New AMD Ryzen Threadripper Editing Machine

[amspire]

I finally finished my other rendering and was able to do some proper tests on my system.

It turns out for vegas 14, the GPU is definitely only used for rendering if you have a GTX580 or AMD 6XXX card. So they are the best GPU's that work with the Sony or Mainconcept AVC. Sony/Magix just never updated them for the newer faster cards.

It took about 6:20 for Sony at 1080P 50P and 3:40 for Mainconcept at 1080P 25P (it does not do 50P) with the GTX580. Now my CPU's were the limiting factor (AMD Phenom II 1055T) and if I look at the usage of the GPU card and extrapolate for a dual Xeon, I probably could do just over 1 minute for the Sony 1080P 50P and about 1:10 for the Mainconcept 1080P 25P.

So a GTX580 GPU with the Sony AVC codec is a real possibility for rendering 1080P 50P at double real time. That is twice the speed Dave was getting with the Magix AVC encoders.  I cannot prove it though - I just do not have a faster CPU right now. In real terms, the dual Xeon could be 10x faster then my 7 year old Phenoms, so I would expect the Xeons to be running at about 70% CPU with the GTX580.

I used the same clip Dave was using in his videos 2 and 3 - the first 2 minutes of the flaming power supply video. The only difference is instead of using Dave's edited source files, I was using 720P downloaded files that had been converted to 1080P 50P.

The other PC I have has an GTX1080 which is absolutely useless with Vegas 14. The GPU usage never gets above 1% and that is just for screen rendering.

So I tried the demo of Vegas 15. Luckily the demo allows me to render a file as long as it is under 2 minutes.

With the same settings as Dave, I got 3:23 with 10% average GPU and 70% average CPU. Now this is still the Phenom II, but it was odd how sporadically the GPU was being used. It was actually doing a bit at 20% then a bit at 0%. I don't know if this is due to an inefficient codec, or an inefficient CPU.

It would be interesting to see with the dual XEON what GPU usage did Dave have for the 2 minute renders. You would think that with 10x faster CPU's, the render would have to run much faster.

Richard

[TheAmmoniacal]

I have a Threadripper 1950X machine, on an ASRock X399 Taichi motherboard. I'll happily run some benchmarks if you want.

[kalel]

Sorry to go a bit off topic, but does Vegas not offer nVidia/AMD GPU specific encoders? I'm not experienced with this software.

[Electro Detective]

Before exiling the Xeon rig to a far off corner in the lab...      consider a clean install of Win 7 Win 10 (no updates, no internet connection, no nothing) and Vegas 14, and nothing else,
on a separate hard drive, be it SSD and or fast hard drive, and go from there

Pretty sure you can install Vegas 15 alongside 14 later (in Program Files > Vegas folder/dir ) and run with either (or both!) and compare

It's just over one hour to set it up on a new or spare hard drive, and may save money and further frustration

I can't see how pulling one of the processors is going to improve performance  but may be worth a shot if only to lay it to rest 

If you go for an AMD Ryzen, hit the AMD user and gamer forums and find out what exact components will give good rendering speeds,
if you're lucky someone's already done it,
or post the question.

[EEVblog]

I used the same clip Dave was using in his videos 2 and 3 - the first 2 minutes of the flaming power supply video. The only difference is instead of using Dave's edited source files, I was using 720P downloaded files that had been converted to 1080P 50P.

Therein lies the problem, the source files make a huge difference.

[EEVblog]

Before exiling the Xeon rig to a far off corner in the lab...      consider a clean install of Win 7 Win 10 (no updates, no internet connection, no nothing) and Vegas 14, and nothing else,
on a separate hard drive, be it SSD and or fast hard drive, and go from there

Did that, full clean install.

[EEVblog]

Ok, something strange is happening, I just retried it on the same render test on Vegas 15, and I now get 1:09 for the 2min clip using NVENC at 1080p50 on the GTX1050 card.
Was 2:40 using the Mainconcept encoder at 50p
Interestingly, different file sizes. 179MB for NVENC, 190M for Mainconcept.

I tweaked a few things in the BIOS to try and fix my windows problem, maybe that had an effect?
It was 1:47 in my previous video.
I'll upload the sourse files so people can play.

[Monkeh]

'tweaked a few things'.

What things?

[amspire]

Before exiling the Xeon rig to a far off corner in the lab...      consider a clean install of Win 7 Win 10 (no updates, no internet connection, no nothing) and Vegas 14, and nothing else,
on a separate hard drive, be it SSD and or fast hard drive, and go from there

Did that, full clean install.

