Sony Vegas Pro 10 GPU ..What, where, when….No Way!

[Norman Willis]

So increasing the number of drives actually speeds writes up??

I have a Raid controller built onto the motherboard, but I only have five available drive bays. Would one big five-disk Raid 5 array be fast enough to do everything (OS, NLE, data, writes, etceteras)? Or does a guy really need eight?

[Davd Keator]

One big array will be fine… However, the built in raid chip on Mother Boards are not designed for speed. You can always give it a shot, I’d like to know how it goes.

Also: from my use as a power user on a computer and what not…

I really like four partitions on a raid.

1:OS
2: Backup files & System restore
3: Work Drive
4: Library – music, images, royalty free stuff…

This allows my work files and other programs sit on the Hard drive and if I mess up my boot sector or need to reinstall the OS it doesn’t interfear with my other files… A complete system restore new codecs and the like in under 20 minutes. A brand new speedy clean system.

[Norman Willis]

OK, then, that’s a $900.00 card! (I’m out….)

I’ve got a fresh install of Vista x64 on Raid 10, so realistically speaking I’ll probably go with that for right now. But the next time I go to install an OS I might try Raid 5….

Thanks.

Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org

[Dave Haynie]

In most RAID senarios, adding drives will speed up both reads and writes, but also increase latency. These days, latency is not usually an issue, but it’s easy to see why this is so. When you read or write from a single drive, you have over time an average latency to get the data, but sometimes it’s a bit faster. With a RAID, you actually have to wait for each drive to seek, so for any seek, it’s the worst actual case of all drives, even if the overall average seek time is the same.

Without a dedicated controller, the overhead of the RAID is exposed to the user. When its something like RAID0 or RAID1, there’s virtually no overhead. RAID5 does have overhead… nothing like “devoting a whole core” on a modern PC, but sure, it’s very measurable. Better RAID controllers devote a separate processor to run the RAID itself, and also buffer writes… so you actually hide nearly all seek time for writes, at least with the better controllers.

-Dave

[Norman Willis]

OK, so a dedicated RAID card is key, then.

Good to know.

Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org

[Norman Willis]

Hi David.

>>I really like four partitions on a raid.

1:OS
2: Backup files & System restore
3: Work Drive
4: Library – music, images, royalty free stuff…

This allows my work files and other programs sit on the Hard drive and if I mess up my boot sector or need to reinstall the OS it doesn’t interfear with my other files… A complete system restore new codecs and the like in under 20 minutes. A brand new speedy clean system.

I am chewing on this. Where do you put all of your program files? Do you put them on the OS partition? And if so, if you re-install Windows, then how do you add the programs back to the registry?

Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Davd Keator] “My friend is using Raid 5 on the ICH10R – thats the mother board chipset. He’s averaging 5MB/s on three hard drives…and noticable CPU draw…He just uses his computer for his small business database, no mega speed needed…

He is also using a server edition of windows to get Raid 5 support…”

5MB/s isn’t right: sounds like one of the drives is faulty. Even if the write-back cache is not enabled, the speeds with today’s drives should be in the range of 50-120MB/s writes, 100-250MB/s reads.

Also, if the hardware (or hybrid h/w as with ICH10R chipsets) RAID5 is used, there should be no need for a Windows Server OS: the OS will only see one volume regardless.

Alex
DV411

[Jim Scarbrough]

Sorry to interrupt the RAID discussion, but to get back to the original post…

The GTS 250 generally came with 512MB of DDR2 or DDR3 RAM. From my research, you need a bare minimum of 768MB of DDR3, but to be safe, consider 1024MB of DDR3 the minimum.

It also appears that DDR5 will provide faster results than DDR3, but more than 96 CUDA cores won’t necessarily provide an improvement in render times.

So, as often happens, your comparison is flawed, but only because Sony has elected to not provide any guidance regarding optimizing the GPU rendering of Vegas 10.

[Jim Scarbrough]

@David Keaton – just saw your rig specs in another post and your GTS 250 does indeed have 1GB of RAM. Although it’s probably DDR3, it should still provide a bump in rendering speed to Sony’s AVC codec. I’ve been considering upgrading to Vegas 10 and a GTS 450 primarily for this feature and am now having serious doubts.

[Dave Haynie]

I’ve been doing much rendering lately myself. I have an AMD 1090T CPU (6 cores, 3.2GHz), a nVidia 8800GT CPU (nothing special these days), 8GB of DDR3 DRAM. I generally render from one HDD to another.. if the project gets very complex, I’ll use multiple SATA input drives and render out to USB.

In all recent testing, I get 97-100% CPU utilization. I was able to make the CPU drop to about 90% by compositing two DNxHD files from the same HDD. Fixed that when I moved one to a separate drive (the C: drive in this case… don’t worry about VM when you have more RAM than you need for the job).

So yeah, your performance. If there’s a filter that’s a bottleneck and not capable of multithreading, that could do it. It’ll be obvious… you’ll have the one CPU nailed, the others not so much, and when you disable that filter, the problem goes away (or shifts to the next filter). With a fast multi-core CPU, it’s definitely possible to beat your HDDs, particularly if you have many assets from the same drive… don’t let your input drives thrash.

-Dave