Video Rendering and Computer Performance

Below is a very render-intensive Vegas Video 3.0 project that I used to make a rough-but-real-world rendering performance comparison between two PCs. These tests aren't rigorous benchmarks or scientific tests, but they do illustrate some important aspects of PC performance.

Computer	Time (mm:ss)
Intel P3 1.1GHz, 128MB PC133 SDRAM, Win98SE	19:35
AMD Athlon 2000+, 256MB DDR333 (CAS 2.0), WinXP (HE)	5:48

Of course the CPU is the most obvious component influencing speed. The Intel P3 CPU running at 1.1GHz should be slower than the Athlon 2000+ running at 1.67GHz, but just looking at the speed in GHz doesn't tell the whole story. Measured in clock speed, the AMD is only about 52% faster, yet we see a 337% gain in performance in the real world. There is more to this than the horsepower listed on the side of the box.

The other major component is the RAM. The quantity of RAM was not important in this test: once you get above a certain threshold, enough is enough. I doubled the RAM on the P3 system and it made no difference at all. The quality of the RAM was critical, with the DDR333 stick (good quality RAM timed aggressively with 2.0 CAS in the BIOS) dramatically enhancing the performance of the Athlon system. Some P4 systems may have even faster RAM.

The faster RAM and faster CPU are, of course, running on a newer, and faster, motherboard. Overall improvements, but especially faster bus speeds, cannot be ignored. The Athlon board is running with a bus speed of 133MHz. Finally, there is no doubt that Windows XP (and similarly Win2000) is much faster than the four-year old Windows 98. So when shopping for a new video computer, make sure you consider the whole picture and expect to see dramatic improvements when moving to new generations (e.g. P3 to P4) of hardware and software.

Test it yourself: vegas_jitter01.veg

Created: 16 February, 2003  
Updated: 22 May, 2003