Trouble is that Vegas 14 has to have GTX580 GPU - then you will probably halve the render times to 1 minute. Any later GPU will not do better then the CPU. A GTX580 on ebay seems to be about $150 or cheaper. For 1080P, I seemed to be using about 800MBytes RAM on the GPU so a 1.5G RAM GPU would be fine.

[nctnico]

If you go for an AMD Ryzen, hit the AMD user and gamer forums and find out what exact components will give good rendering speeds,

But you'll also want stability and that is often forgotten. What works at home usually doesn't work in a heavy use environment. I'd concentrate on getting good hardware first (a Dell or HP workstation with good airflow, Intel CPU(s) and ECC memory) so at least you know the system is stable and any problem you have is really software related. Fast rendering doesn't help if you need to re-render 1 out of 3 files. Maybe moving to Linux as an OS may help as well because it can cope better with heavy processing tasks and isn't bogged down by all the extra Windows 10 fluff.

[amspire]

I'll upload the sourse files so people can play.

Anyone using the demo Vegas 15 can only render under 2 minutes. 1:59 is fine.

[EEVblog]

Files here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/msop0wx8slbu13l/RenderTest-2min.zip?dl=0

Just a single clip extended to 2:00

Vegas 14 and 15 project files.

[gnif]

I just finished a 16 core TR build, I do very little with this kind of thing but if someone want's to throw a step by step of how to render this video in Linux i'd be happy to provide my results. I also have a Vega 56 and a GTX 1080Ti at my disposal for testing.

I have the machine clocked at 4GHz with 64GB of RAM @ DDR3200 on a custom water loop, it should be able to eat up anything thrown at it. For testing I currently have it mining Monero (XMR) at 1400H/s on the CPU alone.

[Terrius]

Threadripper is really good price to performance wise. Personally I would go with the 1920X, simply because in a majority of cases software can't utilize the extra cores from the 1950X. Threadripper is two Zen dies on one chip so while it is a different socket than Ryzen it is the exact same architecture, though Threadripper CPUs are made with the top 1% of Zen dies according to AMD. If you are considering the 1950X then you should also investigate the I9 7900x which is supposed to be the same price and in certain benchmarks outperforms the AMD chips.

 In reality there is no stability difference between Intel or AMD platforms now that the Zen architecture has matured (and board partners have spent time working out the bugs in their Bioses). Like any new architecture it had growing pains (just like Intel). A lot of the issues with the Zen architecture stemmed from the fact that the launch was sooner than partners expected. In addition partners were hesitant to release a variety of boards due to past market issues with AMD hardware.

In the end it likely comes down to, would the increase in performance and reduction in rendering (and handbrake) time be more valuable than soldiering on with your current system?  Single socket systems usually have fewer issues than multi CPU systems (unless you use windows server), so perhaps that is a factor as well? Another thing to consider is the fact that both AMD and Intel have new CPUs that will be launching in spring and early summer (for threadripper 2), so whether it is worth waiting is something to decide on as well.

[gnif]

Threadripper is really good price to performance wise. Personally I would go with the 1920X, simply because in a majority of cases software can't utilize the extra cores from the 1950X. Threadripper is two Zen dies on one chip so while it is a different socket than Ryzen it is the exact same architecture, though Threadripper CPUs are made with the top 1% of Zen dies according to AMD. If you are considering the 1950X then you should also investigate the I9 7900x which is supposed to be the same price and in certain benchmarks outperforms the AMD chips.

Correct except the Ryzen doesn't break out the extra PCIe or memory lanes. Personally I would never buy a TR (mine was donated for open source development work), I am in complete agreeance with Terrius that for a desktop or even small office server a TR is massive overkill, not much is ever going to take advantage of it. I plan to put it to use running a ton of VMs in which case the cores really do help, but not many people would care to do this.

[Electro Detective]

Hardball:

Find out what hardware the Vegas developers currently use or recommend

which operating system/s used/tested, 

what optimal performance should/could/might be expected with Vegas 14 and 15, or what they get with their in-house gear 

email someone at Support, you might get lucky   

[Someone]

Files here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/msop0wx8slbu13l/RenderTest-2min.zip?dl=0

Just a single clip extended to 2:00

Vegas 14 and 15 project files.

Thanks for the source files for examples, rendering out to H264 for youtube takes just under 1 minute here. Thats running the free version of DaVinci Resolve on a laptop (MacBook Pro, but its available all windows/linux/mac), resulting in 140-180MB files depending on quality settings and direct without any transcoding or intermediaries. So you should be able to do much quicker on a desktop platform.

