does a dual core CPU greatly help with Videostudio 10+ ?

[Drumovski]

Im looking to buy a reasonable system for doing some small, snappy projects to put on the web.
I wont be putting forward the money for the system but the person who will doesn't want to pay too much.
Does the new dual core cpu's make a lot of difference to how well videostudio will run, or can I get away with an older AMD 64 939 (or something similar)?

[Terry Stetler]

Enough of a difference and yes, the A64 939's will do fine if money is an issue. I have two; an A64 3800+ and an A64 4600+, both 939's.

[PABrowns]

I've used VS9 and VS10 with a hyperthreading CPU and checked to ensure that the hyperthreading was being used. What I found is the VS is very HT friendly. If a program uses mutlithreading (which VS does) hyperthreading and dual core (quad core, octo core, you name it) will greatly increase the speed of your rendering.

A related question:

Has anyone seen if VS takes advantage of the encoders in the ATI Radeon X1K cards (Viiv)? Or do you need to use the ATI program to take advatage of this feature?

[Terry Stetler]

You have to use the ATI AVIVO Encoder to get the advantage of their GPGPU technology directly.

(GPGPU = general purpose graphics processor unit; basically doing the calculations in the GPU's pixel shaders)

Why do I put it as "directly"? Because you should be able to have indirect support for their GPGPU tech by frameserving the ATI encoder from VS's timeline when creating video files on the HDD.

To try this you install DebugModes freeware Frameserver plugin. This gives you a new export filetype: "DebugMode Frameserver Files (.avi)".

http://www.debugmode.com/frameserver/

Give it a name and "save". It'll put a small proxy *.avi file on the HDD as a placeholder for facilitating the linkup. You would load this into AVIVO or whatever other encoder you want to use and the timeline will go straight from VS to the encoder for processing.

You can also frameserve other programs like VirtualDUB or whatever. You can even frameserve to software on another (possibly faster) computer on your network if you need to.

[PABrowns]

Cool! Thanks for the info. I'll have to play around with this. In the mean time that affirms a decision to upgrade to ATI rather than nVidia which I believe only have hardware decoding, not encoding.

[lespurgeon]

I've an Athlon x2 4400. When encoding with uleads encoder, I will get 100% utilization of one core and 0% on the other. I can still use the machine for other work no problem (use one core at 100% in background), but my experience with the ulead encoder is that it does not multi-thread well.

Select another encoder, and you will get a differnet experience.

[dsegarra]

I've used VS9 and VS10 with a hyperthreading CPU and checked to ensure that the hyperthreading was being used.

This is a stupid question but I also have HT how do I check to see if VS is using it?

[lancecarr]

Place a couple of clips in the timeline and then get VS to render to a new file. It's not important what because all you want to do is give it some work to do.
Then hit crtl/alt/del and the task manager will come up. Select "performance" and your processor should appear as two processors, you can see how much of the CPU resources are being used on the graphic display.

[THoff]

How well you are able to take advantage of hyperthreading or additional physical or logical processors depends on many factors. If the output format/codec don't take advantage of multiple processors, if your hard drive is too slow to handle the I/O, or you are out of memory and constantly swapping, then there will be artificial bottlenecks that will keep you from achieving 100% CPU utilization across all the processors (the ideal situation).

Also, make sure that you are using the latest processor drivers for your CPU (use Windows Update to check and download as needed) -- there have been several updates for AMD processors.