understanding system performance - CPU/GPU/Memory/Disks

[Marco Lomiler]

Hello people. How are you all doing?
I need some help to understand some points on my system performance.

i have a pretty nice windows desktop i did build 5 yeras ago whem i first bought my scarlet mx and now iam on Epic Dragon.

intel i7 3.4ghz
Asus Z87 deluxe dual mobo
32RAM
GTX Tiatan X
several barracudas HD 7.200RPM on sata 6g

My question is -

on the red cine whem i open to preview a red file on full , my system uses 98% of the CPU , only 15% of GPU , 32% of memory , and the disk reads only 32MBs.
on the render side , it keeps the same , and writes only 28MB/s
it was not supposed to use more power from the GPU and from the disks? the disks can write and read 130mbs.

on Media Encoder its almost the same , the only difference that it uses 34% of CPU and 40% of GPU.

Davinci the same. It previews very nice on quarter res
Cudas are enable .

So , my question is on the side of i was considering to upgrade to some M2 SSDs to read and write renders and caches someway on my native Thunderbolt1 from my mother board , or considering some PCIe USBc or T3.

why the softwares are not using at least 75% of the machine power ?

if someone could inspire me with some answers i would be thankfull.

thanks dudes.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Your current hardware should perform better than what you are reporting. Make sure you're on the latest software/drivers. That said, 5 is a lot in computer years.

RED continues to optimize decoding on GPUs, which seems to be their near term trajectory. Fast CPUs are still desirable, but I would not recommend blowing your budget on the latest blazer. The GTX Titan X you already have may not be the new hotness, but if you are running the latest RCX-Pro or an app that has implemented the latest RED SDK, you ought to be able to leverage all those CUDA cores.

Hard drive storage is fine for backups and general operations, but for many of the tasks RedUsers face - even 130MB/s is weak sauce. I'd invest in M.2 NVME, 2.5" SSDs or a spinning rust RAID. Ideally all your I/O would be via the PCIe bus directly. TB3 - with enough PCIe lanes assigned - is a great option. Properly implemented, USB 3.1 SS can exceed 1GB/s - just be aware that many systems are not well configured to exploit it's potential.

Cheers - #19