[TheAmmoniacal]

Threadripper 1950X, Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU. Rendering your 2 min sample project.

MAGIX AVC/AAC MP4, Internet HD 1080p 50 fps (Nvidia NVENC): 1:14 minutes
- CPU usage at 30% average, 50% max, 20% min.
- GPU usage at 12.5% throughout the render
- File size 301 MB

The non-NVENC version of the same template took 2:35 minutes, CPU usage ~93-95% throughout the render. File size 290 MB.

MAGIX ProRes, ProRes HQ - 1920x1080-50p: 3:58 minutes.
- 43.5% CPU usage
- File size 4.81 GB

Intel HEVC templates all took >6 minutes.

Tried many other templates, but they all gave a crappy render.

[amspire]

Threadripper 1950X, Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU. Rendering your 2 min sample project.

MAGIX AVC/AAC MP4, Internet HD 1080p 50 fps (Nvidia NVENC): 1:14 minutes
- CPU usage at 30% average, 50% max, 20% min.
- GPU usage at 12.5% throughout the render
- File size 301 MB

This is what I was noticing with the NVENC renders.

CPU at 50% - GPU at 12.5%
Nothing is happening much on the hard drive.

What is throttling the render speeds? Why isn't either the CPU or the GPU near 100%? On my slow system, it appears the GPU usage is very intermittent dropping regularly to 0%.

[Someone]

Threadripper 1950X, Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU. Rendering your 2 min sample project.

MAGIX AVC/AAC MP4, Internet HD 1080p 50 fps (Nvidia NVENC): 1:14 minutes
- CPU usage at 30% average, 50% max, 20% min.
- GPU usage at 12.5% throughout the render
- File size 301 MB

This is what I was noticing with the NVENC renders.

CPU at 50% - GPU at 12.5%
Nothing is happening much on the hard drive.

What is throttling the render speeds? Why isn't either the CPU or the GPU near 100%? On my slow system, it appears the GPU usage is very intermittent dropping regularly to 0%.

Memory bandwidth between the CPU and GPU are likely to limit their utilisation, or poor distribution of the process not pre-emptively loading frames ahead (should be no problem with total memory capacity for a single 1080p stream).

[EEVblog]

Threadripper 1950X, Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU. Rendering your 2 min sample project.

MAGIX AVC/AAC MP4, Internet HD 1080p 50 fps (Nvidia NVENC): 1:14 minutes

Wow, thanks. That confirms it, a new Threadripper machine would be a waste of money.
Mine is a tad faster than that with the GTX-1050ti
BTW, by CPU (dual Xeon) runs about 50% using NVENC.


Also, I'll be damned, Magix fixed the exact XSplit audio bug that was preventing me using Vegas 15:
https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/vegas-pro-15-update-2-build-261--109529/

I find it remarkable that the program has to support all these different program outputs. Isn't MP4 fairly universal?

[Electro Detective]

https://support2.magix.com/customer/en/vegas/form


"Support request: Have a question about VEGAS Software? Get assistance from our experts."

i.e. it's their baby, ask them what gear they use or recommend, or solutions to rendering spanners 

Perhaps Mr. MathiasH may consider to sign up to EEVblog and sort out the host's issues?   

I reckon there's quite a few Vegas users here... I think 

 

[hayatepilot]

Wow, thanks. That confirms it, a new Threadripper machine would be a waste of money.
Mine is a tad faster than that with the GTX-1050ti
BTW, by CPU (dual Xeon) runs about 50% using NVENC.

Yes, your dual XEONs are already pretty damn fast.
But were you able to solve the windows problems?

[tszaboo]

Threadripper 1950X, Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU. Rendering your 2 min sample project.

MAGIX AVC/AAC MP4, Internet HD 1080p 50 fps (Nvidia NVENC): 1:14 minutes

Wow, thanks. That confirms it, a new Threadripper machine would be a waste of money.
Mine is a tad faster than that with the GTX-1050ti
BTW, by CPU (dual Xeon) runs about 50% using NVENC.


Also, I'll be damned, Magix fixed the exact XSplit audio bug that was preventing me using Vegas 15:
https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/vegas-pro-15-update-2-build-261--109529/

I find it remarkable that the program has to support all these different program outputs. Isn't MP4 fairly universal?

Well that is a simple case, when moar cores isn't better.

I guess you should take a look at the Core i9s then? They had terrible motherboards. The early units did not have VRM strong enough to power the CPU.

[TheAmmoniacal]

The software is clearly the bottleneck here, not the hardware. Ask the developer what hardware they recommend.