Poor 4K performance on Mac Pro, why?

[CaptBeardsomme]

Hi, i'm trying to figure why i get poor 4K playback performance on our Mac Pro.

If i play 4K videos i have converted myself i can only play 2 simultaneously before the fps drops below 30fps, if i use the resolume benchmark files a single file drops med below 30 fps (both clean and noisy). This outputs to a single monitor.

If i look at the activity monitor as this happens i see the CPU usage is about 115%(only about 10% of total cpu power available), ram usage is about 2GB of 16GB and the read speed from the SSD is only about 2-4MBPS, which is way lover then the disks can perform.

So what is my bottleneck here? Is the GPU struggling? Can't Resolume utilize all the CPU cores?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Also; If a Mac Pro isn't the optimal solution for playing back tons of 4K videos, what would be your suggested solution?

[Joris]

Are you running Mavericks on that Mac Pro by any chance?

[CaptBeardsomme]

I was, but i was thinking the same thing and upgraded to Yosemite. That provided no noticeable change in performance :-/

[Joris]

That's a pity. Your problem sounds like something a lot of people had on Mavericks, but went away on Yosemite.

When I run the 4K benchmark on our MacPro with 1 control monitor + 2 outputs at Apple's smallest scaling ( which is not fully 4K but somewhere around 3000x1600, even though we have 4K monitors ), I get 5 layers clean, 5 layers noise.

Also 115% CPU sounds like you're decoding on the CPU, not the GPU. During my test, CPU evened out around 58%.

[CaptBeardsomme]

Hmm, is there a setting for choosing decode method?

The only setting i have changed is the "turn of global effects and transitions"

[Joris]

No, there aren't any settings to disable this.

Are you sure you're not running an older version of Resolume?

[Zoltán]

which years mac pro do you have, and which video card?

[CaptBeardsomme]

Hi

I just reinstalled the latest version of Arena, just to make sure that wasn't the problem. No changes in performance.

I'm running a Mac Pro (Late 2013)
3,5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5
16 GB 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC
2 x AMD FirePro D500 3072 MB

I'm assuming this should give me enough juice :-/

Btw. don't know if this gives you an idea, but the 4K clips i'm struggling the most with are encoded as "DXD3, Timecode" i'm having better results with the files i've encoded myself which are "DXDI".
Note: as i say better results, i can still only play two clips smoothly.

[Zoltán]

try encoding those files to quicktime/DXV3, with uncompressed audio.

[CaptBeardsomme]

Allright, just did that. And the files that were easier to run earlier, now became very laggy.

So from this it seems like DXV3 is way more resource intensive, at least on higher resolutions.

It still doesn't quite help me to understand whats going on here thought. Is it the graphic cards that are struggling? Or is there something stopping Resolume from utilising the capacity of the hardware?