Rendering bottleneck

Russinating

Russinating

Russinating

Soldato
Joined
27 Dec 2005
Posts
17,316
Location
Bristol
My work PC specs are:

Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz
AMD Athlon II X4 630 2.80GHz @ 3.36Ghz
Gigabyte GA-MA785GT-UD3H AMD 785G

Rest standard, 7200rpm drives etc. The main bulk of my work is video rendering - as in, footage, not animation, so not particularly graphics-card strenuous I wouldn't have thought.

Anyway, when rendering my CPU sits at 99% and my available free physical memory decreases slowly from whatever it was sat at pre-render. Based on this am I right in thinking that the CPU is the bottleneck?

At what point does the hard drive become the bottleneck, ie it physically can't write as fast as it's getting the data?

Thanks in advance :).
 
Both CPU and RAM would be a bottleneck for video rendering. Video rendering loves RAM it really does.

Also depending on what video package you use then a GPU could be used to assist in rendering.
 
If your cpu is at 99% then yes it is the limiting factor ("bottleneck") for performance.

I think that your cpu would need to be a lot faster for your hard drives to be the limiting factor.

If your RAM does not go to 100% usage then it isn't the limiting factor.
 
Disco Boy said:
If your cpu is at 99% then yes it is the limiting factor ("bottleneck") for performance.

I think that your cpu would need to be a lot faster for your hard drives to be the limiting factor.

If your RAM does not go to 100% usage then it isn't the limiting factor.
Click to expand...

The RAM issue isn't that simple. I've seen video renders increase in speed dramatically with more RAM even though the system says it has RAM available.

The CPU for the op however is the biggest limitation.
 
It is probable that whatever CPU was fitted it would be at 99% utilisation. The only differential would be the less time taken for a faster processor.

Depends on the application though. If it likes lots of cores, a 1055T may be worthwhile. A phenom II would provide benefit from the extra cache.

More expensively an intel sandy option but I would wait to see what Bulldozer does in June and decide then before opting for a complete mobo ram cpu upgrade.

Of immediate benefit would be ram as DDR3 is relatively cheap and universal between platforms. 8Gb would be better than 4Gb for rendering.
 
I would say going from an Athlon II X4 to a Phenom II X6 would give you the biggest boost in performance possible for that system in rendering (assuming your rendering program is multi-threaded, most good ones are). However, RAM is cheap right now so if you can afford it, an extra 4 GB wouldn't hurt.
 
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