Question on high core count cpus

[Kamjam21xx]

Say i get a 16 core 32 thread cpu and limit my rendering to 14 cores. i should still be able to browse the internet or do graphic design with little to no hiccups, right?

[karsnoordhuis]

Browsing the internet shure, graphic stuff im not so shure about. Id give rendering 12 cores and use 4 for general use

[mariushm]

You should be able to do that regardless, unless the software stupidly sets the thread priority to "critical" or some priority that doesn't allow other threads to use those cores.

 

The operating system will create threads of various applications on random cores and threads, with a preference for cores and threads that are used less.  So from time to time, cores or threads used by the video encoding program will also switch between running that task (video encoding) and running threads of various applications.  The operating system is smart enough to give each thread an amount of time and all applications should work fine.

 

You can make a test with the command line x264, let it use all your threads and you'll see all your cores pegged at 95-100% yet you'll still be able to browse and watch movies with no problems at all.

 

btw.. there is some point over which there's no benefit to using more threads.. for example for h264 the optimum is somewhere around 1 thread for each 64 vertical pixels plus 1-2 threads for decoding input video and creating the output file ... so for a 1080p , more than 16 threads are not recommended, when you go over one thread per 64 vertical pixels the quality actually starts to decrease slightly due to how various compression algorithms in the h264 standard are designed... and also a lot of threads will also idle waiting for the rest of the threads to finish their jobs... encoding is a mix of stuff that can be made in parallel and parts that must be serial. 

 

So unless you're encoding 4K, for software encoding it's often better to encode using fewer threads and maybe encode two videos or two segments of your video in parallel, each instance using a subset of total cores/threads in your system.

[Kamjam21xx]

It would be Cinema 4D and other renderers, some stuff renders on the gpu, but a lot of times it has to be handled by the cpu.

 

I have a x965 right now but ill be making a new rig with a 1950x, so thats why im curious. C4d can utilize every available thread to max usage.