CCE and DUALCORE Performance

[kabster]

Hello,


I have just put an rigg together a few weeks ago, and i like to know if i gain the right speed out of cce encodes!??


My system:

Windows xp pro x64 "sp2+=up-to-date patched"

Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (black edition) @ 3000Mhz = Rock stable
3 Gigabyte ddr2 pc5300 = 667mhz (planning to ad 1 gig stick to run in DUAL CHANNEL again btw)
Hitachi 300 GB SATA2/16Mb=cache/ 7200 rpm
K9NGM3 msi mainboard

That having said, i have used cce sp 2.7.0.12 + rebuilder pro 1.26 and my top speed is like 3,4 :rolleyes: on a cpu load of only 60 - 70%!!! Does that sound right?

Iam searching for a way to boost cpu load in order to improve encode time more or less!!!

any ideas?


urs kabster,

[kabster]

Moderator can u move this thread to the MPEG2-encoding section please!?

My bad!!


kabster,

[jdobbs]

My AMD Opteron (dual core) runs at a base speed of 2.4GHz (overclocked) -- and I get a little over 5x speed with CCE.

Unfortunately the 70% processor usage is about all you're going to get with CCE. It is a multithreaded application and prevents itself from being loaded more than one time. Too bad. Of course on the other hand it is still the fastest high-quality encoder I know of.

[kabster]

My AMD Opteron (dual core) runs at a base speed of 2.4GHz (overclocked) -- and I get a little over 5x speed with CCE.

Unfortunately the 70% processor usage is about all you're going to get with CCE. It is a multithreaded application and prevents itself from being loaded more than one time. Too bad. Of course on the other hand it is still the fastest high-quality encoder I know of.


How is it possible u get speeds over 5x :eek: whit an processor that has 600Mhz less then mine and also overclocked?

I like to know wot your cpu loads are at that point please!!

Maybe, ill install dual core center and see if i get anything out of that!!. But further overclocking using that is out of the question, as i did that already manualy through the bios!!

thanks any for the input,

kabster,

[kabster]

@jdobbs,

I realy realy hope you add the option to set priority not just to normal but to high and even realtime for dual cores...;

It seems when i run cce in realtime through taskbar it gains speed of near 7 and above whit cpu loads of between 95 - 98% !!!! Its so DULL that one cant config priority through the .exe file itself. It must be done through an shortcut !!!

Isnt there any way to adjust that priority by for example editing an config file from rebuilder ? I mean, doesnt rebuilder store this kind of settings!!?



kabster,

[kabster]

@jdobbs,

I realy realy hope you add the option to set priority not just to normal but to high and even realtime for dual cores...;

It seems when i run cce in realtime through taskbar it gains speed of near 7 and above whit cpu loads of between 95 - 98% !!!! Its so DULL that one cant config priority through the .exe file itself. It must be done through an shortcut !!!

Isnt there any way to adjust that priority by for example editing an config file from rebuilder ? I mean, doesnt rebuilder store this kind of settings!!?



kabster,


AnYoNe :o!!!

[Video Dude]

I find that CCE is slightly faster if the source and output are on two separate hard drives.

With an Intel Quad Core, I get 7x to 8x speeds on dual drives. Using the same drive I get 6x to 7x.

[jdobbs]

@kabster

I did testing using HIGH and REALTIME priorities. When running alone they run at exactly the same speed (at least on the four test systems I use) as NORMAL or IDLE priority. If you are running other processes, HIGH will take too much priority from other processes and they don't response correctly to events (like mouse clicks). If you set it to REALTIME priority, the entire system freezes except that app.

There really isn't a significant advantage to adding the extra priorities -- but you can bet they'd generate a bucket-load of trouble reports.

[kabster]

I find that CCE is slightly faster if the source and output are on two separate hard drives.

With an Intel Quad Core, I get 7x to 8x speeds on dual drives. Using the same drive I get 6x to 7x.


I do process them from 2 seperate partitions beeing source to destination, i know its an improvement doing that.
Now, just the other day i played whit the iDCT decoder setting. And it shocked me to find out that a 32-bit IDCT is faster then an 64-bit one!!??? Given the fact that both my processor and os are both capable to process 64-bit algorithms!!! But i gues it must have something to do whit rebuilder and/or avysynth as to why it slows down my encode speeds choosing the 64-bit iDCT i guess!!!


@kabster

I did testing using HIGH and REALTIME priorities. When running alone they run at exactly the same speed (at least on the four test systems I use) as NORMAL or IDLE priority. If you are running other processes, HIGH will take too much priority from other processes and they don't response correctly to events (like mouse clicks). If you set it to REALTIME priority, the entire system freezes except that app.

There really isn't a significant advantage to adding the extra priorities -- but you can bet they'd generate a bucket-load of trouble reports.


THATS odd jdobs!! wot can i say!! I hope u arent refering to the Mbitrate speed btw but rather the numbers nexto the BIG "SPEED" at the very botom in the task window?

Again i gained much HIGHER Speeds doing so by boosting priority to realtime!!! Since, like u said. High priority didnt gave me much, as good as nothing infact. So i choose realtime, based on wot ive read about Dual-Cores performing in REALTIME inviroment!!
But its true the system gets somewot laggy. But still iam able to surf/ downloading/ in short doing small stuff whitout any problems!!! The only application next to CCE (whit over 300MB ram in usage) is my p2p and eats arround 150MB ram.
But then again that might be the reason why my system is rock stable, ive got for the moment 3 sticks of 1 Gigabyte pc5300 = 667Mhz ddr2.
And when doing all this under HIGH LOAD i still have like over 1 gigabyte memory space to waste .

