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Renders not touching cores in CS4
Hi there,
I’m using CS4 9.01 on an HP xw8600 with dual quad 3.0ghz xeons and 4gb of RAM, under XP 32 bit.
Under AE7, I was using Gridiron to max out all 8 cores on time pressing renders. Now that Adobe have implemented their own multiprocessor support of sorts, I thought I’d give it a go. Whatever I seem to do however, my renders are taking an age, and barely registering 2% cpu usage across all cores! What is going on? This is even with the bar all the way across to Faster Rendering in the Multiprocessor settings. Oddly, the render seems to occasionally ‘spurt’ and get the CPUs up to around 70%, but only for 20 seconds or so, before it’s back down to a crawl.
The renders in question are 16 bit comps, resizing 1080 to SD PAL, with a bit of fastblur, that’s it.
Anyone got any thoughts?
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3 Replies
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That’s a tiny amount of RAM for 8 cores. RAM starvation of multiple cores actually slows things down, as the multiple processes start up, find out that they don’t have enough RAM to do anything useful, and then shut back down.
If I were using your system, I’d allocate nearly 2GB to each core and only use two cores (leave 6 for other applications).
Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously isn’t going to make everything always go faster. Here’s an excerpt from the Memory & Multiprocessing preferences section of After Effects Help.
“The number of background processes that can run on your computer also depends on the total amount of installed system RAM and the amount of RAM that is assigned to the After Effects application. The amount of RAM required for each background process varies depending on your system configuration; at least 1 GB per process is recommended. Optimum performance is achieved with computer systems with at least 2 GB of installed RAM per processor core.
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Using the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature does not speed up the rendering of all compositions. The rendering of some compositions is memory-intensive, such as when you are working with very large background plates that are several thousands of pixels tall and wide. The rendering of some compositions is bandwidth-intensive (I/O-intensive), such as when you are working with many source files, especially if they are not served by a fast, local, dedicated disk drive. The Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature works best at improving performance when the resource that is most exercised by the composition is CPU processing power, such as when applying a processor-intensive effect like a glow or blur.”———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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Many thanks for your quick response Todd.
Yes 4gb is not much RAM but its the maximum supported by XP 32 bit, although the OS only sees about the first 3.25 gig. Previously with AE7 I was using Gridiron’s Nucleo and that was able to fully max out all cores to 100%, although with some delay as it took time to open many instances of AE. Clearly the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously function is a different kettle of fish.
I had read the relevant bit in the help but hadn’t worked out to give each CPU so much RAM. If I upgrade to 12gb of RAM and Vista 64 bit will be able to use all my cores effectively?
Many thanks again.
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> If I upgrade to 12gb of RAM and Vista 64 bit will be able to use all my cores effectively?
Yes, I recommend using a 64-bit operating system.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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