Laughable FCPX performance despite decent specs

[Scott1204]

I tried with my 1080ti and AMD 560 and it made no difference.

It’s frustrating because the Ti as an amazing card. Under Premiere it does fantastic... no proxies or rendering needed for many complex effects.

Hopefully Apple will update FCX in the future, especially as eGPUs become more popular.

 

[MrRodoSmith]

And I'm a hill billy geek. Just listen to me on the YouTube page. People are shocked when they actually hear me.

First off, no issue with the accent. (from North Carolina myself)
Secondly, your kids are adorable and I couldn't stop focusing on the aquarium (nice clown fish).
Thirdly, I have a similar setup - i7 6700, EVGA GTX 1060, Gigabyte GA-Z170X-UD3

Still having issues with benchmarks in FCPX (running High Sierra 10.3.3, FCPX 10.4). Internal graphics are turned off. Not sure what else I need to check and tweak to get the results you did.

Thanks in advance for your help/feedback.
=)

 

[jordya]

First off, no issue with the accent. (from North Carolina myself)
Secondly, your kids are adorable and I couldn't stop focusing on the aquarium (nice clown fish).
Thirdly, I have a similar setup - i7 6700, EVGA GTX 1060, Gigabyte GA-Z170X-UD3

Still having issues with benchmarks in FCPX (running High Sierra 10.3.3, FCPX 10.4). Internal graphics are turned off. Not sure what else I need to check and tweak to get the results you did.

Thanks in advance for your help/feedback.
=)

I also have a similar setup and I'm seeing terrible FCPX performance when benchmarking BruceX...around 2 mins.

I was able to get "Hardware Encoding Supported = Yes" working, but no improvement at all when running BruceX.

My setup: i7 7700K, GTX 1050ti, Gigabyte Z270XP-SLI, 32GB RAM
running 10.13.3, FCPX 10.4

Any advice or tips from the members is greatly appreciated.

thanks!

 

[boogieman77]

I have yet to install High Sierra just not got around to installing it yet.

 

[amt8]

Same problem here:

i7 5920K (6 cores 3,8ghz)
16 GB Quad Channel RAM
GTX 1060 6 GB
High Sierra on APFS
Webdrivers installed

MORE THAN 6 MINUTES FOR THE BRUCEX TEST!!!!

I think FCX is using only CPU rendering and just for one core. Also that core CPU usage is very low.
I started to notice the slowdown just a few days ago, since previously I only used FCX on Sierra and other older versions with a GTX 960. With those older versions the performance was quite good, so when I started to see a simple text needed minutes to render I knew something was wrong.

Anyone found a solution yet (other than buying an AMD card)?

 

[amt8]

Oh, I just took the BruceX test on my Sierra 10.12.5 backup using FCPX 10.3.3

46 secs!!!!!

So there's something wrong either with FCPX 10.4 (the one I used on High Sierra), with High Sierra or the Nvidia Web Drivers for High Sierra.

Edit: I just did the BruceX test again in Sierra but with FCPX 10.4, and the results are also correct (in fact a couple of seconds better), so the problem has to do with High Sierra or the Nvidia web drivers.

Edit2: Ok..this is weird, I just tested the BruceX again but in High Sierra and I got 41 seconds.

Edit3: Don't know why, but know the BruceX test in High Sierra is 65 seconds now (and I'm getting crashes and even screen corruption sometimes)

Edit4: Rebooted High Sierra and immediately launched the BruceX test, result 22 seconds!!!!!, repeated the test without closing FCPX..40 seconds...repeated again 90 seconds...repeated again 115 seconds...
Then I log out and log in without rebooting, launched FCPX aaaand...40 seconds.
Also while the test is rendering the "WindowServer" process goes crazy using up to 50% CPU

Definitively there is something wrong either in Sierra or the WebDrivers, sounds like a memory leakage or something else.

Any help appreciated.

 

[boogieman77]

Oh, I just took the BruceX test on my Sierra 10.12.5 backup using FCPX 10.3.3

46 secs!!!!!

So there's something wrong either with FCPX 10.4 (the one I used on High Sierra), with High Sierra or the Nvidia Web Drivers for High Sierra.

