Very slow rendering with NVMe SSD

Douglass-Ray wrote on 8/16/2023, 2:12 PM

I’ve just bought a WD Black SN850X to speed up my rendering in Vegas Pro 19.  I’m using is as an external drive.  I’ve done the following tests using both the PC’s Thunderbolt port and USB-C port, with the same results.

Today’s UserBenchmark on-line statistics show their current average real-world test results:

Sequential:  Read 3,795 MB/s;  Write 3,894 MB/s;  Mixed 2,988

My own UserBenchMark test of the new NVMe SSD show the following averages:

Sequential:  Read 714 MB/s;  Write 644 MB/s;  626 MB/s

(The Random read/write numbers are about the same for both today’s on-line averages and my NVMe SSD’s results;  e.g., 67 MB/s vs 43 MB/s write.)

I checked that there’s no excessive CPU load, and the SSD is not overheating.  I’ve rebooted and run the same test several times with the same results.

My actual real-world results: 

When rendering, I’ve always used a hard drive as my media source, and have written to a regular SSD.  As the new NVMe is supposed to read/write at the same time, first I tried using it as both the source media and as the render destination.   The speed was only slightly faster than my old HD to SSD method.  I then tried reading from another SSD and writing to the NVMe.  The speed was identical to the NVMe to NVMe.  I also tried the reverse, with the same results.  I even tried using a standard SSD (Samsung 850 EVO 500GB) to read and write simultaneously – again the same low speed as the NVMe to itself.

Am I missing something?  Any advice would be most welcome!

Vegas Pro 19

Windows 10 Pro

CPU:  Intel i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20 GHz

Liquid CPU Cooler

RAM:  32 GB

Motherboard:   MAXIMUS IX HERO;  BaseBoard Version: Rev 1.xx

Graphics:  NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB

Sound:  VA2246 Series-0 (NVIDIA High Definition audio)

Comments

john_dennis wrote on 8/16/2023, 3:46 PM

@Douglass-Ray said: “Am I missing something?”

Apparently, you missed the significance of disk i/o throughput in the render process compared to all the other factors like source decoding, fX application and encoding.

fr0sty wrote on 8/16/2023, 3:52 PM

Renders are usually bottlenecked more by CPU, memory, and GPU long before they are by hard drive throughput. Some formats just take a long time to render even on more powerful systems, especially when rendering in 32 bit project mode (which most people do not need to). 8 bit is always faster and, unless using 10+ bit media, it isn't advisable to use 32 bit mode.

RogerS wrote on 8/16/2023, 9:56 PM

You are welcome to try the benchmarks in my signature. Your old CPU and GPU (I have similar ones) will send frames to be written so slowly even the slowest HDDs will have no problem keeping up with it.

If you want to see what the NVMe drives can do, copy the finished video over after the render completes.

Douglass-Ray wrote on 8/17/2023, 3:01 PM

Thank your for your quick responses. Forgive my ignorance, but is there anything that can be done to increase rendering speed, such as upgrading my CPU+GPO+motherboard? (My system is extremely fast in all the processes I need -- except rendering, which I'd like, but don't really need.) I understand there are many bottlenecks. Are they insurmountable for all systems? I'm too much of an amateur to implement complex processes; but, in theory, can rendering bottlenecks ever addressed with software, hardware, or settings? No need to explain how, but I'm curious. Thanks.

 

fr0sty wrote on 8/17/2023, 4:08 PM

Tips to speed up renders... just remember, faster render usually equals lower quality.

1. Don't use 32 bit mode, especially if editing 8 bit media. If you're not sure, you're editing 8 bit media.

2. Use GPU accelerated render engines like NVENC (Nvidia GPUs) or VCE (AMD GPUs) or QSV (Intel GPUs). These render slightly lower quality (the untrained eye won't notice), but much, much faster. You'll see (NVENC) etc. next to the render preset in the render as dialog, choose those. They are available under the Magix AVC and HEVC render codecs.

3. Make sure your media matches your project settings. Otherwise, VEGAS has to do a conversion pass on the media to convert it to match your project settings before it can send the frame off to be encoded. This slows things down.

4. Some codecs decode slowly... such as variable frame rate video, HEVC, etc... you may find better results shooting or producing the video you are going to edit in a different format.

5. Make sure you have a video decoder enabled in your file i/o settings of preferences, preferably intel qsv if you have it available, but nvdec if not.

6. Make sure a GPU is enabled in the video tab of preferences, preferably your most powerful one (Nvidia).

7. Make sure your dynamic RAM preview setting is set low, like 5%, or it'll gobble up the RAM VEGAS needs.

8. Some effects, especially stuff like noise reduction, slow things down dramatically. Factor that in when choosing which effects to use and where.

Douglass-Ray wrote on 8/18/2023, 6:02 PM

Thank you for the suggestions; I'm going through them. By the way, in a separate issue I posted today, my CPU is almost always maxed out during even simple renders, and the GPU is pegged at zero. Not sure why.

RogerS wrote on 8/18/2023, 8:26 PM

Try a benchmark in my signature and you might get hints from the settings as well.

Douglass-Ray wrote on 8/19/2023, 4:54 PM

I checked my settings, and discovered that when I had to reenter all my custom settings, i inadvertently chose the template without NVENC -- and never even noticed when rendering. My CPU and GPU are back to normal, and my renders are more than 4x faster. Thank you for giving me the obvious solution, but which I'd missed.