Athlon X2 4400+ VERY slow at CCE

[glen8]

We'll I'm NOT impressed with AMD chips at all. I used to have a Pentium 4 3.4 Northwood which would blitz CCE no problem.

I had a small bonus from work so decided to upgrade and get an AMD X2 4400+ as I've heard so many people rave on about them.

BIG MISTAKE!!!!!!!

Guess what, my CCE speed is........

wait for it..........

0.65

Yep that's ZERO POINT SIX FIVE LOL

I guess Intel still holds the crown for multimedia performance.

[Easy123]

I guess you did something wrong. My A64 3500+ running on A8N SLI Deluxe with 1 GB of Corsair TwinX RAM goes up to Factor 2.5 in CCE 2.67 (no Filter or whatsoever applied to avs script)...

[glen8]

I'm using the latest version of CCE and also Avisynth

[buzzqw]

post your avisynth scrip
maybe are presente slow filter !

BHH

[glen8]

LoadPlugin("C:\hd tools\dgindex\DGDecode.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\hd tools\dgindex\Decomb.dll")
MPEG2Source("C:\HDTV\smallville 5x01\small5x01.d2v")
LanczosResize(720,480)
convertToYUY2()

Thanks for the help guys, I just hope I haven't wasted my money. To be honest, I wish I had bought a Pentium D now!

[Amnon82]

It is maybe DeComb.dll. You loaded it but don't use it.

[glen8]

ok, just removed the decomb.dll line but it's still the same :-(

[GZZ]

I got a AMD X2 4200+ and I get around 3.5-3.8 in CCE, using around 75% CPU power.

[glen8]

argh! I wish I knew what's causing the hold up

Could it be my source that I am encoding? Does anyone have a small source file I can encode just to test it out?

Thanks very much

I would love 3.5+ speed!

[GZZ]

Have you tried out another encoding project ? Also try to see if all your drivers for your chipsæt are installed.

I use this script for progressiv pal souce:

Import("AddAudio.avsi")
LoadPlugin("DGDecode.dll")
Mpeg2source("p01_a1.d2v", idct=6)
ConvertToYUY2(Interlaced=False)
AddAudio() #prevent a memory leak in CCE

this is the script I use in CCE 2.67. I didn't change anything since I got my new CPU... So can't say what is wrong with yours. But try to encoder another DVD and don't use any filters.

[Boulder]

Try this:


LoadPlugin("C:\hd tools\dgindex\DGDecode.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\hd tools\dgindex\Decomb.dll")
MPEG2Source("C:\HDTV\smallville 5x01\small5x01.d2v")
Crop(0,0,-0,-0,true)
LanczosResize(720,480)
convertToYUY2()

[KeyserSoze]

glen8,


I got the same CPU like you and i get 4.0~4.2 speed in pal progressive dvds with 2.67 ;)

[TJeR]

IMHO you have some hardware/software issue. I have a 4 year old Athlon XP +1800 with 1.2GB of RAM, and I get twice yor speed with PAL interlaced material and decomb loaded, and I am not telling you it rise up to near 1.8 with progressive film....

If yors is a lap-top check if you some "power saving" system enabled, and/or some software cpu cooler; the benefit of those are quite unnoticiable, but hey usually drammatically decrease your speed.... in anything you do

[Axed]

Dont AMD processors have that "quiet and cool" thing that also doubles as processor protection incase of overheating?

Is it possible the fan on the processor is boned..?

[TJeR]

I just know my PC; and I talk for personal experience, so I am not really the right person to answer your question, but I am sure othes will do

[Boulder]

glen8 should also check if he has installed the latest chipset drivers.

[PhillipWyllie]

Are you running basic, sp or pro? Whats you're time using say TMPEG. I think it could be your configuration. Oh looking at custom technology's web site, maybe your CPU's instruction set isn't supported.

[Revgen]

@Glen8

Do you have Cool 'n Quiet enabled?

If so, then I'd suggest that you disable it. C 'n Q has given me performance problems in some applications.

[Boulder]

I think he has forgotten to enable reply notifications :devil:

[Pirate515]

@Glen8

Do you have Cool 'n Quiet enabled?

