Vegas Not Utilizing Dual CPUs

Jordan T. wrote on 6/12/2005, 6:35 AM
Greetings! I just purchased a new system that has Dual 2.8Ghz Xeon CPUs (hyperthreaded), 2 GB of RAM, and an ATI FireGL V3100 video card. I had been using Vegas on a 2.0Ghz laptop with 1GB of RAM, and I was expecting a huge jump in performance. At this point, Vegas uses only and average on 33% CPU usage total, during both real-time preview and rendering. I've got the dynamic RAM preview set to 1GB of RAM and the rendering threads set to 4, but I'm still not seeing a difference between my new dual-CPU system and my old laptop.

Can anyone tell me what I need to do to get Vegas to utilize the full CPU bandwidth on my dual-CPU system?

Thanks in advance,
Jordan T.

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 6/12/2005, 6:49 AM
My suggestion is pretty stupid but check the options and make sure the dual cpu usage is properly checked.

JJK
B_JM wrote on 6/12/2005, 7:04 AM
dual xeon systems should not be set for HT ... worse performace ussually ..

the 2.8 ghz xeons prob. have only 400mhz FSB , not the 800mhz ... plus I never really need to set the ram levels that high for preview - even on 2k previews ..

many other factors also ...
Tom Pauncz wrote on 6/12/2005, 7:07 AM
Are you using Vegas 6? My understanding is that prior releases of Vegas did not make full use of dual processors.
Tom
farss wrote on 6/12/2005, 7:35 AM
Well it rather depends on what you're doing with it, certainly encoding my dual Xeon systems runs way, way faster than my old system. I don't do much in the way of complex renders so I can't really comment but rendering hires stills and encoding to mpeg-2 is also much faster, the old system just chocked on this. I am using the 3 GHz CPUs, 800 MHz FSB and SuperMicro mobo, I read a few reviews of the Tynan ones and they seemed to be a lot slower the SuperMicro.
Ah and I have a Highpoint RAID controller, that also seems to help.
Bob.
mark-woollard wrote on 6/12/2005, 2:28 PM
I too have dual 2.8 Xeons, but only 1Gig of RAM. I have not run Vegas on any other system so have no personal comparator. However, I'm disappointed with the performance of HD Link. Capturing a 3-minute m2t clip with auto conversion to CineForm Intermediate (Medium) takes about 50% longer than the clip itself. Hardly "near real time".

Maybe my system is not set up for optimum performance. Any suggestions would be most appreciated.
David Newman wrote on 6/12/2005, 8:29 PM
Pathlight,

The new version of Connect HD (v1.7) now includes a threaded encoder (previously only available in Aspect HD) which will make better use of your dual CPU system. However the older dual Xeon system only offer us a moderate acceleration due the the limited memory bandwidth (for the 533FSB systems.) On a dual Opteron system the conversion is real-time.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm
Jordan T. wrote on 6/12/2005, 10:08 PM
Yes, I'm using Vegas 6. I switched of HyperThreading and it did results in a speed increase, however, it still only uses about 60% of the processor bandwidth. Somone mentioned there was a multi-processor setting that needed to be either enabled or disabled. Can someone clarify? Thanks!!! - Jordan T.
mark-woollard wrote on 6/13/2005, 2:03 AM
Thanks for the clarification, David.

Do you think upgrading my 2.8 Xeons to 3.2 would get me much closer to real time conversion?