Video Studio 9 on Dual Core CPUs

[2Dogs]

First of all HT isn't all it's cracked up to be and with most functions only gives you a few percent advantage, and even then most improvements I've seen are in benchmark programs written with Intels help

I also used to believe that HT stood for Hyped-up Threading. When I carried out some comparitive tests with my P4 2.8c, however, I found that HT did actually give a measurable improvement in rendering performance - in fact as much as 21%! Later Intel cpu's are supposed to have an improved implementation of HT.

The other thing that seems to be a cause of some confusion is the cpu usage. With my single core cpu, HT gave that performance benefit even though the two logical halves of the processor were showing a combined average usage of around 60% or so, compared with 100% for the single logical cpu without HT. In an ideal world, with code written to take better advantadge of HT you might see an even greater benefit and greater cpu usage with HT enabled - but the fact is that the existing code runs faster with HT.

The same is true for dual core cpu's. Perhaps the only oddity is that HT does not appear to offer any benefit for the Intel dual core cpu's for encoding tasks. HT is only offered on the Extreme Edition dual core cpu's, at a very hefty price premium, but comparably clocked regular Intel dual core cpu's achieve just about the same encoding performance.

AMD seem to have the lead for now, but hopefully next years Intel chips will be competitive, resulting in price drops for us mere mortals. (and tight-wads like me!)

[renderman]

Thank you all (specially Terry) now it´s crystal clear.
When I do the render, Most of the times I leave the PC and do some other things like go to lunch etc.
My intention to use dual core wat to have the render made faster not only 7 to 10 %, in other words to use both cores nearly 100%, I know I won´t get the render half of the time with this, but I expect more significant time savings.
I never use/do other things in the PC while rendering. Gonna look for some app/codec that really use both of them cores at max and give me significant time savings (30-50%). If that is not possible, then Dual cores are not for me. again I have a p4 3.3 with HT.

[GuyL]

OK - Here are the results!

My system was the same except for the processor swap. I went from an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ to an AMD Athlon X2 3800+.

The video file was an analog capture to AVI using the Huffyuv codec at 720 x 480. The clip has some stuff in the audio track and the voice track with several transitions. I rendered the file to MPEG 2 at 8M, 720 x 480.

The 3000 Took 12 minutes and 53 seconds to render and the 3800 X2 took 11 minutes and 51 seconds. A total savings of of just over a minute!!!

Needless to say, this is not what I had expected. I took a look in the task manager and the CPU hovered around 50% usage during the whole process.

[jchunter]

The recently released 6.1 Divx codec, which has been specifically designed to take advantage of hyperthreading and dual CPUs, runs about twice as fast as version 6.03, when VS9 uses it to transcode Mpeg2 HDV to Divx HD 1920x1080 @ 5Mbps. My CPU is P4 HT 3.0 GHz.

Torsten, your system with dual CPUs, each hyperthreaded might see an even greater improvement.

[Ponderer]

Since the performance improvement was so Codec dependent, would I be able to just use this new Codec with VS8 and get the benefits of my Dual Core computer?