Vegas 9 on XP still better than 64 bit 7...... at DVinfo.net

Gerald Webb · December 13th, 2009, 01:58 PM

Hi to all, would love an explanation for this.
Core I7, 12 gb ram, overclocked to 4ghz.
32 bit XP and 64 bit Win 7 installed on a 150gb Raptor drive.
Vegas 9 on both, Vegas 64bit as well on Win 7.
A 1080p project with 4 tracks of different cam views of live band,
2 x avchd, 1 x XD cam and 1 HDV.
Few cross fades, mainly just splits every sec or 2.

In 64bit Win 7 with Veg 9 64bit, it is very ordinary, slows down to 12 fps, sometimes even 3 or 4. Massive delays on most cuts. Basically not a smooth editing experience.

Now hears the crazy thing,

In good old 32 bit XP, the same project plays at 25fps all the way through, and to make it even more absurd, I even added some Glint to the XD cam track to pick up the stage lights. I confess this slowed it down marginally, but nowhere near as bad as Win 7 with no fx.

What the $%^& is going on!
Anyone? This is not the first time ive seen this, however this is the first time it has been so blatantly obvious.

cheers guys

Axel Scheffler · December 13th, 2009, 03:47 PM

The rule is still valid: New is not everytime better.
Ever looked at any comparisons in the magazins? Non tells me that it is beneficial to change from XP to W7 (even 64bit) in regard to video application. In every render and run time test XP was much faster than any Vista or the beloved Windows 7. Stay with it and try again, when your projects are getting much more complex but even than it might not be better with W7. I will wait till Windos 12 in a couple of years, maybe than they have a faster OS which does not eat up resources like hell....

Axel

Imran Zaidi · December 13th, 2009, 07:35 PM

A few questions.

Are you on the very latest Vegas 9 update on the 64bit?

When you look at the task manager in W7, are you seeing all 8 threads in the cpu process measuring tab, and how are they performing when you're actually rendering as compared to the percentages on XP?

One more- both your XP and your Win7 are on the same computer on the same drive, and the drive is 150gb? Or am I misunderstanding your configuration?

Gerald Webb · December 13th, 2009, 08:42 PM

thanks for the replies,
Its Vegas 9c.

7 and XP are on the same raptor drive, all media is on others drives (each cam on a different drive).

With task manager, in XP, when playing, all cores are showing slight usage, 10% on avg.

In 7 , when playing, cores 1,3,5 and 7 are showing about 50% usage, the other cores only show about 20%. Interesting, does this mean something?

Just did ram preview in 7, cores 1,2,3,4 and 6 get busy, 5,7 and 8 still only manage 20 %.
ahhh here we go, rendered 30sec to a new track, all cores up at 80-90%.
LMAO , rendered 100% and then white screened and crashed, lol.
Im really not one of those ppl that hates change, on the contrary , I love new things, but 64 bit is becoming a pain.

thoughts, suggestions?

Imran Zaidi · December 13th, 2009, 09:07 PM

There's something definitely going on with your Win7. First, the crashing when all you did was render. And the fact that the same task (I'm assuming you're doing the same EXACT task) has the XP only using a little CPU but with the Win7 almost devouring the CPU. This is definitely not typical behavior.

I know that 150Gb seems awfully tight to be running two full OS's on (I'm assuming they're equally partitioned and properly separated). The minimum requirement for Win7 64-bit is 20Gb, but minimum is of course a bad scenario. Considering the installation of software over time that bloats up a drive, and general system file bloat with updates and temp files etc, and that you have two of these on one drive, I could potentially see the XP being okay with it, but the Win7 not liking it at all. That's one scenario.

Another scenario might be something else that's been installed that Win7 is not liking, or is fighting with Vegas somehow. This could be a world of anything, from drivers to codecs to who knows what.

Another question might be if the Win7 was a fresh, clean install, or an upgrade.

Sorry I can't be of much detailed help, but there really are a lot of possibilities here. But what I can tell you as someone who recently jumped from XP 32 to Win7 64, and also uses Vegas 9 64, your computer's behavior does not at all sound typical. Mine was a completely fresh install on a spacious drive by itself though, and I literally do nothing but edit video on that machine, and very occasionally surf the web.

