Test: Speeding up rendering --overclocking and adding RAM

[Martin Wiosna]

So I wanted to see how different overclocking and adding ram would effect my rendering times.

For Base this is my computers

AMD Phenom II X4 940 at 3.0 Ghz
4 GB of OCZ Reaper (pc6400 800mhz)
EVGA GTX260 896MB graphics card (650mhz)
Vista 64 bit
Vegas 8.0c


So stock speed is at 3.0Ghz

I took a 30 second clip (HDV), ran Neatvideo, and 4 other effects.

Wanted to Render in the Windows Movie Video format 1080p at 8mbps preset.

Stock time was at best 6:02 minutes

Now for over clock:

Overclocked the processor to 3.48Ghz

Best render time of : 5:09 minutes

I attempted to overclock my GPU to 700mhz (stock is 620) and ran into terrible stability issues, like crashing, freezing up during render, computer rebooting during rendering, and computer not booting up at all.

Went back down to 650mhz, and now added 4GB of additional ram (for 8 GB total )

With the CPU set at 3.3 Ghz and 8 GB of ram

the Best rendering time was 5:16 minutes

So even with half the ram as long as the processor was faster it had the biggest impact on rendering times.

Another interesting note is that after a render I did the exact same render for some reason it took twice as long.

I would have to close down Vegas and restart it in order to get the quicker render time...odd...

Conclusion: Vegas Rendering times are more dictated by processor speed rather then total memory.

[Chris Harding]

Hi Martin

I posted here a while back on another strange fact with Vegas 9....!!

If you drop a bunch of clips into Project media and then render them ..the first clip seems to take twice as long and the rest of them. I have no idea why Vegas does this but whenever I do a Realty shoot (where all the clips are around 5 minutes) Clip 1 takes around 5 minutes to render to MPEG2 but the rest only take around 2 -3 minutes to render.

This might affect your tests so it might be worth rendering two or three clips with 4GB and 8GB ram and also with the MB overlocked and normal and then compare????

Chris

[Craig Longman]

First off, I'm presuming you were using the 64bit version of Vegas 8.0c?

Secondly, I think the times are interesting, 5:09@3.48, 5:16@3.3 and 6:02@3.0 you indicate. I think the extra RAM still helped, your speed dropped 5% but the time only dropped 2% or so.

Thirdly, I would totally agree with you on this, and it make sense. At full HD (1920x1080) there are 2 million pixels that need to be addressed per frame. With 5 FX and the output, there's a minimum of 12 million touches per frame. Even if you can feed the memory fast enough, having more CPU horsepower really helps no matter what. Increasing drive speed can help also though, it depends on the CPU utilization.

Fourthly, the Neat Video is a cleaner of sorts, right? If so, it has to use temporal changes to do its thing, and that means it's a real limiting factor. If it has the little yellow dot, it indicates that one single instance of the plug-in needs to handle every frame because the processing of each frame is dependent on the previous frame. If they plug-in doesn't have that dot, then Vegas can launch multiple copies of the plug-in, significantly improving performance by utilizing all the cores/procs. Unfortunately, this point alone almost certainly rendered your tests entirely based on the core speed. With only one frame was being processed, disk through-put or memory bandwidth/usage was hardly being taxed at all.

However, I still feel that you're right. Processor and disk speed contribute mainly to performance, whereas memory contributes to stability and sustainability.

[Leslie Wand]

minor time saving aside - if you're using vegas (perhaps any nle?) for production work (ie. commercially), it's a better idea to invest in a faster cpu / more ram than to play with overclocking since the pc might appear stable under most circumstances, but crap-out while under 'pressure' from a complex tl and/or render.

i've know of a number of my students who've o'clocked their set-ups due to lack of funds and have happily created content UNTIL one day they've crossed some unknown boundary and had bsod, weird freezes, etc., in nearly every case i've suggested defaulting back to spec and in nearly every case they've been able to complete their project, at the expense of longer render times...

ymmv

[Jeff Harper]

Thank you for posting, Martin. Your test proves what has been well-known about Vegas for most of us. Processor speed is what affects processing in Vegas, virtually nothing else. Ram has little to nothing to do with the rendering process, and GPU speed even less (except in Vegas 10), unless you have a poorly equipped system, but then it doesn't affect speed, but system stability.

Since 2008, many of us have been running an i7 that is easily overclock-able and stable with only an aftermarket fan.

I've been using the i7 920 Since 2008, overclocked from 2.66 GHz to 3.6. Overclocking became mainstream with the 920, and is old news now; three years old to be precise, and even older news to those that jumped into it with the q6600, which was a good overclocker, depending on the precise version you had.

Overclocking the GPU is absolutely not advisable in most cases and is fine if your playing around, but of no value unless you're running Vegas 10 and rendering whatever one or two codecs that are helped by GPU acceleration. Even then that improvement is almost irrelevant, but it is a step in the right direction by Sony.

[Larry Reavis]

There's a 64-bit version of 8c? News to me . . .

With 64-bit versions of Vegas, RAM can make some difference at the extremes. I tried Win7-64 with 2GB RAM and Vegas 9/64 would render, but so slowly!

4GB RAM improved performance quite a lot; 6 GB added little speed. 12 GB virtually none at all.

[Jeff Harper]

Larry, I would suggest that 2GB is barely enough ram to run windows optimally, which is why 4GB helped, so that makes sense. Microsoft recommends 2GB or ram for Windows 7, but their system requirements have always been ridiculously low; I dont know why that is, but I imagine it's a marketing driven policy to help drive sales.

My previous post about added ram not being meaningfuI for rendering purposes was made with the assumption that virtually all manufactured PCs (virtually all current ones) with Windows 7 already have at least 4GB of ram installed, and anyone building a system would surely not consider installing less than 6.

So if anyone is running a Windows 7 PC and has less than 4gb of ram, and they edit video, they are running a somewhat cripped machine to begin with. Just my 2 cents.

[John Woo]

There is also a limitation of 32 bits programs not able to utilise more than 2GB of RAM. Use program like CCF Explorer to tweak your Vegas.exe so it can use more than 2GB of RAM. My 32 bits Vegas8.0C during render uses between 3.3 to 3.6GB of RAM

[Larry Reavis]

@Jeff Harper

Well said - I agree that anything less than 6GB for Win7-64 is both inadequate - and improbable for most builders; you'll probably have at least that amount