Rendertest results with MacPro Quad

[Charley Gallagher]

Running a MacPro two dual core 2.66 processors.
Boot Camp to boot into windows
2 gig of RAM
Stock video card
Vegas 6d
Setting on best

Render time was 45 seconds.

Really hoped it would be more like the 29 seconds I got the first time I tried it only to find out that Vegas defaults to good, not best setting.

Far cry from my AMD64 -3400 that got 79 seconds but with all that power it didn't render twice as fast. I'm a little disappointed.

[Theodore McNeil]

My next computer is going to be a mac with final cut and vegas on it so I'm keeingly interested in what you're doing.

What were you rendering? Just and plane jane .avi or something more elaborate?

[Mike Brown]

Thanks for the info, Charley. Like Theodore, I'm wondering how this render time translates into everyday use. It sounds like the Mac is still faster than your AMD computer. Even though it's not twice as fast, does it meet your needs? Will you start running Vegas on the Mac instead of the PC?

[Charley Gallagher]

"What were you rendering? Just and plane jane .avi or something more elaborate?

I was using the "rendertest" that was created for Vegas. I can email you a copy if you like. I forget who created it but its used as a standard so one can compare results to other pcs. Its a tiny file that really make the pc work and uses no external files. I did a search on "render test', or maybe it was "rendertest" to see previous discussions on this board.

I just bought the Mac on Sunday, worked Monday and last night I plugged it in, downloaded "Boot Camp", the Mac, UNSUPPORTED BETA program that creates a partition on your hard drive and automates the process on installing Windows. I needed a fresh new copy of XP. It won't accept a copy unless it has SP2 on it. You can't install XP then upgrade to SP2.

So I got it running, installed Vegas 6, and ran the rendertest. There are no other programs on the machine except Vegas. I couldn't wait.

I did import a few .avi files and try Vegas. I use two monitors and it seems monitor number 2 frequently has a full screen window of the media files. I like to set to thumbnails to choose from what seems to be hundreds of pic that represent the avi files in the bin. I liked that they were displayed instantly rather than one at a time until the page was filled. But I found that it was that fast only if there were no accompanying (darn I forgot the extensions of the files that appear once you put the clips on the timeline) .skf?? files. They slow the process down. If they are there it the thumbnails don't appear all at one time.

With the rendertest. Just playing the file, prior to rendering, and scrubbing through it was a treat.

I installed After Effects this am and it really flies. I have nothing to comepare to other than my AMD3400 and a MacMini I purchased to see if I would like the Mac. The dual core 1.6 mini seemed faster than the AMD but AE for Mac is not the "universal binary" program needed to use it correctly. Consequently it didn't run as fast as it should have but still was at least as fast as the AMD.

Glen Elliott has a Sony Vaio ?? dual core, and if I remember correctly he got a speed of 49 seconds with that rendertest. If that's correct, I could have built a dual core Windows machine for 550 and saved a bundle. I will have to talk with him again to verify. It could have been 59 but that number does not stick in my head.

Thats all I can think of for now. I did get this machine to do both Vegas and Final Cut Pro figuring 50 percent of the editors use FCP and when I retire in two years I will probably want to edit for others so I should know the industry standard. I sure do love Vegas and FCP looks like work.

[Vincent Croce]

My Athlon X2 4600 (Vegas 7.0b, 2gb ram, GeForce 7800, 1 TB Hdd, OS & apps on raid0 array) finished the test in 39s. I'm a bit surprised you didn't score higher with your new Mac. Perhaps Boot Camp slows things down, being some sort of emulator...or maybe you just need to figure out how to tweak that new beast of yours.

[Rob Lohman]

Originally Posted by Vincent Croce

Perhaps Boot Camp slows things down, being some sort of emulator...

Bootcamp is *not* an emulator. It simply prepares the drive and supplies
Windows with the correct drivers to work. However, the EFI BIOS might do
some translation and it can be questioned how good / efficient the Mac drivers
are (since you have no comparison).

I don't know how well Vegas multi-threads these days, but I do remember
that some time ago I think it did the audio and video on 2 seperate threads
and that was about it.

