3 posts tagged “matrox”

For typical uses, e.g. word processing, email, web browsing, a typical specification computer can be used.

For non-typical uses like playing games and video editing, you often can't get away with a typical specification. The trouble is that it can be difficult trying to figure out what specification you do want in order to get the most from your system. Reviews go some way but since there can be an amazing number of permuatations of hardware bits and pieces, it can be difficult to compare apples and oranges.

WGehrke has created an automated tool for generating some benchmark results for Premiere Pro. The tool performs three tasks: rendering of the benchmark's project timeline, exporting that timeline to a single AVI file and encoding it to a DVD MPEG file.

I decided to run the test twice on my new computer. The first run would be with just Premiere Pro. Here are the timings:

• Rendering: 248 seconds
• AVI export: 42 seconds
• MPEG export: 52 seconds

I then re-ran the test, this time using the Matrox RT.X2 hardware to accelerate the processes. Here are the timings from that run:

• Rendering: 166 seconds
• AVI export: 33 seconds
• MPEG export: 106 seconds

It should be understood that a lot of the benchmark uses native Premiere code, particularly the MPEG export. I'm not sure why it took so much longer on the second run; I didn't run the test again to see if it was consistenly slower. It is worth knowing that there is an additional mechanism for exporting MPEGs using the RT.X2 hardware acceleration and that should be a realtime process. I didn't take that route, though, because the compression settings would have been slightly different.

So how does this system compare with other results?

For the rendering test, the native run is slower than the first three submitted results, which are a 2.66GHz Quad Core, a 2.66GHz Dual Core and a 2.93GHz Dual Core. I'm not particularly surprised about that. This is a processor-intensive operation and is likely to be single-threaded so even though I've got 8 cores, they are clocked at 2.33GHz, which is slower than all of the others. When the Matrox RT.X2 acceleration kicks in, the run is the fastest of all results.

For the AVI export, 42 seconds is about middle of the road for all of the submissions while 33 seconds is 2nd fastest time. I hadn't expected the RT.X2 to have played a part here. The AVI export should be a disk intensive operation. My system has got 7200rpm SATA drives (the Barracuda 750Gb drives) while the other contributors have largely used 10,000rpm drives.

Finally, the MPEG export. 52 seconds is again about middle of the road, while 106 seconds is really bad - I need to re-run the test to see if it is consistent. If it is, I'll report it to Matrox for their investigation. This test is another processor intensive test so I'm not surprised at the 52 seconds.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the results. The RT.X2 clearly makes a difference - and largely a beneficial one. The choice of the harddrives was largely driven by a capacity desire and I wasn't overly concerned by the difference between 7,200rpm and 10,000rpm.

The choice of going for 2 Quad core processors may seem a bit strange, particularly given that a higher speed Dual core processor is more effective. However, this system was bought with the long term in mind. Multi-core systems really only came to the forefront during 2006 so not much software takes advantage of them. I expect that to change during the lifetime of my system.  

It has been a long time coming but I've finally got the new video editing computer (a.k.a. The Beast) home, waiting to be married up with the Matrox RT.X2 SD/HD video editing card.

The first struggle is getting the box out of the car & into the house. The system is so big & heavy, it needs two people to carry it. It is too wide to fit through the door, so we have to turn it sideways - carefully as I had opened the box at work and not taped it up again! Having done that, I've got to get the system out of the box & into my room. It is really heavy and I shouldn't be carrying it by myself but the doorways & corners are just too awkward to try to do this with two people.

Next hassle ... fitting the RT.X2 card. This is a full length PCI Express card, which means that not only must the card fit into the socket, but the card also has an alignment strip at its far end that must be slotted in ... all while trying to dodge the cables that are strewn throughout the system. I finally manage it, but I've still got to fit the additional harddrive (& its SATA cable) so I'm a bit anxious that I might not be able to do that without removing the card - it is a bit close to the SATA sockets.

Power-on and the system produces a nice crisp images on the Dell 24" widescreen display. Pretty much the rest of the evening was spent installing the Adobe Production Studio. 5 DVDs ... and I'm beginning to wonder if this should be going faster than it is.

