Arena 6 and multithreading

[GMAS]

Does anybody have any experience already with multithreading? Who has run a "heavy" project and saw that indeed arena 6 is using multiple core/threads?
Or is is still better to go for lesser cores but higher clockspeeds?

How about the issue that arena6 would be less depend on the gpu but more on the cpu? Anybody see any improvement on that?

[Warspite]

I checked this in beta - it works great and scaled well on 12 cores. It is time to invest in multicore.

[kman1898]

On my 4 cores it's using 124% of 400% but this is much more and more work on my CPU than 5... it was only 60% of 400% with arena 5

[drazkers]

I remember during the beta it was mentioned that keeping to a 4core machine that's 3.8ghz will be great for everything I vaguely remember. Not 100% sure on that.

[Menno]

Below is what i've advised during the beta in response to a question whether a single-core setup or a multi-core setup should be preferred.
What it comes down to is that we'll parallellize work wherever possible, but sadly it's not always possible.

Will we be utilizing multiple cores? yes. For each and every button you press? no

There's things we do for which the total number of cycles matter (num cores * clock speed) like thumbnailing, deck switching, composition loading, file opening, column triggers and video decompression to name a few.
If you're purely concerned about fps then i assume you're using a codec with very low decompression overhead (dxv duh). In this case clock speed will help our single threaded renderer run faster if secondary cores finish decompression in time.

For now i wouldn't suggest getting a 32 core 2.3GHz cpu yet, but rather an 8 core 4.2GHz for example.
I have an i7-5960x. During deckswitches my cores chew through the work like hungry grizzly's but during normal playback (dxv) there's not enough work for them to do.

I gues you should first select a decent clock frequency (4GHz is pretty nice) and then get as many cores as your budget allows, 4 being lower bound.

[drazkers]

Below is what i've advised during the beta in response to a question whether a single-core setup or a multi-core setup should be preferred.
What it comes down to is that we'll parallellize work wherever possible, but sadly it's not always possible.

Will we be utilizing multiple cores? yes. For each and every button you press? no

There's things we do for which the total number of cycles matter (num cores * clock speed) like thumbnailing, deck switching, composition loading, file opening, column triggers and video decompression to name a few.
If you're purely concerned about fps then i assume you're using a codec with very low decompression overhead (dxv duh). In this case clock speed will help our single threaded renderer run faster if secondary cores finish decompression in time.

For now i wouldn't suggest getting a 32 core 2.3GHz cpu yet, but rather an 8 core 4.2GHz for example.
I have an i7-5960x. During deckswitches my cores chew through the work like hungry grizzly's but during normal playback (dxv) there's not enough work for them to do.

I gues you should first select a decent clock frequency (4GHz is pretty nice) and then get as many cores as your budget allows, 4 being lower bound.

Thanks for jumping in! I got my threads and cores mentally mixed up. Great heads up.

[Menno]

Yeah 'threads' and 'cores' are a different thing, it's confusing because they aren't always used to describe the same thing and can be interchanged with eachother. In the end we're never really interrested in how many physical cores a cpu has. What we care about is how many threads a cpu can execute in parallel.
Take my current cpu for example: https://ark.intel.com/products/82930/In ... o-3_50-GHz.
It contains 8 physical cores (booo). But it supports hyperthreading, and as such it can run 16 threads in parallel (yay).

Here's intel's description for what a core is:

# of Cores
Cores is a hardware term that describes the number of independent central processing units in a single computing component (die or chip).

And for a thread:

# of Threads
A Thread, or thread of execution, is a software term for the basic ordered sequence of instructions that can be passed through or processed by a single CPU core.

[Warspite]

Checked it again.
I can run 12 videos with 1400x1080 resolution at 60 fps in Resolume 6. 12-core XEON scales up to 55% load.
Please note - video is encoded in h264. In Resolume v5 i can do this only with DXV content and decoding made on Videocard.
With H264 in Resolume 5 i can get 40 fps on second layer, 20 fps with 3 layers, 13 fps with 4 layers. CPU load - 20%.
Same machine, same conent.
So Resolume 6 is waaaaaay better then v5. I am thinking about switching back to h264 from DXV

[GMAS]

So you are also saying that arena 6 is definitly less dependend on the gpu than the older versions?

[Warspite]

It is a relative thing. I do not think that to say "less dependent" is correct.
Yes, there is more help from CPU in file playback, but in some areas CPU wont make GPU life easier.