Network redering, Should I buy Gigabit cards or just 100…What cards to buy?

[Terje A. bergesen]

It seems highly unlikely that Network Rendering is dependent on your network card in other ways than for compatibility. It would be insane for Sony not to use the Windows environment (probably TCP/IP stack) to communicate over the network, which means that any network card that works under windows will work for network rendering.

Compatibility problems across operating systems is an issue, but if your network card works under Windows it will work with Vegas. Guaranteed.

If you need your network card to also work for Linux (if you dual-boot into Linux) then you should take that into consideration.

—
Terje A. Bergesen

[Rob Mack]

All I can tell you is that I have no problem working with a stream of DV25 footage over a gig-e network. My guess is that it should be enough bandwidth to keep a second system busy.

By all means, get a card that works with Linux, especially because any such card is probably unlikely to offload any work onto the CPU. Just a guess there.

Rob Mack

[Ecoholic]

So you are saying that pci-e gigabit is better than the thruput of a regular Pci gigabit card…I know pci-e is supposed to have more bandwidth but when is 1000 not 1000. When it’s pci vs. pci-e? Thanks, George

[Memson]

You absolutely MUST use gigabit cards for network rendering.

I have a dedicated fileserver connected to my SAN plus two additional Vegas rendering servers. These three are connected together using teamed NICs giving me 4Gb/s. The editing suite is connected to this network using standard 1Gb/s network card (Broadcom NetXtreme).

The next upgrade I will make will be to a network card that off-loads the TCP work from the CPU. Similar to use a high performance graphics card this will remove substantial workload from the CPU leaving more cycles for the application.

A high performance network card also needs high performance switches; we use HP ProCurve here.

Mike

[Ecoholic]

Thank you all for your suggestions and input! I have read more and investigated your suggestions, I have come to the conclusion that pci-e is by far the best way to go…Here is an Gigabit ethernet comparison
pci=1.58 MB/s pci-x=7.09MB/s Pci Express=100MB/s
Seems strange but if you go to the intel website it is explained in great detail on thier whitepaper on the 9300 pci-e card…An even faster soulution is to pay 100$ more a card(9400) for what mike alluded to which is called load balancing recieve side scaling refered to as RSS (not the news stuff)thanks y’all and y’have a good day now y’hear, George Wingard

[Dr. Dropout]

You will get best net render results with a dedicated file server and everything running on a Vegas-supported OS (ideally XP SP2 everywhere)+.

3 shared hard drives named “C” connecting HT boxes by say a 1394 network…you likely aren’t going to see much of a win for instance.

If you are running anything other than a G.e-connected array pinging a dedicated file server, you might want to stick with dual-dual core proc on single systems- Vegas 6 can take advantage of 4 threads for rendering, so it is quite possible that a single system could render FASTER than a homebrew/low cost network rendering setup because you avoid copying files around in stitch operations (stitch = everything except DV, and some other I-fame only .avi types, like Sony YUV).

[Donatello]

in general i have found that a 100 network is NOT being used to its capacity when i use 3 NRS computers ( 2.4 PIV, 2 PIV , 3700amd) ..

the 3 computers do render out very fast (50-60 less then single computer) but by the time it takes to stitch the segments together it’s about equal to single comuter rendering … now 6 computers using NRS and you’ll cut some time ..
i don’t do much NRS rendering using mulitple computers anymore – i find assigning each computer a single job using NRS works better for my workflow ..

[Ecoholic]

https://www.intel.com/network/connectivity/products/whitepapers/mesh_pcie_whitepaper.pdf
Could be due to the fact that pci bus does not have that much bandwidth paste the link above to see the science behind pci vs pci-e I like the Multi tasking on six computers though… you must have a nice rolling chair 🙂

[Ecoholic]

Did not really think how I was going to connect my Network Rendering besides the cards csn i connect in a chain? any suggestions on the best way to connect this or links would be very helpfull…I noticed the procurve is pricey $2000+ I am looking at the 5 and eight ports >100$ any suggestions here? Best George

[Anoni Moose]

Jumbo frames can make throughput significantly higher when transferring a large amount of data over gigabit ethernet while trying to do it as fast as possible. However! EVERYTHING connected together in such a hookup must support jumbo frames! Anything that doesn’t will gag, and this includes any switch that may be connected (and many of those don’t support jumbo frames, although some like SMC’s do) as well as ALL the other devices connected to that switch.