I'm wondering what would happen if you run a 2 (or 4) network render nodes
on that one machine (if that is possible). Might get a better number?

p.s. an emulater would be Parallels which allows you to run Windows under
Mac OS X (when it is running).

[Guy Bruner]

My Intel E6300 overclocked to 333 MHz frontside bus does the render test in 27 seconds. Something doesn't sound right in your setup. CTRL-ALT-DEL to Task Manager/Performance and see if you have all four CPUs engaged. You should see 4 CPU charts if they were all picked up by Windows.

[Rob Lohman]

Guy, is that a dual-core chip? How fast does your chip run? As far as I know
Vegas will not use all 4 processors (which is easily verified if you open up
task manager while running the test)

[Guy Bruner]

Hi Rob,
Yes, the E6300 is a Core 2 Duo chip normally clocked at 1.86 GHz. At normal clock speed, it does the rendertest in 35 seconds. I would expect the Mac Quad to out-perform it since the CPUs are clocked at 2.66 GHz, even if Vegas is only making use of 2 of the 4 processors.

[Rob Lohman]

So what were you running it at when you got the same score? That would be
the more interesting number in this case....

[Glenn Chan]

My compilation of rendertest results is as follows:

27s - Overclocked Intel E6300 @ 2.33Ghz (266mhz FSB --> 333mhz, 2MB cache, 1.86ghz originally; V6d; V7b = 28s)
SOURCE: Guy Bruner @ http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/for...694&Replies=31

28s - Intel E6600 Core 2 Duo (Vegas 6d; 2.4ghz, 4MB cache)
SOURCE: Emailed submission.

34s - Intel E6300 Core 2 Duo (Vegas 6d; 35s in Vegas 7b)
SOURCE: Guy Bruner @ http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/for...694&Replies=31

39s - AMD X2 4600+
SOURCE: JohnnyRoy @ http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/for...3138&Replies=4

*39s/74s - AMD X2 4400+ (Toledo core, 2X2.2ghz, 2X1MB cache, no dual channel memory, Vegas 6.0b)
SOURCE: philfort@ http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/for...447&Replies=26

*39s - AMD X2 4400+ overclocked to 2420mhz
SOURCE: Jayster @ http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/for...5519&Replies=0

*40s/76s - AMD X2 4400+ (Toledo core, 2X2.2ghz, 2X1MB cache, no dual channel memory, Vegas 6.0b)
SOURCE: TheRhino@ http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/for...239&Replies=61

44s - Pentium D 3.0ghz
SOURCE: GMElliot @ http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/for...ssageID=454055
see also: http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/for...3138&Replies=8 (45s)

45s - Macpro 2X2.66ghz dual core Intel processors
SOURCE: Charley Gallagher @ http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=78558

47s - Core Duo 1.83Ghz (laptop)
SOURCE: FrigidNDEditing @ http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/for...7142&Replies=3
SOURCE: GMElliot @ http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/for...ssageID=454055


The macpro score seems a little disappointing? :(

[Charley Gallagher]

Upgraded to Vegas 7 and score improved from 49 to 46. Still a big disappointment. I wonder if there are some tweaks I am not aware of. I did try changing max processors/cores from 4 to 1. Same score.

[Duane Burleson]

can you post a link to this render test file? Or at least the file name? I ask because I have found three different files that have been used over the years for vegas render tests.

Duane

[Glen Elliott]

Something is wrong- I got a faster rendertest score with my Mac Book Pro running XP via Boot Camp.

[Rob Lohman]

Do we know if all of these were at good or best settings? That seems to make
a big impact (since Vegas defaults to 'good' instead of 'best').

Also, the Mac Pro machines seem to have some memory related issues especially
with audio / video work.

It's particularly in latency sensitive applications such as audio/video encoding and 3D games that the Mac Pro's FB-DIMM memory subsystem really holds it back

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2832&p=1 (last page)

If you want to know more I suggest you read the article (entirely) and look at
the tests they did. I have no idea if this can influence the Vegas benchmark much.