My longtime computer builder and technical consultant jotted down a quick assessment of how he corrected my problem with SE's (and Vegas') poor performance and what he did to correct this, with the wishes of having me pass his conclusions onto this group.
hello paul, here's a hardware configuration, and troubleshooting of the whole problem.
Asus P5DLD2-Deluxe motherboard.
4GB DDR2 667mhz crucial memory
Intel dual core 3.4ghx cpu
3ware 8 channel sata II raid controller pci-e 4x
pny Quadro NVS 440x16 pco-e 16x
(2) 500gb sata II 7200rpm drives on board in mirror raid
(2) 500gb sata II on 3ware striped
(2) 500gb sata II on 3ware striped
external 500gb sata II USB 2.0 for archive and backup.
the original drivers that came with the nvs caused stability problems so switched to the latest drivers at the time. ran several performance test on drives including disk IO, cpu stress test, memory test. ran sisoft sandra and compared to similiar intel and amd based system performance statistics which was well above those similiar ratings.
vegas ran initially at full frames, mirage ran faster.
Problem: vegas running slow, mirage has issues. ( a update was done for IE7 and WM player along with some ssecurity updates)
removed the updates possible except those that would affect other programs and possibly cause other problems.
no change in performance.
from recommendations ordered the nvidia geforce 7950 GT. uninstalled the nvs drivers, shut down, removed the nvs, installed the 7950, powered up installed the drivers.
had paul run specific software and no change in performance.
removed the 7950 installed the nvs and powered up.
there we noticed pauls apps ran better and looked at the drivers and saw they were the drivers from the 7950. so we tested playback of quicktime and on scenes with panning or lots of delta's the framerate dropped. had paul test different codecs avi uncompressed, divx, mjpeg. the avi played back flawlessly. had paul comvert several quicktime clips to avi and confirmed playback was perfect.we surmised it was quicktime.
problem. tablet drawing showing blinking end on drawn line. went back to last driver used problem still persisted. had paul check cables and switch monitors 1 and 3 in reverse. problem gone.
will install the drivers from the 7950 on tuesday hopefully.
It has been my experience that all too many times software vendors point to it always being hardware when in fact it's a software issue. In pauls case it's a combination of newer drivers and not using quicktime to erase he problem.
now for the nvs card, I throughly researched this card in particular because he needed multiple monitors and it was a better idea to use one card rather than two cards. even though it's stated it's primary use is banking and financial is basically for multiple displays. we have delivered this card and it's variants to several banking and investment firms. the applications they use is not gpu intensive, they need it strictly for multiple displays. in additional to this I called nvidia, my distributor, and they confirrmed this card is fine for video editing. with card it's also fine as I've tested it with catia, autocad 2005 and 207 at a construction company we delivered a cad specific workstation to. the nvs gpu is a NV43 chip, the quadro 3000 series is a NV35GL chip. I compared the specs and the quadro 4000 series had a G71 chip.
thew nvs is a 11 micron die, the 3000 a 13 micron. it has a higher transisteer count than the 3K series but not the 5K series. also this card is fully directx and open gl compliant.
the nvs is equal or surpass's most the quadro cards excluding the quadro 5K series in vertex shaders, vertex pipelines, pixel /texture pipelines,and pixel shader version. ( this would be most beneficial if working in 3D, paul works in 2D so no real benificial gain there. the nvs has a core speed of 440mhz, the 3000 series a 400mhz speed and the 4000 a 375mhz core speed.
the areas it's weak in are focused in 3D such as geometry rate, fill rate, and a smaller memory bandwidth bus. but even with these deficits I have yet to have a complain from the construction company who's using it intensivly.
while I'm not a video guru, I do work with video occaisionally, and play and dabble with various editing and dvd production suites. some expensive, some cheap.
as for codecs, quicktime has it's plus being it creats a smaller file, it's con, decompression is cpu intensive. avi, larger file size, less cpu intensive.
So Problem: poor performance.
Solution : update drivers, use avi instead of Qtime.