If so, then I'd suggest that you disable it. C 'n Q has given me performance problems in some applications.
I actually had a totally different experience with Cool 'n Quiet. I had it disabled by default, and performance was just horrible. Given the fact that this was my first AMD system, I was ready to give up on it and return motherboard/CPU and get Intel one instead. Then I turned CNQ on and what a difference did that make. I have a feeling that if you have CNQ off, it just plays it safe and runs CPU at its real speed. For example, in my case it is Athlon64 X2 4800+ (real speed 2.4 GHz), so with CNQ off it is constantly running at 2.4 GHz (after all, that's how my system felt like at the time). However, turn CNQ on and it will squeeze 4800 MHz out of it when necessary, and will drop back to 2400 when idle. After all, that's what AMD CPUs are notorious for, they slow down when idle and speed up when workload is placed on them, that's how they stay cooler and use less power. Desktop Intel CPUs, on the other hand, always run at the same speed regardless of the workload. Centrinos (Intel Notebook CPUs) seem to be employing similar tactic for the sake of saving battery power.

[Boulder]

I'm quite sure your processor won't reach 4800MHz at any time. 4800+ does not mean maximum clock frequency;)

[Doom9]

it will squeeze 4800 MHz out of it when necessary, and will drop back to 2400 when idle.Since the maximum CPU frequency of your CPU and mine (I have a 4600) is 2400 MHz, what you said is not true.. our CPUs would melt at that clockrate. What happens instead is that the clockrate varies between 1200 MHz and 2400 MHz, for both cores.

Here's a path from Microsoft that deals with extreme performance issues with dual core CPUs under WinXP: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896256/en-us. Certain games absolutely need it, perhaps certain boxes or other applications do, too.
Also, on the AMD site, along with the CPU driver you can get a tool to monitor CnQ so you can check if your CPU is running at full throttle when encoding.

[Malcolm]

it seems glen8 uses some HDTV stuff which he's also resizing to PAL:
MPEG2Source("C:\HDTV\smallville 5x01\small5x01.d2v")
LanczosResize(720,480) Maybe that's the reason why it's so slow..!

And: 4800 MHz is not possible! You can check the highest frequencies reached with intel and amd chips here: http://valid.x86-secret.com/records.php
To run Cool 'n Quiet properly you should DEINSTALL the CnQ drivers from AMD, DISABLE CnQ in your bios and use the Rightmark utility to control CnQ instead! The Rightmark tool works perfectly and informs you about current state / frequency / voltage in you systray! Here's the link: http://cpu.rightmark.org/products/rmclock.shtml
Btw. it's free!
Here's a screenshot:
http://cpu.rightmark.org/pic/rmclock5.png

Greetings,
Malcolm

[n3rdyguy]

Hi glen8.. Sorry to hear about your new Athlon 64 ;/

I wanted to hear if you have solved your problem, or know what was wrong? Any solutions? I am considering the same upgrade in the near future.

[glen8]

eek, sorry for the late replies guys. Been busy and just not checked the forums in a while.

I was running all the latest chipset/cpu drivers and had C&Q disabled. It was still painfully slow. I tried different source material and tried loads of different versions of avisynth and cce.

I have had to put up with the performance loss as I haven't a clue why it's so slow. I leave my PC encoding all night now and look at the results the following morning.

The quality is great so I'm happy.

[Revgen]

It could possibly be an compiler issue. I would be interested to know what CCE is compiled with. If it's compiled with an Intel compiler than CCE may run slower on AMD chips by design. Intel intentionaly designs their compilers not to detect AMD chips.

Features like SSE and SSE2 may not be taken advantage of if that is the case.

[Pirate515]

It could possibly be an compiler issue. I would be interested to know what CCE is compiled with. If it's compiled with an Intel compiler than CCE may run slower on AMD chips by design. Intel intentionaly designs their compilers not to detect AMD chips.

Features like SSE and SSE2 may not be taken advantage of if that is the case.
AMD CPUs are actually 100% compatible with Intel platform, so for all practical purposes AMD CPU would look like as if it is Intel CPU to application programs. In other words, it is fully capable of executing all of the instructions in x86 instruction set without a hitch. AMD64 family fully supports SSE and SSE2 extensions, and all dual-core as well as latest single-core CPUs also fully support SSE3. So applications that take advantage of these features will not suffer from any incompatibility issues when running on AMD CPU.