Edit: I just did the BruceX test again in Sierra but with FCPX 10.4, and the results are also correct (in fact a couple of seconds better), so the problem has to do with High Sierra or the Nvidia web drivers.

Edit2: Ok..this is weird, I just tested the BruceX again but in High Sierra and I got 41 seconds.

Edit3: Don't know why, but know the BruceX test in High Sierra is 65 seconds now (and I'm getting crashes and even screen corruption sometimes)

Edit4: Rebooted High Sierra and immediately launched the BruceX test, result 22 seconds!!!!!, repeated the test without closing FCPX..40 seconds...repeated again 90 seconds...repeated again 115 seconds...
Then I log out and log in without rebooting, launched FCPX aaaand...40 seconds.
Also while the test is rendering the "WindowServer" process goes crazy using up to 50% CPU

Definitively there is something wrong either in Sierra or the WebDrivers, sounds like a memory leakage or something else.

Any help appreciated.

For a update Im now on latest Nvidia drivers and up to date with 10.13.4. Ive got my FCPX updated also. Its blazing fast again. Getting some BruceX test in at random and they are always under 13 seconds. I dont base FCPX on this I base it on the videos I encode. I did a test before upgrading with a simple 4k 60fps roughly 5 minutes in length. Before update on 10.13.3 using old nvidia drivers .106 it would take the video roughly 4:56 to output as a master file. After updating to what I am now. Im seeing the same video done in roughly under 3 minutes. So using the latest Nvidia and 10.13.4 im back happy I wont be updating anything for a while. The lagging in other things from browsing to everyday things is also gone.

 

[amt8]

I just updated to 10.13.4 too with latest web drivers and the improvement is clear. First BruceX run with the system just booted was 22 seconds, every other retry is always 33 seconds. Not bad, I guess the difference in results with your system is due to your 1080Ti vs my "poor" 1060. Anyway I'd really like to know why the GPU usage meter shows about 30% or less usage while is rendering and the CPU usage also just about that. It seems FCPX doesn't really use the hardware at its maximum capacity.

BTW, can your system play a simple credit scroll title with the "better quality" setting turned on without slowdowns? (with background rendering off)
I can't remember if I could in my old 960 GTX, but it's really surprising me such powerful cpu/gpu can't scroll a bunch of text at 30 fps without slowdowns.

Thanks!

 

[boogieman77]

I just updated to 10.13.4 too with latest web drivers and the improvement is clear. First BruceX run with the system just booted was 22 seconds, every other retry is always 33 seconds. Not bad, I guess the difference in results with your system is due to your 1080Ti vs my "poor" 1060. Anyway I'd really like to know why the GPU usage meter shows about 30% or less usage while is rendering and the CPU usage also just about that. It seems FCPX doesn't really use the hardware at its maximum capacity.

BTW, can your system play a simple credit scroll title with the "better quality" setting turned on without slowdowns? (with background rendering off)
I can't remember if I could in my old 960 GTX, but it's really surprising me such powerful cpu/gpu can't scroll a bunch of text at 30 fps without slowdowns.

Thanks!

No issue. Worked just fine. If I do update I’m making sure this version is cloned to one of my spare ssd drives. I was just about to roll my Sierra drive back in and forget high sierra. The lag in the user interface was enough to drive me crazy much less the poor performance of FCPX.

 

[amt8]

In my computer the credits roll starts to stutter when 4-5 lines are shown in the screen and I use the "better quality" setting.
Maybe always stuttered, even when I had the GTX 960..I can´t remember, but what is driving me crazy is the fact, THE SAME effect in iMovie works perfectly at full framerate and full resolution. In fact, every text effect I tried worked way better in iMovie than in Final Cut Pro X (and they are the same ones, using the same engine).

Just for fun installed Premiere 2018...but I can't stand it...yes, I know it's probably more powerful than FCPX but the fact you have to render almost everything and even at 1/2 screen size and low quality preview many "complex" graphics stutters makes me think Adobe never really optimized its software (even with CUDA Mercury Engine turned on).