By the way, your XP 32 can't use all that RAM you have. That alone is reason enough to be rolling Win7 (assuming you can get your Win7 happy).

Jeff Harper · December 14th, 2009, 12:09 PM

Gerald, your experience sounds normal for your situation (to me) in a manner of speaking. First, XP is still superior in the benchmarks for rendering, etc., so I'm not surprised your preview is better as well. Increased ram utilization seems to me to be worthless with Vegas.

Secondly, I have found Vegas 9 64 bit to be a relavively poor performer overall. I have even found 64 bit to render more slowly, which makes no sense at all, I know. Interestingly, though, the quality of my videos is superior when rendered with 64 bit vs 32 bit. I discovered this quite by accident. I edit in 32 bit and render in 64 bit. This improved quality was actually dramatic in a couple of instances; in particular during scenes with poor contrast. Don't ask me why, I haven't a clue. It just is, at least on my machine. BTW, I run a 150 Velociraptor on an overclocked i7 920 also with 12gb of ram as well.

I can't imagine 150GB not being enough room for both your OS. I am a proponent of smaller being better, faster. On the other hand, Harm Millard has outlined elsewhere the huge potential for slowdowns on a partioned drive. Apparently a partioned drive is not nearly as efficient as a non-partitioned one. If it were me, and I had to have tow OSs, I would use separate HDs. Personally I'm not so sure you can accurately judge your dual OS performances when they are on a partitioned drive such as your are, but what do I know. If your Windows 7 partition is located on the inner part of the discs, isn't it operating at a disadvantage to begin with? Just something to think about.

James Harring · December 14th, 2009, 12:12 PM

I have a Core I7 920 and recently upgraded to Win7 x64 from XP64. I see about the same frame rates... not bothered to measure them, just I can't tell any difference. CAVEAT: I AM running Vegas 8.1. I do like the multimedia tweaks I see in Win7... I've become a big fan of Win7.

You should verify you have the latest drivers (bios, video, chipset, etc) and also check to ensure your hard drives have the latest firmware. Also a defrag may help. I would take a hard look at any Vegas plugin's too.

To see if there's something causing you issues do this (Vista/Win7):
Go to the Desktop
right click on COMPUTER, click MANAGE
Expand EVENT VIEWER
Expand APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES LOGS
Expand microsoft
Expand WINDOWS
Scroll to DIAGNOSTICS-PERFORMANCE
Badly behaving drivers are sometimes logged here. I've found I have to update my video card driver about monthly it seems.

Gerald Webb · December 14th, 2009, 10:31 PM

thanks again for the responses,
Jeff, the 150 raptor is partitioned 100 and 50, the 100 being the first partition for Win 7 and the 50 is second for XP. I only had the XP partitiion on there for the things that 64 Win 7 wont do, such as, capture in vegas
update bios from MSI (update tool wont work in 64 bit mode)
Render to divx out of vegas ( can anyone render to divx out of 64 bit vegas?)
Capture in Nero uncompressed AVI ( works in XP not in 64 bit 7 )
Capture audio in camtasia ( yeah ok, occasionally i can get it to work in 7 but the next time it opens, no go, not worth the effort)
wow the list is long isnt it. anyway,

Havent noticed the quality difference, i prob will now, lol.

James, I ran 8.1 for a while and thought it was faster, BUT, I had so many random crashes I gave up after a while and went back to 8c (my beloved 8c, if i could make it dark grey id never change).
I didnt think about the hard drive firmware, i will check that out. thanks.

Axel Scheffler · December 14th, 2009, 10:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

Gerald, your experience sounds normal for your situation (to me) in a manner of speaking. First, XP is still superior in the benchmarks for rendering, etc., so I'm not surprised your preview is better as well. Increased ram utilization seems to me to be worthless with Vegas.

Secondly, I have found Vegas 9 64 bit to be a relavively poor performer overall. I have even found 64 bit to render more slowly, which makes no sense at all, I know. Interestingly, though, the quality of my videos is superior when rendered with 64 bit vs 32 bit. I discovered this quite by accident. I edit in 32 bit and render in 64 bit. This improved quality was actually dramatic in a couple of instances; in particular during scenes with poor contrast. Don't ask me why, I haven't a clue. It just is, at least on my machine. BTW, I run a 150 Velociraptor on an overclocked i7 920 also with 12gb of ram as well.

