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Sony Vegas 10 Slow rendering CPU / GPU rending tested
While testing Vegas Pro 10 GPU acceleration, I soon realized that this was a mission or more involved than anticipated. I turned over rocks, looked in crevasses, even downloaded white papers from Sony them selves. Let me tell you, there is minimal documentation on CPU and EVEN less on GPU rendering in the Sony Vegas world!
General observations:
Sony Vegas coding has not been updated in many years. New buttons, pretty colors, a few filters are in deed the bulk of updates. Support for new file formats of video cameras are the primary reason for the updates, that’s it.
The old magic number of 2 gig’s per core remains the same from Vegas 6 to today. Back in the 32 bit days, my computer had 2 gigs, and a single core. Everything worked fine, slow but fine. The CPU was always at 100%. I decided those fancy quad cores looked mighty nice. I bought the Q6600 and upped my ram to 4 gigs. Suddenly, I had memory issues, rendering problems and boy did I find out about Swap file access times. The next thing I knew Sony Vegas was constantly going to the swap file to access info. My memory requirements jumped to 6 gigs of RAM! Luckily for me 64 bit was just around the corner. I upped my computer to 8 gigs. Smooth sailing again. My CPU load averaged around 66%
Sony claims that their new software supports up to 16 cores on a 64 bit software! Wow, I can’t wait to upgrade my computer. Low and behold I am now the proud owner of the Intel 980x 6 core 6 Hyper Threaded CPU! Just think of all of those cores churning out pixels in HD glory! While rendering a file my CPU load has averaged 25% Now and then the CPU load does bounce as high as 60%, but never maintained.
During all of this I have acquired an AMD Phenom x4 925 and an Intel 920 as well.
The AMD also averages around 95% and the I7 920 churns at 50%.
Sony Vegas Pro really likes FOUR cores and about 6 gigs or ram.
While researching how Sony Vegas sends time line info to the rendering cruncher has not been all that fruitful either. By reading a white paper and benchmark testing, I have confirmed that Sony Vegas Pro, indeed sends off one frame at a time to be processed. When that frame is done, Vegas checks the result and sends that frame to the HD to be saved. When complete, Vegas sends out another frame, so on and so forth. I have seen as much as a 26ms (milli seconds) lag on the File I/O in system monitor to confirm that we are waiting for processing to occur between frames. The average lag in 1ms.
While looking at the disk I/O meter in the computer I realized that my computer is only creating a file at around 5Mb/s – mega bytes per second! Why so slow?
That observation stuck me as very odd. I thought to my self what if…just what if I could decrease the time lag between the HD access, ram, and CPU? How could I do this? The answer was simple. Now that I have a powerful computer with 12 gigs or ram, why not use 5 gigs of it and make a ram drive! I scoured the internet for such a device. I found a company called SuperSpeed, they have it. So just how fast is having a virtual HD in the System memory?
Lets do some testing:
Western Digital Black 1terrabyte HD.
109 MB/s Sequential read & Write
50 Mb/s if written in 512 k chucks.
.75 Mb/s in 4K chunckies. 750K per second, WHOA – slow! Could this be my issue????I mean if Vegas sends off the frames one at a time and then sends that to the HD, there would be tremendous lag in creating a file!
I’ve always loved fast drives, so lets test my RAID 5 array.
Areca 1280ml – 2 gig cache with 8 Hitachi disks.
1506 MB/s Sequential. WOW speedy
1393 MB/s 512k chuncks
129 mb/s 4k chuncks! Faster but… what if I could go faster?RAMDISK – 5 GB HD.
4384 Megs a second! Sequential
4064 Megs at 512K
1267 Megs at 4K chuncks! MAN That was fast! Was that ever so fun to transfer files and test!Okay lets do some rendering testing:
4K setting 23.97 32bit float…
Short 30 second commercial with 8 layers of RED 4 K footage and 16 layers of Audio.