This morning, I installed the RT.X2 software and ran the validation software. My video card isn't validated, even though it is on the Matrox site. I'll upgrade the driver tonight & try again. Boot-up for the workstation is pretty darn fast, so I'm a bit happier about the performance of the system.

I'm currently downloading a 3.3Gb update to the RT.X2 software. As this rate, I'm not going to get it all down within a day - Matrox need to upgrade their connection, I think.

I'm a bit disappointed about one thing, though. The update includes some new effects and, according to the Matrox site, my graphics card doesn't have enough video memory to perform the cube effect. Now, that is a bit of a cheesy effect so I'm not too worried, but it annoys me that I've gone to all this trouble to build a system that is going to last me a really long time and it is already out of date. Still, the graphics card was probably one area that I was expecting to upgrade during the lifetime of the workstation in order to maximise its performance under Vista when everything becomes Vista compatible.

I've been persuing video editing as a hobby for quite some time now and, lately, I've been trying to push that hobby into some sort of money-earning exercise, particularly around weddings. To that end, last year I upgraded from two Sony DV camcorders to two Sony HC1 HDV camcorders. I didn't have the software or the hardware to support them but the pricing in Tokyo was good enough to persuade me to take advantage of the opportunity and worry about getting the footage off them later! That, and the fact that you can actually use them as very nice DV cameras as well.

Wind the clock on a bit and we get to the release of Adobe's Premiere Pro 2 which comes with native HDV support. This significantly improved on the previous version which needed to transcode the HDV footage into an internal format ... and that didn't work for me. Native HDV support needs a lot of processor power, though. My n-year old Pentium 4 2.8GHz PC just doesn't cut it. My new(ish) Core laptop does - just.

So it is time to replace the main video editing PC. I've been a big fan of Matrox video editing enhancements for quite a while now, starting with the 2500 then the RT.X100 and now the new RT.X2 - a reasonably low cost add-on card that provides good support for HDV footage in realtime. The downside is that you still need a fair amount of processing power - a minimum of two processors or cores.

For the RT.X2, Matrox have been persuing a policy of validating motherboards & systems in order to provide the most efficient level of support. I'm not entirely happy with building my own system so I've opted to go for a brand-name, even if that adds some $ to the cost.

As a long-standing Dell customer, my initial intention was to go for a Dell system ... but Matrox didn't have any validated. They primarily had dual-processor AMD systems. Intel were just about to launch dual-core CPUs, though, so I waited. It took Matrox a while to validate them but there are now dual-core systems on their list ... and the dual-core Xeon based HP xw8400 and Dell Precision 690.

Those two workstations are simply fantastic. I've done a careful comparison between the two and there isn't a lot between them. The primary differences are in the number of drives, the built-in RAID compatibilities, slot configuration and power capabilities. One curious thing from Matrox's testing is that the best-of-breed graphics card that works OK in other systems - the Radeon 1950 - does not work well in these workstations. Matrox are still looking into that.

With the quad-core Xeons about to be released, I'm almost set to place an order ... with Dell. As there wasn't much between the two workstations, I'm taking advantage of the corporate discount we get so the Precision 690 wins on price. What am I getting ... ?

2 x quad-core Xeons (8 cores!!!!)

4GB memory (4x1GB)

500GB SATA boot drive, 2x750GB SATA data drives

Dual-layer DVD +/- RW drive

ATI FireGL V7200 graphics card

plus the Matrox RT.X2 card. At some point I might then add the Creative X-Fi card as the default is only stereo as far as I can tell.

I'm probably going to set this up for dual-boot - XP for the video environment and Vista for everything else. In a 32-bit environment, 4GB memory is the maximum that can be used, so I'm not going to be in a rush to change that.

The rumour is that Adobe Premiere Pro 3 will be set for Vista so I'm hoping that if that is the case, Matrox will release Vista drivers and also update their compatibility test so that newer DX10 cards like the amazing Nvidia G80 are supported.

Now all I need is my own nuclear power station to keep that lot running!