Hey all!

Was hoping someone could feedback if they've used a 10920x in a build and what it's general performance is like?

A general use case for me is 8 callers, 2-3 NDI outputs, then stream and record (usually 2 recordings!)


On my current build (i7-9700k) this absolutely redlines my CPU and even causes a lot of issues, to the point where I have to push some stuff to other machines (such as using an NDI out into a different machine to handle encoding/streaming/recording).

My colleague has a build with the Threadripper 3960x and it handles all of this and much more (absolute beast), but trying to figure if I can save a few £ by taking a cheaper core that's still more high performance than what I currently have.


Can anyone help?


Cheers!
H

I do this regularly (and even more) with a 3rd gen i7 (3770K) on a Z68 chipset motherboard, 16G of DDR3 RAM and a GTX960 ! The CPU never goes above 50% and the render time fluctuates around 20ms !

Your problem is not the CPU!

Which graphics card do you have?

Got that! That's what I'm talking about indeed.

Trust me! I'm not bullshiting you.

More details:
- my vMix computers are dedicated to vMix, meaning there's nothing else than vMix and the required drivers to make it work with BMD cards, audio interface, midi controllers.
That's it! No Office, no Adobe crap, no third party apps, not even NDI tools (vMix doesn't need it). As a result, when idle, the CPU is between 0 and 1%. Nothing in the background, no unnecessary services activated.
- second, my projects are very well organized and optimized. For a basic production I have around 50 inputs, sometimes 70-80. Nothing goes into vMix without prior testing/analysing. When the provided media do not fit my requirements, they are converted or re-encoded to what I know works best. For example, a ProRes video might use 10/15% CPU for playout. The same converted in H.264 will barely use 1%.
- everything I do in vMix (and I do a lot) is carefully managed. I always try to find the best way to set up my projects based on recommendations (for example use Lists for videos) and my personal experience. And trust me, I ask vMix a lot and my projects are often very complex and very demanding. I always have several NDI i/o, have 4 monitors, use EXT outs extensively and despite all this, accepting 8 vMixCalls is not a challenge.

In fact I also have a i7 7700K computer with a Z270 chipset, DDR4 RAM and all... It's obviously more powerful and the same project will render twice faster (around 10ms) but the difference is slight when it comes to CPU load (maybe around 10 to 15% less).

So I don't think upgrading your CPU will drastically improve things for you. I feel like it's more a "work method" problem and most likely the fact that your computer has a lot of background processes already running.

My 2 cts...

Yes, I have it configured correctly




I'm happy to hear any other pointers people have - but I had always assumed using the vMix call functionality, you're getting 8 feeds in (so up to 8 h264 decodes) and then sending potentially up to 4 h264 encodes back (for outputs 1-4), so that's an incredibly CPU intense process, no?

Then what are other obvious areas for me to look at as to why my machine struggles?

Similar to you, when on a job I strip the machine right back to its barebones, no additional software will be running except potentially something like Zoom to output into, and NDI tools to open studio monitor to watch some of my outputs flexibly.

I wouldn't use any NDI tools on the same host as vMix. NDI stands for "Network Device interface", it's not supposed to be used on the same host as the source, especially when NDI is quite CPU intensive and it makes no sense to encode to NDI via vMix and decode NDI via Newtek. I'd rather use a small laptop to monitor my externals...
Same for Zoom: I never use it on the same host. Zoom is CPU based and can be fed over the network by NDI.

Looks like the 2070 does not work as it should.
Invert the RTX and see what happens...

yep

This was without any recording or streaming even running (but yes, that would normally be set)

Thanks Xaver - while I was running on these drivers for my 2070 test, the 3070 machine unfortunately wasn't, as you can't get drivers old enough for that series (the cards are too new) - but this could actually explain the discrepancy that the 3070 is actually being overused, rather than the 2070 being underused.



This however puts me back to square 1 - why is my CPU being maxed out to 100% when having 8 callers in & sending 4 videos out?