Multiple filters, effects, crops, split screen, masking, etc…
Blu-ray 16mbit – 50 to 60% CPU load. – 18 seconds per frame to render
CineForm 4K 4.4.4.4 – 50-60% – 34 seconds per frame to render
YouTube AVC – 50-60% cpu – 13 seconds per frame.Sad, SAD, SAD…in all rendering tests, it did not matter how fast my hard drives were. Simply put my throughput did not exceed 7 megs a second to the hard drive. There is no bottle neck in the hard drives.
For kicks, I rendered out an AVC memory stick that 512k resolution. I averaged 66 megs a second write time, yet still did not exceed 60% CPU.
I did the exact same tests on my AMD as well, even with GPU acceleration on and OFF. That computer has the GTS 250 1GB Vram.
I had very, very interesting results. The CPU pegged at 100% for a few nano seconds mostly hovered at 95-97% load. Here is an interesting observation as well. Clock cycle for clock cycle, my AMD is 26% slower. That is 2.8 GHz vs 3.33 GHz intel. The rendering times for this comparison was 26% slower! On the AMD! That is amazing to me…. Everyone always says Intel has more instructions per clock, yada yada yada…well, not according to real world rendering. After all, rendering is what really matters to us anyhow….
SIDE BAR: GPU rendering HAD NO EFFECT, I repeat NO AFFECT on my quadcore… Someday, I’ll dig out my old P4 computer and render test that bad boy with my GTS 250…perhaps it will help..PERHAPS.
What did I learn?Simple:
For Sony Vegas editing:
Fastest Quad Core you can afford, HT doesn’t do much but help in multitasking, barely…
At least 8 gigs or ram – 6 for Vegas and 2 for your computer use.
1 fast HD for your computer. One HD for your projects.
Cheapest Video card you can get away with.My own rig:
I7 980x
12 gigs ram
2x 5850 video cards
2x HD monitors
1x 2K monitor – Lacie 730Sony Vegas 9e
Adobe CS5 Aftereffects, Illustrator, PhotoShop
Adobe Audition 3.0RADID 5 Array set up as multiple drives:
C: 64 gig Boot
D: 12.9 TB work drive
E: A/V Library
F: Backup – all programs that my compute needs if I have to do a full restore of my boot.
I do this every few months to clean my system for max speedyness.USB 3.0 Dock station: cheap HD to save client work on, clients get their files transferred and end of project to their own drive for safe keeping.
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43 Replies
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You do realize that the only thing that is GPU accelerated is the Sony AVC render type and the only fair benchmark is video without any FX. You want to measure rendering to AVC and not processing the actual FX on the frame which is NOT GPU accelerated. Also using 32-bit color will significantly slow down any render.
Did you actually render to Sony AVC? I can’t tell from your post.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Yes, I was rather long winded in that post. Bluray 16Mbit & Internet AVC were the Sony AVC codecs. I just threw in the Cineform 4.4.4.4 to compare visually lossless file to that of a finnishing output.
I was saddend that 4 gigabytes per second on HD speeds ment noting.
Perhaps my GTS 250 card is too slow to improve my AMD computer…But no increase at all. SAD INDEED. My next computer will get a GTX 460. We will see then.
I wrote this report for people looking to increase speeds, Hard Drive performance and CPU clocks. I find it shocking that AMD and Intell rank the same for Vegas. I dropped AMD in the K6 days. Now looking at it again…
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[Davd Keator] “Perhaps my GTS 250 card is too slow to improve my AMD computer…But no increase at all. SAD INDEED”
Yes, I would say this is the problem. Your GTS 250 has 128 CUDA cores. My old 9800GT has 112 CUDA cores and I see a slight improvement when rendering with my old QuadCore 2.6Ghz. If you have a newer processor, then a GTS 250 is not going to be faster. By comparison, the GTX 480 has 480 CUDA cores. That should give you a boost in rendering performance.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Perhaps, Sony’s marketing does say may speed up on slo-mo computers. However, transcoding using ATI’s stream processing is a noticable speed increase even compaired to that of my 980x! I think Sony backed the wrong boat, why not just use OPEN GL / CL…Cuda not so impressive…And Nvida cards can do Open GL acceleration as well…Adobe after effects uses GL acceleration for years now and supports both card manufacterers.
