Vegas Pro and Multi-CPU Rendering

[punkshoo]

Hey guys, new to the forums but been watching Linus for years. I'm in a bit of a pickle when it comes to a budget upgrade path. My buddy and I use Vegas Pro to edit our videos and want to centralize everything into a single rendering/storage machine and I'm trying to do this as inexpensively as possible. I currently use an R7 1800x machine to render my videos and 1080p rendering is only a bit longer than real-time. We would like a similar solution for us to work locally on our machines (he would be using a vpn to access the network) and then do the final render on a server. My original thought was to build an i7-8700k machine with a 1070ti but the $1500+ price tag that goes with that just isn't in the cards at this very moment. I have an unused blade server running dual Xeons on a 1366 platform and when running a render test it seems I am only using one of the CPUs. So here's the question: Is it possible to make Vega Pro render on multiple CPUs? I can't seem to find anything regarding this, only how many threads Vegas Pro can utilize. My findings seems to indicate 16 threads. I see Cinebench scores for the x5650 are just a smidge behind my R7 1800x and I was thinking if I went with x5690/x5687 CPUs I could find an interim solution to this problem of ours for $100-200. Does anyone know if this is possible or have any experience with this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Electronics Wizardy]

You can do multi cpu rendering, but the dual 1366 system will probably be slower than a ryzen system due to the latency and low single core performance. The system is probably being smart and only using one cpu as it will be slower to use the second due to latency and numa.

 

 

 

What does task manager look like?

 

 

[punkshoo]

When rendering I see one CPU with 2 boosted cores and all cores running around 70% while the other CPU is basically idle.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, punkshoo said:

When rendering I see one CPU with 2 boosted cores and all cores running around 70% while the other CPU is basically idle.

And other tasks use both cpus?

 

Probably just the system being smart about numa. Dual socket doesn't make sence for most video editing work.

[punkshoo]

Thanks for confirming that. I'm super new to dual CPU setups so I don't quite understand how load balancing works. Other tasks do use both CPUs but I've never had it under enough load to need it outside of a VM environment. Now that I'm watching it more closely it does seem to be offloading some of the work to the other CPU but minimally. With that being said, do you think there's still a value proposition in upgrading the 2.2Ghz CPUs to higher-core 3.6Ghz CPUs for rendering or would it be best just to hold out for a bit and build a dedicated more modern rendering machine for substantially higher cost?

[punkshoo]

As it stands with the current CPUs the render time is roughly 3x real-time. Obviously, we're looking at this from a productivity standpoint mainly because he's rendering on an FX 8350 which is about the same as the current CPU configuration in the server.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, punkshoo said:

Thanks for confirming that. I'm super new to dual CPU setups so I don't quite understand how load balancing works. Other tasks do use both CPUs but I've never had it under enough load to need it outside of a VM environment. Now that I'm watching it more closely it does seem to be offloading some of the work to the other CPU but minimally. With that being said, do you think there's still a value proposition in upgrading the 2.2Ghz CPUs to higher-core 3.6Ghz CPUs for rendering or would it be best just to hold out for a bit and build a dedicated more modern rendering machine for substantially higher cost?

If your goal is to render videos quickly you want a single fast cpu, ryzen is a good value here. Really, id stay away from dual socket for video editing.

 

1 hour ago, punkshoo said:

As it stands with the current CPUs the render time is roughly 3x real-time. Obviously, we're looking at this from a productivity standpoint mainly because he's rendering on an FX 8350 which is about the same as the current CPU configuration in the server.

Dual 1366 isn't really an upgrade from a 8350 for lots of editing tasks. Id just save up more for a newer platform.

[punkshoo]

Thanks for the insight. I really appreciate it.