Rendering time gain with Dual Core

[Radioman62]

I just fixed a problem with my laptop. It's just 1.5 years old and started to shut down after some demanding renderings. It also got very warm.

I blowed out some dust with a handgun to my compressor and there was some but not much dust I thought. Anyway, it did very well. Now it stays pretty cool and my renderings all do to the end without the PC shutting down.

In my fault finding struggle I turned the dualcore option on and off to find the sollution and also, in the meantime, did some tests with VS11 to find out how much you gain i time with dual VS. single core.
On my average material, not to advanced but music and some small soundclips in MP3 and different bitrates I gained 25% faster rendering time with dual core. The video was 8 minutes long.

What is your mileage? Anyone else testing this feature?

[MrA]

I blowed out some dust with a handgun to my compressor and there was some but not much dust I thought. Anyway, it did very well. Now it stays pretty cool and my renderings all do to the end without the PC shutting down.

In my fault finding struggle I turned the dualcore option on and off to find the sollution and also, in the meantime, did some tests with VS11 to find out how much you gain i time with dual VS. single core.
On my average material, not to advanced but music and some small soundclips in MP3 and different bitrates I gained 25% faster rendering time with dual core. The video was 8 minutes long.

What is your mileage? Anyone else testing this feature?

Some text deleted.. You are very very fortunate your machine still works!! Air compressors like that CAN produce water vapor, (depending on were you live), and if you do not have a dryer attached. Next time, buy a can of computer reccomended compresed air.

I use a quad processor, with dual video cards, and had it for about a year, I think. No problems here.. Never did a time test, though.

With video, the more "horsepower" the better.

[Radioman62]

No problem, I know what you are talking about (and I'm surely know what Im doing .) As a matter of fact I lied, because I used the handgun at work and that air is very controlled and dry.
My own compressor also has a separator for water/dew. I have painted my cars motor room without problem.

So, you don't have any figures of what you gain with two cores?

[MrA]

So, you don't have any figures of what you gain with two cores?

Sorry, no I don't. But doing the math.. probably twice that of dual core, give or take all the variables associated. But actually, I would like to know.. I'll get back with ya on this one..

[andrewgerm]

I had my render times cut by a little over half. Doubling your cores will not be an exact double though. From 1 to 2, or 2 to 4. There is a slight loss in co-ordintating between the cores, etc (very lay terms here)

My additional increase came from getting 4 times the RAM (4GB now) and my old processor being 2.4 (pre hyperthreading) and now a Dual 2.66. CPU's obviously alone will not be the factor in rendering, but play a major part. I just wish VS would make use of all the stream processors on my new GPU.

I keep a window open when capturing or rendering to monitor system resources, and I have noticed that on my old CPU I'd have 90%+ CPU usage, but on the dual core they both sit at about 50-70% average. Perhaps VS isn't using, or spawning enough threads to really push the limits on multi core processors.

There are also a few issues with using more than 2 cores on XP Pro, and a KB articles I read from MS that says you won't be able to use much more than somewhere between 3 and 4GB RAM. Groan

Again, my few cents worth

[Radioman62]

I keep a window open when capturing or rendering to monitor system resources, and I have noticed that on my old CPU I'd have 90%+ CPU usage, but on the dual core they both sit at about 50-70% average. Perhaps VS isn't using, or spawning enough threads to really push the limits on multi core processors.

I had the same experience. Allmost 100% CPU with one core and an average about 60% with both.

Interresting that you gained that much with more RAM though. I just have 1 Gb. The tweakers that have done special profiles for Video editing didn't gain that much allthough they had more RAM after the tweak. OK they didn't get 4x RAM . Maybe the huge amount of RAM helps alot?

[andrewgerm]

I've closed down a lot of apps to get down to a bare bones on my older machine, and have had a small (I'd guess 5% or there about) speed gain. On rendering a 1hour DV tape for DVD, that is less than 10 minutes. I do as a rule shut down a lot of apps when I'm busy with rendering, but don't see the need to totally disable everythign for that small gain. I sometime need to get on to the machine's shared folders, etc to get files.

The extra RAM might be helping with keeping disc writes down to a min until rendering is finished, and would certainly cut down on any needed swap usage. I'll try do some benchmarking on that to figure for certain.

This evening I was doing some work in an audio program, and when running filters on the files you can acutally set a priority for program execution. Setting this to 'high' in the app didn't do too much, and I was seeing about 50% usage on one core, and 10% on the other (I did have other apps running, etc) Setting to 'max' pushed core 1 up to 60%, and core 2 up to about 40%. You can do the same using Windows Task Manager (I always have this in a corner of one monitor when doing intensive work) Go to processes, look for 'vstudio' and right click on that entry, then select priority, and then choose an option. I'd strongly recommend against the hightest setting, as you'll likely kill the CPU time for essential kernel processes needed for you hardware, and windows. I haven't tried any experimenting here with 2 cores, but I guess nothing ventured... Note though, that you will likely have a less stable system doing this, but, on the same page of that note, I was doing this on my older PC all the time. I'm guessing VS11 is written with multi core CPU's in mind, but perhaps my guess in a previous post was on thinking that there weren't enough threads to fully utulise both cores to the max.

I'll keep on with the benchmarks. Maybe I can dig up the raw footage on a previous project and re-render for a proper, more scientific test.
XP does hit its 'sweet spot' for RAM at 2GB (I hear its 4 for Vista) Still, there are many other variables other than just RAM, etc that would come in to play.

Good luck though!

[neonbob]

Sorry, no I don't. But doing the math.. probably twice that of dual core, give or take all the variables associated.

You will not gain twice the speed. Ulead Video studio is not a true multi thread program.
There is only a 25% gain with a dualcore and even less with a quad. The program has to be specifically written for multi core/thread in order to use a quad to it's maximum ability. I have a quad core and there is a HUGE speed difference with one of the few true multi core programs I have (Sony vegas). My Q6600 in that circumstance as tested is literally twice as fast as the E6600 dual core.

On the other hand, there is either no, or only a small speed increase with most of the non multi core programs.

[BuZZarD]

The only benefit of dual core is that 1 core can spend it's time doing nothing but rendering and the other core will run all the other tasks.

If you bring up the processes in task manager, right click Videostudio and 'set affinity', you can set it run on core 2.
Do the same with every other process but set their affinity to run on core 1.

Core 2 will runn 100% on rendering without interruption from other tasks.