But then Nvidia has been behind for years.
Perhaps they paid off Vegas…Things that make you go hmmm…
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I second that.
The rendering pipeline is just one part of the whole system. And from my experience, if you’re not seeing 100% CPU during a render, it’s because the system is waiting on something else.
What it’s waiting on… who knows. If you’re doing 8 layers of compositing, there are 8x as many HDD loads, lots of other CPU work, plug-ins, etc. And I’ll bet not all of them are multi-threaded.
Years back, I ran into this myself. I had moved from a 2-core to a 4-core system, and yet, I was seeing horrible rendering times. When I took a closer look, I found that the HDD was actually the bottleneck. The project I was working on had multiple video layers, many 6Mpixel and 8Mpixel DSLR photos, etc. And I had it all on one HDD, going back to the same HDD, no RAID, all high-def, etc. Once I spread the assets out to multiple devices, I got my 100% CPU rendering back.
With that many assets on the drive, the HDD speed itself was probably not the issue. As you jump around on a mechanical device like an HDD, the performance will start to more resemble the seek time than the burst time you’ll see in an HDD test. I already knew this… I did audio for years before video, and for multiple tracks, especially back in the 90s, seek time was more important than raw transfer time. You’ll eliminate this in a RAM disk, of course. But this is just offered as an example of an unexpected bottleneck.
Try this: load up one video file, Cineform or whatever, and render out to AVC on another drive — no effects, nothing but the render. That’s your baseline… if all CPUs are pegged, great. If not, it’s probably a limitation in Vegas, or some weird system thing.
-Dave
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That was the poupos of my long winded report. I tested all sorts of HD configurations. The ram Disk speed was astonishing… 850,000 I/O’s and 4.6 gigabytes persecond! Even if divided in half, or even fourths, it’s still faster than any other HD storage method out there.
Upon more thinking I don’t even see the GTX 480 making a dent in performance. In my testing the GTS 250 didn’t get passed 5% load, and 4mb into the card at a time. I used a program called GPU observer for that test, and all core cpu gadget. They both work well. So even 112 cores vs 480, only if the GPU hit 30% or more would it make sence to upgrade
Sony Vegas just has a slow rendering core cruncher…However, I truely beleive it’s better than anyone elses at the moment.
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I am a beginner to intermediate user. Using video from Sony HDR-XR500. I used Adobe Elements 7 then Sony Vegas 9 Platinum Pro Pack. I started using PMB, camera software, to burn AVCHD to DVD, really liking the results over standard DVD. I was hoping SV9 would allow AVCHD burns too but of course it does not.
True 64 bit programs would be nice too as I’ve upgraded to Windows 7-64. I also just purchased a GTX-470 thinking about using Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. I thought it was the only 64 bit video editor?
As I plan for the future would you suggest going the Sony Vegas 10 route or the Adobe Premiere Pro route?
Thanks for your insights.
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[John Dirickson] “As I plan for the future would you suggest going the Sony Vegas 10 route or the Adobe Premiere Pro route?”
Since you’ve used the light versions from both companies, download the trial versions of the high-end products (does Adobe allow this?) and see which one you like better.
I don’t know about Adobe but Sony has a reduced price upgrade for going from Movie Studio to Vegas Pro (US $489.95). -
I agree with Mike. I have both and my preference is Vegas Pro 10 but only you can determine what is best for you. Download the trials and check them out.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
David – Have you tried moving your swap file to a 3rd HDD? One not being used by the system/program and not being used to write the rendered file? I would guess the RAMdisk was being used this way, so the lack of improvement there probably answers my question – and kills my hopes…
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