Iam curious wot it will give when i add another 1GB stick and run my system in dualchannel. As dual channel appearantly works only in pairs. Should have thought of that before i placed the order actualy..

Also, i think why u gain much more speed jdobs using normal priority whit an processor having less speed then mine.

Appearantly these days its not about the horsepower alone but rather the way the cpu process things appearantly not the mention the size of cache :confused:

I notice it aswell about the pricetaggs that comes whit these processors. Appearantly the price of opteron processors is goes from slightly more to quite allot more then wot ive payed for my ahtlon 64 5000+ (black edition)
:eek:. Even though the frequence clock speeds of some are much less then of mine. So must be for an reason they arent cheap i guess given their speeds!!

That and the fact that opterons are optimized for multi tasks while ahtlons 64 x2 are optimized for gaming, must be the reason aswell why u gain such an speed jdobss!!

Thanks for u thoughts jdobs and video dude,

i still sillently hope for an additional priority settings jdobs :cool:

kabster,

[manono]

One important reason for your encoding being slower is that you're PAL (I'm guessing here), and jdobbs is NTSC. Your DVDs contain 20% more pixels, will take longer to encode and will encode more slowly.

I also gain no advantage from setting the priority to High or Realtime. I also suspect that if you're getting better encoding speeds setting the priority to Realtime, you have other things going on in the background.

When I want to boost the CPU usage, I set my AviSynth script to run Multithreaded in CCE:

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/MT_support_page

It doesn't always speedup the encoding, and can sometimes even slow it. It seems to work best when there are some MT supported filters in use. But I don't pretend to be an MT expert.

[PhillipWyllie]

Supply CCE with uncompressed video in the YUY2 colour-space from a decent Raid(0) array to get fastest results.

[kabster]

One important reason for your encoding being slower is that you're PAL (I'm guessing here), and jdobbs is NTSC. Your DVDs contain 20% more pixels, will take longer to encode and will encode more slowly.


So u think its because i use pal source material !? You are right, most of the stuff i do is pal related. But then again, shouldnt pal be faster then ntsc! Since, pal only playback at 25 fps (at most) = 1500 frames (more or less) compared to ntsc 29,97 = 1800 frames. Most of time when the ntsc projects have 29,97 = 30fps to round up. But ill pay attention to the very few formats i get playing at 23,xx or 24 frames/sec and see wot that gives through encoding!!

But indeed when u talk about 20% more pixels u actualy refering to the different window sizes right! That might be the cause aswell for my slow encodes!!

720x576 = pall against 720x480 ntsc.. havent thought of that before since its such an small difference in size!!


I also gain no advantage from setting the priority to High or Realtime. I also suspect that if you're getting better encoding speeds setting the priority to Realtime, you have other things going on in the background.

All i can add to that is, when iam encoding whit cpu loads between 70 - 75 i still have the full 25 - 30 % idle loads left!!
And thats why i must gain speed i guess by changing the process priority. Most of the additional task in the background is network related not much cpu related but the tasks do require allot of ram. But ram isnt a issue here, as ive still almost an full GIGABYTE left of free memory when doing all tasks (encoding inclusive)!!

Realy, adding a few more prioritys to rebuilder woud be nice in my case.



kabster,

[manono]

Hi,
But then again, shouldnt pal be faster then ntsc! Since, pal only playback at 25 fps (at most) = 1500 frames (more or less) compared to ntsc 29,97 = 1800 frames
Actually, that would, in most cases, be another reason why PAL encoding would be slower, as most NTSC movies on DVD are encoded as progressive 23.976fps and then apply 2:3 (or 3:2) pulldown to have them output 29.97fps. In most cases we NTSC people aren't encoding the full 1800 frames (to use your example), but only 1440 frames.
720x576 = pall against 720x480 ntsc.. havent thought of that before since its such an small difference in size!!
720 x 576 = 414720 pixels
720 x 480 = 345600 pixels
414720/345600 = 1.2 or 20% more pixels in a PAL DVD.

I don't know if that's a small difference or not, but it's certainly large enough to effect your encoding times when compared to encoding the same movie from an NTSC DVD.

[jdobbs]

In addition the Opteron has a large cache, and I have a fast hard drive dedicated to video encoding that is always defragmented. Also, DVD-RB always encodes at 23.976 to the intermediate file -- so that woudl be the number to use in comparison.

I wasn't implying that his system was slow... I was just throwing out a number to use for comparison.

I'll be picking up a quad-core computer today... I've been experimenting with x264 encoding of HD movies -- and the 20 hour encoding cycle on my Opteron gets old fast...

[Sn8kbordin]

It also depends on what you are backing up.

I noticed that movies that are letterboxed when in widescreen get encoded faster by CCE than a full pictured widescreen movie, and 4:3 encodes the slowest.
Also cartoon encodes quicker than a movie.

Right now I am getting 4.5X speed on a Opteron 185 @ 2.74GHz w/ 2GB of fast RAM (2,2,2,3 IIRC @ 2.5,3,3,6 ) with source being on a SATA2 RAID0 Seagate hardrive array being encoded into SATA RAID0 WD Raptor 10K RPM array.

[Blue_MiSfit]

I think you're just running into the limitations of CCE. Its multithreading doesn't seem to scale that well, at least in terms of CPU utilization.

Changing the process priority won't affect things.

If you want more speed, do two encodes at once :)

~MiSfit

[Sn8kbordin]

CCE wont run 2 instances