I hear you man, I did these tests with my relativly simple projects as I was getting more confident with Vista 64 but whatever I did XP was faster and sometimes even a lot. It seems like that the projects needs to be very complex to take advantage of the 64bit. In regard to RAM utilization under 64bit it did not matter if I had 2, 3 or 6GB it was never using more than 900MB, for whatever reason I don"t know, my projects had material way beyond these numbers.

Axel

December 13th, 2009, 01:58 PM	#1
Gerald Webb Trustee Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: Central Coast Australia Posts: 1,046	Vegas 9 on XP still better than 64 bit 7...... Hi to all, would love an explanation for this. Core I7, 12 gb ram, overclocked to 4ghz. 32 bit XP and 64 bit Win 7 installed on a 150gb Raptor drive. Vegas 9 on both, Vegas 64bit as well on Win 7. A 1080p project with 4 tracks of different cam views of live band, 2 x avchd, 1 x XD cam and 1 HDV. Few cross fades, mainly just splits every sec or 2. In 64bit Win 7 with Veg 9 64bit, it is very ordinary, slows down to 12 fps, sometimes even 3 or 4. Massive delays on most cuts. Basically not a smooth editing experience. Now hears the crazy thing, In good old 32 bit XP, the same project plays at 25fps all the way through, and to make it even more absurd, I even added some Glint to the XD cam track to pick up the stage lights. I confess this slowed it down marginally, but nowhere near as bad as Win 7 with no fx. What the $%^& is going on! Anyone? This is not the first time ive seen this, however this is the first time it has been so blatantly obvious. cheers guys

December 14th, 2009, 12:12 PM	#7
James Harring Major Player Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Tampa, FL Posts: 210	Win 7 vs XP performance I have a Core I7 920 and recently upgraded to Win7 x64 from XP64. I see about the same frame rates... not bothered to measure them, just I can't tell any difference. CAVEAT: I AM running Vegas 8.1. I do like the multimedia tweaks I see in Win7... I've become a big fan of Win7. You should verify you have the latest drivers (bios, video, chipset, etc) and also check to ensure your hard drives have the latest firmware. Also a defrag may help. I would take a hard look at any Vegas plugin's too. To see if there's something causing you issues do this (Vista/Win7): Go to the Desktop right click on COMPUTER, click MANAGE Expand EVENT VIEWER Expand APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES LOGS Expand microsoft Expand WINDOWS Scroll to DIAGNOSTICS-PERFORMANCE Badly behaving drivers are sometimes logged here. I've found I have to update my video card driver about monthly it seems.

December 13th, 2009, 03:47 PM	#2
Axel Scheffler Regular Crew Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: San Jose, CA, USA Posts: 44	The rule is still valid: New is not everytime better. Ever looked at any comparisons in the magazins? Non tells me that it is beneficial to change from XP to W7 (even 64bit) in regard to video application. In every render and run time test XP was much faster than any Vista or the beloved Windows 7. Stay with it and try again, when your projects are getting much more complex but even than it might not be better with W7. I will wait till Windos 12 in a couple of years, maybe than they have a faster OS which does not eat up resources like hell.... Axel

December 13th, 2009, 07:35 PM	#3
Imran Zaidi Trustee Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Orlando, FL Posts: 1,315	A few questions. Are you on the very latest Vegas 9 update on the 64bit? When you look at the task manager in W7, are you seeing all 8 threads in the cpu process measuring tab, and how are they performing when you're actually rendering as compared to the percentages on XP? One more- both your XP and your Win7 are on the same computer on the same drive, and the drive is 150gb? Or am I misunderstanding your configuration?

December 13th, 2009, 08:42 PM	#4
Gerald Webb Trustee Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: Central Coast Australia Posts: 1,046	thanks for the replies, Its Vegas 9c. 7 and XP are on the same raptor drive, all media is on others drives (each cam on a different drive). With task manager, in XP, when playing, all cores are showing slight usage, 10% on avg. In 7 , when playing, cores 1,3,5 and 7 are showing about 50% usage, the other cores only show about 20%. Interesting, does this mean something? Just did ram preview in 7, cores 1,2,3,4 and 6 get busy, 5,7 and 8 still only manage 20 %. ahhh here we go, rendered 30sec to a new track, all cores up at 80-90%. LMAO , rendered 100% and then white screened and crashed, lol. Im really not one of those ppl that hates change, on the contrary , I love new things, but 64 bit is becoming a pain. thoughts, suggestions?