Compatibility with Intel platform is actually what makes AMD CPUs so appealing. When you don't have to worry about your programs not running, you can then look at other factors (such as performance and price) to choose the one that's best for you.

[Revgen]

I'm not talking about the processor, I'm talking about the compiler. Intel code compilers specifically make sure that AMD chips aren't detected. That means that SSE, SSE2, and other features that AMD chips have won't be taken advantage of. This can cause code to run slower on AMD chips.

[Boulder]

I very much doubt that CinemaCraft would do such a thing.

[random asshat]

I was running all the latest chipset/cpu drivers and had C&Q disabled. It was still painfully slow. I tried different source material and tried loads of different versions of avisynth and cce.

I have had to put up with the performance loss as I haven't a clue why it's so slow. I leave my PC encoding all night now and look at the results the following morning.

The quality is great so I'm happy.

I'm very sorry your speed isn't as expected, though.
My AMD chip has been absolutely smoking at CCE encodes.


http://images5.theimagehosting.com/encode.jpg (http://www.theimagehosting.com)

Full Disclosure:
AMD FX series
Cool & Quiet Enabled
Nan SSE2 optimised DGdecode
Dedicated DV workstation

[Fishman0919]

We'll I'm NOT impressed with AMD chips at all. I used to have a Pentium 4 3.4 Northwood which would blitz CCE no problem.

I had a small bonus from work so decided to upgrade and get an AMD X2 4400+ as I've heard so many people rave on about them.

BIG MISTAKE!!!!!!!

Guess what, my CCE speed is........

wait for it..........

0.65

Yep that's ZERO POINT SIX FIVE LOL

I guess Intel still holds the crown for multimedia performance.


What ver of Win Xp are you running, Home does not support Dual-core at all

From MS site...

IOW, you can set up Windows 2003 Server on a dual core, dual
CPU Opteron system and only have to pay for a single 2003
license.

But both XP Pro and Home are licensed on a per installation
basis, not per processor. XP Pro supports SMP and can use
up to two physical CPUs, and they can be dual core (for a
total of 4 processors).

XP Home is not SMP capable at all, and as such only supports
a single core, single CPU configuration. It will work with
dual core CPUs, but the second core is effectively useless.

[DVD_GR]

I am encoding with cce for so much time and with so many different cpu's,from tha first time we found about V2.5.Intel sucked all the way round from its 800mhz p3 which lost from 800duron !!!to Athlon xp all model who really kicked ass model with almost double speed of him,and all latest tests,with opteron showed most impressive encoding speeds.I remember years ago Intel users thinking what is going wrong with their cpu.The truth is this:Amd to process a piece of data,it will need 10-12 stages to get the output,while Intel will need up to 30-31 to get output (simply speaking).sorry for my bad english :( The real cpu power is showed on this and not the hollow mhz of intel...only dothan has shorter pipeline depth and is the only cpu of intel that we could say worths.Amd X2 is the top performing model that exists on home-pc's up to now,maybe a dual-core opteron could beat it at cce encodes.
wish santa claus brought me an x2 :D :D :D

[murattttt]

My typical CCE speed


With a basic avisynth input (Source is progressive NTSC letterboxed 16/9 movie)
mpeg2source("W:\DVD REBUILDER WORK\D2VAVS\V01.D2V")
ConvertToYUY2()
AudioDub(BlankClip())

Cool n Quiet is enabled within the Bios. I guess it is sth to do with a bad set up maybe some conflicted driver or bottleneck issue? (Even File indexing service is a heavy load on IO which I never use).

[PhillipWyllie]

@Glen8: Could you post the CCE log

[Thasp]

If I am converting a source at 160x90, 256k(compatible with the iAudio X5L DAP), it is around 5-5.7for encoding speed. If I am downconverting 720p HDTV streams, resizing them using lanczosresize, and decimating them, I get encodes around 0.77 speed also. I just tried it now since this thread remained unresolved, I found it while searching for more info on running two instances of CCE for a dual core CPU.

It all depends on your source. I have an AMD64 Venice core 3000+ @ 2.4 GHz. It's doing my encode at 0.76.

[PhillipWyllie]

@Thasp open your script in VDub or VDubMod and then hit F5( Shift F5 in VDubMod) for preview VBR from start. Then if you fps is low then the issue is with avisynth( I think avisynth doesn't support the dual cores). Also what codec are you using to decompress the HD source( if it's not mpeg). Running two instances will be a problem unless you have 4 physical HDDs.

