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Hyper-Threading and Final Cut Studio

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Hi,

I have recently built a Hackintosh after using 10 YRS regular Macs. At first thanks for this forum which helped me a lot.

I am using Final Cut Studio 2 and I am wondering why is the CPU running all the time at low rates when doing apparently hi-complexity tasks. I still don't have a clear answer but at first I tried to disable Hyper-Threading of my Core-i7 950. To my surprise it really makes a difference - here are some examples:

Exporting a 1080p source with superimposed graphics through Compressor to a QT H.264 file (2-pass encoding, better resize filter) - a 30s took 1min 57sec with Hyper-Threading on and the CPU was showing an usage of 38%. Than I disabled Hyper-Threading and the same task took 1min 43sec and CPU showing 68%. This means I saved 14sec. on a 30sec video segment. Not bad.

Than I tried to export some Motion project to QT ProRes - with HT it took 3'20'' and without 2'58'' (I don't know if these marks are international '-marks minutes and ''-seconds)

I also tried a task with DivX Converter - with HT it took 26''and without 21''.

:!: So in every aspect of the video encoding I got better results with Hyper-Threading being Disabled.

I have seen here in some forums that someone was deciding which CPU is the best for video and many people advised that the Hyper-Threading of the Core-i7 is a good thing for this purpose - so here I give a practical example that it may not be true.

The only application where I have noticed worse results is Cinebench - with HT it gave 5.58 and without HT 4.22. But I mostly work in Final Cut Studio, so that is what matters to me more. Maybe for rendering some 3D objects HT might be better.

It seems that the Final Cut Studio 2 is not able to use the full power of this CPU's. I heard the same from my friend who has an original 8-core MacPro that the CPU ratio is always very low when even using Final Cut Studio 3.

Does anyone have an idea if there is a chance of making FCS using more of the CPU power?

Best!

Radim
 
Hi Radim,

This indicates that the processing power of your app is limited not by the number of processing cores but by the data transfer rate to and from them. The bottleneck may be in the memory chain from RAM down through the cache, or, if the data is coming all the way from the hard drive, speed of the drive or of the SATA bus.

In any case, the data transfer bandwidth is maxed out, so that the CPU can only process data at the same rate no matter how many cores are used. Putting HT on (doubling the number of logical cores) only results in each core getting more idle. The small (relatively speaking) deterioration with HT may be because of increased overhead from HT.

To be honest, I don't know a thing about Final Cut Studio :!: but in general: Try to think about how your application engages your computer system as a whole, and eliminate (upgrade) the weakest link. That should get you to realize your system's potential better.

By the way, I think this thread would better be in Post Installation -> General Tuning.
 
Akubichan said:
Hi Radim,

This indicates that the processing power of your app is limited not by the number of processing cores but by the data transfer rate to and from them. The bottleneck may be in the memory chain from RAM down through the cache, or, if the data is coming all the way from the hard drive, speed of the drive or of the SATA bus.

In any case, the data transfer bandwidth is maxed out, so that the CPU can only process data at the same rate no matter how many cores are used. Putting HT on (doubling the number of logical cores) only results in each core getting more idle. The small (relatively speaking) deterioration with HT may be because of increased overhead from HT.

To be honest, I don't know a thing about Final Cut Studio :!: but in general: Try to think about how your application engages your computer system as a whole, and eliminate (upgrade) the weakest link. That should get you to realize your system's potential better.

By the way, I think this thread would better be in Post Installation -> General Tuning.

Hi Akubichan,

thanks for Your reply. I wrote this message based on a thread about what processor one should choose to get better results in video production and someone was recommending Core-i7 because of the advantage of HyperThreading.

Regarding the system weak parts - I doubt there are some - while doing the encoding operations, the Hard drives are mostly idle - or working on minimum speed. I use hi-speed drives on SATAII, which read and write approx. 130MB/s. I have 12GB RAM and still haven't got use of more that 8.5GB. Regarding the motherboard I think that the Gigabyte X58A-UD5 rev.2 is a really powerfull board, so I don't think the problem would be there. Any other ideas?

I can't explain why FCS2 works faster with HT off = 4 cores. I had a feeling it could improve the performance and it did. I would be happy if it would be able to use still more of the CPU power but that is probably a question on the developers of the software.

Best Regards!

Radim
 
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