December 13th, 2009, 09:07 PM	#5
Imran Zaidi Trustee Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Orlando, FL Posts: 1,315	There's something definitely going on with your Win7. First, the crashing when all you did was render. And the fact that the same task (I'm assuming you're doing the same EXACT task) has the XP only using a little CPU but with the Win7 almost devouring the CPU. This is definitely not typical behavior. I know that 150Gb seems awfully tight to be running two full OS's on (I'm assuming they're equally partitioned and properly separated). The minimum requirement for Win7 64-bit is 20Gb, but minimum is of course a bad scenario. Considering the installation of software over time that bloats up a drive, and general system file bloat with updates and temp files etc, and that you have two of these on one drive, I could potentially see the XP being okay with it, but the Win7 not liking it at all. That's one scenario. Another scenario might be something else that's been installed that Win7 is not liking, or is fighting with Vegas somehow. This could be a world of anything, from drivers to codecs to who knows what. Another question might be if the Win7 was a fresh, clean install, or an upgrade. Sorry I can't be of much detailed help, but there really are a lot of possibilities here. But what I can tell you as someone who recently jumped from XP 32 to Win7 64, and also uses Vegas 9 64, your computer's behavior does not at all sound typical. Mine was a completely fresh install on a spacious drive by itself though, and I literally do nothing but edit video on that machine, and very occasionally surf the web. By the way, your XP 32 can't use all that RAM you have. That alone is reason enough to be rolling Win7 (assuming you can get your Win7 happy).

December 14th, 2009, 12:09 PM	#6
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Gerald, your experience sounds normal for your situation (to me) in a manner of speaking. First, XP is still superior in the benchmarks for rendering, etc., so I'm not surprised your preview is better as well. Increased ram utilization seems to me to be worthless with Vegas. Secondly, I have found Vegas 9 64 bit to be a relavively poor performer overall. I have even found 64 bit to render more slowly, which makes no sense at all, I know. Interestingly, though, the quality of my videos is superior when rendered with 64 bit vs 32 bit. I discovered this quite by accident. I edit in 32 bit and render in 64 bit. This improved quality was actually dramatic in a couple of instances; in particular during scenes with poor contrast. Don't ask me why, I haven't a clue. It just is, at least on my machine. BTW, I run a 150 Velociraptor on an overclocked i7 920 also with 12gb of ram as well. I can't imagine 150GB not being enough room for both your OS. I am a proponent of smaller being better, faster. On the other hand, Harm Millard has outlined elsewhere the huge potential for slowdowns on a partioned drive. Apparently a partioned drive is not nearly as efficient as a non-partitioned one. If it were me, and I had to have tow OSs, I would use separate HDs. Personally I'm not so sure you can accurately judge your dual OS performances when they are on a partitioned drive such as your are, but what do I know. If your Windows 7 partition is located on the inner part of the discs, isn't it operating at a disadvantage to begin with? Just something to think about.

December 14th, 2009, 10:31 PM	#8
Gerald Webb Trustee Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: Central Coast Australia Posts: 1,046	thanks again for the responses, Jeff, the 150 raptor is partitioned 100 and 50, the 100 being the first partition for Win 7 and the 50 is second for XP. I only had the XP partitiion on there for the things that 64 Win 7 wont do, such as, capture in vegas update bios from MSI (update tool wont work in 64 bit mode) Render to divx out of vegas ( can anyone render to divx out of 64 bit vegas?) Capture in Nero uncompressed AVI ( works in XP not in 64 bit 7 ) Capture audio in camtasia ( yeah ok, occasionally i can get it to work in 7 but the next time it opens, no go, not worth the effort) wow the list is long isnt it. anyway, Havent noticed the quality difference, i prob will now, lol. James, I ran 8.1 for a while and thought it was faster, BUT, I had so many random crashes I gave up after a while and went back to 8c (my beloved 8c, if i could make it dark grey id never change). I didnt think about the hard drive firmware, i will check that out. thanks.