stills onto a second drive, I was back at 100% per core. It's not that Vegas isn't trying to use all cores, but if it can't keep them fed, some will be sitting around waiting for input.

Looking at it another way, if you're rendering on an SMP machine and don't have all CPUs at 100%, you have some other bottleneck. Look for it in your I/O.