Vegas Pro 17 Barely Using Available System Resources

Joseph-Boone wrote on 5/31/2020, 2:05 AM

I just built a new PC with a goal of significantly reducing my render times. They did improve from my 6 year-old Haswell build but not by nearly as much as I had expected. Watching Windows Task Manager during a render shows that Vegas Pro is using roughly 30% of my CPU power, about 30% of my available RAM, 20% of my GPU, and uses just a small fraction of the bandwidth of the SSD drive that source files are stored on. In other words, the PC has a ton of raw power but only a small slice of it appears to be called upon by Vegas Pro. Logically, I'd expect to see a bottleneck somewhere but as far as I can tell there's no part of the system that's being hit hard. My system specs are as follows:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X

GPU: Nvidia GTX 1080 ti

RAM: 32GB DDR4 3600, Timing 16-16-16-36

The drive I read from is a 2TB NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD. The one I'm writing to is a SATA III SSD.

I have no idea why Vegas Pro is tiptoeing so gingerly through my system. The funny thing is that even in my old 6 core system which I would have expected to work really hard to run the software, the utilization wasn't that much higher and even the CPU was only at 50%. If anyone has any ideas how to find a bottleneck or otherwise goose Vegas into working harder, I'd love to hear it. Based on what I see at the moment, it seems like render times could be half or even a third of their present time and it would be great to get anywhere near that.

Comments

walter-i. wrote on 5/31/2020, 2:18 AM

There are some threads that deal with rendering and rendering times - this one too - https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/benchmarking-continued--118503/
Use the search function.
I also have a computer that I think is strong, and it don't use the resources anywhere.
One possibility that comes up - if you can open Vegas in several instances and run your renderings at the same time - I did that with my old computer in up to five instances - so you can bring your CPU to a boil.

fr0sty wrote on 5/31/2020, 2:24 AM

Not every task is going to max out every core on your CPU, even if it is maxing out your CPU's capabilities. Same goes for GPU... there's some power in the GPU that just simply isn't useful for encoding video (like stuff designed for rendering or texturing 3D graphics), or there may be a bottleneck elsewhere in the system that makes the GPU wait on something before it can calculate.

Not saying that is the case in this specific situation, just trying to illustrate how not seeing 100% utilization doesn't necessarily mean you are not getting the most out of the hardware that it can do for that particular task.

john_dennis wrote on 5/31/2020, 2:25 AM

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/i-m-going-for-a-walk--118208/

RogerS wrote on 5/31/2020, 4:17 AM

Try Voukoder- I find rendering to h.264 very fast with it. https://www.voukoder.org/

Joseph-Boone wrote on 5/31/2020, 2:07 PM

Try Voukoder- I find rendering to h.264 very fast with it. https://www.voukoder.org/

It took me a minute to figure out how to find and configure the Voukoder option, it definitely helped once I got it going. My CPU usage was 50% most of the time but ranged as high as 90%+ at times. More importantly, it cut the rendering time by a third and at the end of the day that's what I was really interested in. Thanks for the suggestion, I never would have known to even look for that on my own!

john_dennis wrote on 5/31/2020, 2:15 PM

@Joseph-Boone

" I never would have known to even look for that on my own!"

Read the forum every day for ten years. You'll catch on. Then, when Alzheimer's disease sets in you can use the search function.

Happy Otter Scripts enables the same functionality in Vegas Pro along with many, many other functions that you don't currently know you need.

https://tools4vegas.com/