[Thasp]

Now I have an opteron 165 @ 2.7 GHz and, I can't even get 75% out of each core, I get 57-65% out of each core doing an HDTV --> DVD compliant MPEG2 encode. Very odd

[Sounddude]

Resurecting this thread because I just got a X2 4200+ AMD and I'm also getting slow speeds in CCE 2.67. I'm not encoding any HDTV, just avi's. My speeds are around 2.7-2.9. I see here in this thread, someone with a 3800+ getting 5.56.

My scripts are not using any filters. I checked the script in vdubmod using the above instructions and it's showing 24fps.

This is a new build running XP Pro SP2 with 1 gig of ddr 500 ram and all the latest drivers and patches. Any idea as to why my speeds are so slow?

[jshumate]

Sounddude - I might be able to help. My first PC (still have it) is an Athlon 1 GHz CPU with 512 MB of RAM. Sometimes CCE would lock it hard. I found out that if I changed CCE to run in "realtime" priority, it would not lock up.

Then a couple of years ago, I bought a PC with a 3200+ AMD chip and 512 MB of memory. CCE sometimes locks up the PC. I couldn't run any of the reautoring programs that can use CCE (Reauthorist, DoItFast4U) without my PC locking up EVERY time. Even if I tried to run CCE in realtime priority, those programs locked it up. Only if I ran CCE by itself in realtime mode did it run OK. I complained here about how AMD doesn't play nice with AMD and 2 guys said "Oh yes it does! I've never had a problem with it on any AMD system I have used." That got me thinking.

Mostly for the heck of it and because I thought I might want to play with using RAMdisks, I upgraded the memory on my 3200+ CPU system from 512 MB to 2 GB. I tried running Reauthorist, which NEVER worked for me without locking up. It worked perfectly! No lockups. I have checked the memory when running CCE on a system with 512 MB of memory and while it does use a lot of memory, it didn't use it all at anytime I looked. I checked the memory usage when running Reauthorist and I was shocked to see that CCE alone was using 540 MB! I still had plenty of free memory though as I have 2 GB. So I think the key to using CCE on an AMD system is memory. I now would not recommend anyone run CCE on an AMD system with less than 768 MB of memory. I am now convinced that you can fix CCE problems on AMD systems simply by having enough memory.
My encode speeds for CCE got much better, over 2.x. Sorry Sounddude, but for me anything with CCE over 2.x IS pretty good. I've never seen any better. If anyone is getting over 5.x, that's great, but I have never come within a light year of that. Try getting more memory and see if that helps.

[Dark Eiri]

I have a Athlon64 3200+ and I barely can get 0.65 =/
With my Duron 1300 MHz I was used to 1.5, minimum...
That's very strange.

[rahzel]

do this: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=81429

but make sure you read the instructions carefully.

i just got a 3800+ X2 a couple weeks ago, but i haven't tried encoding without doing the above. i don't know if this relates to this thread, but using DVD-RB with CCE and multiple encoder processes checked, i get speeds of well over 5 in CCE. my processor is overclocked to 2.75ghz, though. even with my old single core opteron 144 at 2.69ghz, i got speeds of about 3.8.

[Dark Eiri]

I tried SP2 version. It seems fixed, I'm getting REALLY good speeds now.

[coopervid]

Hi,

unfortunately the forum rules didn't allow me to post for 5 days since I had the same issue. However, it was with my Intel 3GHz and an ASUS board. I finally found out that the BIOS was not setting my DDR RAM at the desired speed with the default settings. I had to set it there to manual and I'm not even overclocking. So - if your BIOS supports manual CPU and RAM clock setting just try the supposed values and don't use the automatic settings. It made a BIG difference in my case and still everything is stable as I also expected it by not using overclocking at all.

Hope it helps-maybe not in all cases but in some.

Vid

[Trahald]

@ coopervid

what settings did you change.. bios are similar and would be interesting to know.

[coopervid]

In my AWARD BIOS this is under Frequency Control. I have to set the CPU Host frequency to 200MHZ, the memory frequency to 2x which leads to the memory be clocked at 400MHz = effective 800MHz with DDR (Double data RAM).