Tips on how to improve systems proformance

[Darby Edelen]

[Thomas Honeyman] “I’m getting 3.2 frames per second. Is this standard? As I had no idea of what to expect but I was hoping for something a bit beefer than my last system. “

It renders at a rate of 3.2 frames per second? I haven’t used Magic Bullet myself, but that sounds like pretty decent performance to me. Do you have multiprocessing enabled in your AE prefs or are you using Nucleo Pro for fast previews/renders?

The time it takes to render out a given composition will vary largely depending on:

1) The size of the composition.

2) How many layers you have in the composition.

3) How large those layers are.

4) How many/what effects are applied.

5) Options such as motion blur/depth of field/3D lights/shadows

6) Your Memory & Cache settings.

7) Whether you have multiprocessing enabled.

Those are the big factors, I’m sure there are others I left off. As for your questions regarding your drives, it sounds like you have it set up just fine.

QuickTime may not be necessary, and it shouldn’t have an effect on render speed, but it is advised.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Thomas Honeyman]

What’s your view on Xp 64 vs Vista 64?

[Darby Edelen]

[Thomas Honeyman] “What’s your view on Xp 64 vs Vista 64? “

I haven’t used either one, I work in Mac OS X land. I would say that whichever is more stable/supported would be a better bet, and at this point I’m guessing that’s XP 64… but this is all conjecture.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Brendan Blair]

Thomas,

Did you ever figure this out??? I have the exact same problem as you, but the really lousy performance is even more embarrasing because I have:

New Dell T7400 running WinXP 64 bit
32 GB of 800MHz FBDIMM RAM (Yes, that’s true!)
4 SAS 15K drives in Dual RAID 0 configurations
Dual Quad Core 3.2 GHz processors.

Just like you, I have a much slower system (a Dell Vostro with a dual core at 2.16 GHz and 4 GB RAM) that can do about 18 fps on the exact same footage that I do about 3.2 fps with on this incredibly fast system!

So I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong (I’ve only had the system for a day now).

There are three things I can think of:

1) Make sure the video driver really is up to date (mine definitely isn’t so I’ll be upgrading it once I get home today – yes, that’s my home system!)

2) Try changing the number of cores that AE works with since there have been some issues when you go over 4 cores. There is info about this I believe in the readme that comes with it. I might try making it see only 4 cores or 6 maximum instead of 8 since the potential problem can happen when going over 6 cores

3) Use Adaptive Resolution in the preferences

These are the things I’m going to try tonight.

A few other points: I noticed with this setup that AE was barely using any of the other cores even when multi-processing was turned on (checked using Windows Task Manager under Processes). Also, (and this would definitely be a problem), each AE process was only using anywhere from 200 – 400 MB when I should have been doing as much as 3 GB each! (8 cores * 3 GB per process = 24 GB RAM out of a total of 32 GB)

When I downloaded the trial of Nucleo Pro 2 and did a Fast Render it rendered far faster and each process consumed a full 2 GB. However, the speed was only about 2.31 times faster than my dual core 2.16 GHz system so it still doesn’t seem right.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

Again, have you found out anything else?

Thanks!

Brendan

[Thomas Honeyman]

Thanks for the info…Haven’t fixed the problem. I kinda felt that I couldn’t do anything.

I’ll double check the video driver. Not sure if I’ve updated that.

I came to the conclusion that AE is only using one core when I’m in real time which is only 2.4 with 6600…Then it ain’t going to be that fast compare to my single 2.8 even though I only had 512 ram. When NP is doing it’s background stuff you get an improvement in time on the overall project but that’s rendering. I was hoping to be able to preview my effects quickly but that seems a no go.

Your system looks so awesome, wishing I had that setup. It doesn’t make sense that with all that horse power you would be flying to milky way in no time.

Let me know how you go man….I’ll get back to you about that video card too.

[Thomas Honeyman]

Do you mean adaptive resolution in the previews?

I had use open gl when possible..changed to adaptive resolution, see what that does…

I’ve also downloaded the latest driver for my quadro.

[Thomas Honeyman]

That didn’t work…

[Thomas Honeyman]

Ok bit of an update here…

I ended upgrading to a quadro 4500…Noticed a huge difference here. I think that the graphics card makes a massive difference in your performance. Would love to see the perfromance with the new 1.5 gig quadro’s…

If anyone has 1 or even using 2 x quadro’s together. Like to know for future reference, if or how much of a performance increase. I hate working in quarter and half res…

I recently moved to vista 64…It’s a ram hog but doesn’t seem to slow AE down. As I have 8 gig of ram. Render out I reckon will be slowed down…But i’ll shut down processes for that. Far more stable running 64 os. Xp was always crashing on me… I only installed vista a week ago, do there’s heaps of streamlinig to go… Main thing is working out how to stop it being a ram whore.

Just did a quick preview test too…

I’ve read that turning off open gl will improve preview… Not the case with my system. Open gl is faster. I read a while ago here on the cow. A dude was saying that quadro’s gave a better performance with open gl. Like to know more on this too.

Hey Brendan, hows your system working now?