under performing CPU

Aung · Post by **Aung** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 6:53 am

I have a dual core AMD CPU and while chomping through Xvid with Uead Visual Studio the CPU's are only working at 45% to 50%. I have a serial ATA150 hard drive and 2 sticks of 512 mb, DDR2, 800 ram. I have the dual core drivers installed and task manager shows a graph for each core.
How can I find out where the bottle neck is that is stopping the CPU 's from running at 100%. The mobo boasts 'Dual Channel DDR2 800' Does that mean that there is a separate bus for each stick of ram? I am only getting 14 fps chomping through Xvid single pass, default settings. What frame rate should I expect for a AMD X2 6000 CPU, on a ECS amd960gm-m2 mobo? Aung

Clevo · Post by **Clevo** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 7:42 am

There's a nice thread (search for it) explaining what processes that are running in the background and how to set your PC up so that as much resources are used for editing.

But to me... just from the info you have given if you are experiencing 100% cpu usage and still burning slowly then I would suspect you have a bottle neck somewhere.

From what you are saying it looks like you have room to spare.

What is the actual problem you are having?

DLA · Post by **DLA** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 12:17 pm

The bottleneck is VideoStudio. Don't look for any hardware problem, there is none. Some time ago, I upgraded from a single core Athlon 3800+ 2.4GHz to a dual core Athlon X2 3800+ 2.0GHz. Before the upgrade, my single core was running at 100% during rendering. After the upgrade, both cores average 50%, sometimes one will go to 90% while the other will go down to 10%. The only gain I have is in the burning module during the preparation of the VOB files, both cores average 70% somewhere for a relatively short period of time. Disappointing.

Clevo · Post by **Clevo** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 2:04 pm

I thought the CPU indicator indicates how much processing power is used to get the job done.

If your CPU is being 99% used that means windows has had to put other processes off till this job is done.

If I remember correctly you can set windows to throw more CPU resources to give the software more grunt power.

Am I reading the CPU usage indicators incorrectly?

DVDDoug · Post by **DVDDoug** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 9:20 pm

Aung,

What version of Video Studio are you running? Video Studio 11 does have "Intel Core 2 Duo" support. I think this is fairly new, and I assume it works with AMD also.

It may be that the Ulead/Corel MPEG-2 encoder is using both processors, but that the DivX decoder is not. Since it is going so slow, the CPU is probably the "bottleneck", and Video Studio is handing most of the work to one CPU.

A lot of DivX users complain that it takes 8 - 12 hours to convert their video!

It's actually very tricky to write a program that uses both processors equally. The program has to be broken into two equal tasks ("threads"). It's like two mechanics are working on your car. It's hard to keep them both 100% productive. It's more likely that one is doing most of the work and the other is standing around handing him tools or something.

I would be very surprised if all of Video Studio's functions are optimized for dual-processor systems. The rendering (encoding) process does seem to make some use of the 2nd processor/core.

I thought the CPU indicator indicates how much processing power is used to get the job done.

If your CPU is being 99% used that means windows has had to put other processes off till this job is done.

Right! In reality, the processor runs full-speed all of the time. When there is nothing important to do (or if it's waiting for data), the Windows operating system runs a "do-nothing" loop. The CPU utilization is a measure of how much real work the processor is doing. At 100%, it's not running any do-nothing loops.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Thu Sep 06, 2007 12:51 am

I always convert any DivX videos to MPEG2 beforehand with a 3rd party program. There are several FREE DivX to MPEG2 converters available - use Google. alternatively there are some beter ones that you can buy.

I tend to use vso ConvertXtoDVD which creates a very basic DVD and then you can either import that DVD or simply rename the VOB file extension(s) to MPG. A typical 1 hour DivX takes about a hour to convert.

andrewgerm · Post by **andrewgerm** » Thu Sep 06, 2007 2:05 pm

HI

THere's a topic I was reading, and posted to a few weeks back, a title similar to 'dual core performance' or something. Some of us were discussing why VS doesn't max out the CPU. Perhaps take a read there.

Dual channel DDR means that your motherboard can read / write to two memory busses at the same time, provided the RAM modules are installed in the correct configuration (you'll need them installed in specific slots, in two's)

Increasing the priority of VS in windows can improve CPU usage somewhat, but can also lead to instability on anything but a perfectly tuned system. Also check the affinity of VS; that it is indeed configured to use both core's.

The other thread has some details on how to do this, else post here, and there'll be plenty of people happy to help.

Aung · Post by **Aung** » Fri Sep 07, 2007 9:16 am

I have done a more accurate survey. I have a 2 minute (3000 frame) clip of a disco singer and the backdrop is a metallic thread curtain. With the disco lights flashing there's much quick changing of colours reflected in the curtain. Should put the on board grafic under reassure. Results rendering (chomping video) with Ulead V S 8, (saved on disk as AVI type 2, recommended) free version that came with my fire wire card. And I registered it. Xvid was done in one pass, defaults straight out of the box.

DVD 28.5 fps 130.5MB
MPEG2 17.6 fps 83.9 MB
Xvid 12 fps 110.5 MB

For viewing the shots I go to Puppy linux and use xine player (I have dose cut down with N-lite with only Ulead installed, not even media player.) With all of the 3 clips the CPU graphs, one for each core average out around 50%. DLA is on the mark, if one core is up then the other core is down. And they never work togeather at the same ratio, 50-50. One job the 2 graphs will be 60-40, the next 90-10, then 30-70 and so on but the overall average shown in the % box hovers around 50%. Surprise packet DVD chomps faster than real time but alas in xine player there are flashing horizontal lines 2mm apart on my 17 in LCD screen. If I could get the 2 CPU's running flat out DVD chomping would attract lightning. Xvid is a smigeon clearer than MPEG2 and is the codec I want to save my clips to. I have my BIOS set to use the maximum 512 MB of ram for shared video and task manager reports that I have 523 MB of physical memory of which 291 MB is still available while chomping Xvid. With 291 MB of ram unused shurely I don't have a ram problem. The page file usage goes from 256 to 316 MB when chomping starts but is a continuous straight line while chomping. With 291 MB of free memory is Ulead still double dipping into virtual memory on the hard disk? The system cashe (whats does that do) goes from 191 to 280 MB in the 250 seconds that Xvid takes to chomp the clip. Is this any more help to find my bottleneck.

Aung · Post by **Aung** » Sat Sep 08, 2007 8:05 am

Thanks andrewgerm, for verifying about dual ram bus. I had a slight recollection of reading that for video chomping a separate bus for each ram stick is best. But I could not remember what the system for dual bus ram was called. My board has only 2 ram slots and I have identical sticks in each slot so I figure that is the best I can do for ram. Aung