I'm rendering a sequence with a lot of Fluid Motion Effects in HD. Rendering 1:1 on a 2 x 2.66GHz Dual core Intel Xeon MacPro with 5GB 667MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM RAM and while rendering i open Activity monitor the % of cpu used is 25% to 30% leaving 70% idle.

Is this right?

Is there any way to improve this?

Thanks

Agustin

bump

I'm working on actual data for this, but it's hard to come by.  Avid DOES utilize all 8 cores for most functions, but not all.  In particular, some effects do not render using all available power.  Not sure which yet.  Which effects were you using when doing this render test?

Hi Todd, thanks for the reply!

I'm rendering a sequence with a lot of fluid motion, as as far as I can see Avid is using 1 core only.

Could you be disk-bound instead of CPU-bound?

I don't Think so. I have a 4x500GB SATA II Drives Array connected to a HighPoint RAID Card with 180+ MB throughput.

MC 3.0 is also using the gpu for a lot of operations and has an "intelligent" algorithm for deciding which silicon chips to use when. FluidMotion uses several techniques found in mpeg playback acceleration (e.g. motion prediction) which the gpu can handle more effecient than the cpu, so my _guess_ is that your intel chips are almost idling because your nvidia chips are doing all the work.

Well, it's only an assumption...