Computer set up to work with AE smoothly

Excessive memory consumption 90% of the time comes down to configuration issues, bad drivers, leaky DLLs. You name it. You can make a 512 GB system crash just as easy if you are using e.g. a hacky CoDec from some exotic media player software or screen capture tool in AE just as you can with a broken storage or motherboard driver. I do get your point and who knows what went on with your previous i9, but I'm pretty sure once you actually get to do your daily work, you will find that many times at least AE really does not simply use more RAM even under extreme load.

 

That's also the reason why likely nobody can fully alleviate your doubts and confusion. This is really a case of me doing this stuff for 20 years and relying on my gut feeling just by looking at screenshots sometimes. Sometimes "you simply know". indeed synthetic benchmarks can be contradictory, but of course there's always a logical explanation behind these discrepancies. Storage matters. AE's cache matters. PCI transfers to and from your GPU matter. There's simply a lot going on under the hood. Again, though, given how AE works I maintain my position that fewer cores usually are better. Latest when you use stuff like particle systems chugging along on one or two cores you will learn to appreciate the better single-core performance over any parallel rendering.

 

And quite generally, unless you plan on doing new videos for your display every day, the actual rendering is what? 1% of all the work? 3% perhaps? People always seem to forget that and I can't quite understand why it's so critical to them to shave off another five minutes of render time when they could just let their machines run overnight. Unless you churn out trailers and graphics for TV where you literally sometimes just stream your AE preview live to the studio, I can't see why people are so obsessed with this. Interactive performance and reliable preview performance have always been more imporatant to me.

 

As for the GPU stuff - simply driver issues. Apparently NVidia haven't managed to create a good set of drivers for every RTX models, so many users have reported problems e.g. with the 421 versions, but no trouble with older 411 versions that should be less optimized. This may simply take a few tries to find the right combination just like it may take some experimentation on running two videos in parallel. Generally it should be possible, though, I'm just not sure how well VLC fares under those conditions. It may be better to run this in Windows Media Player directly and/ or rely on professional video splitters or stuff like Samsung's multiscreen connection features. Playing 12k is still pretty non-standard and quite ambitious.

 

Mylenium

Hi Mylenium

Thank you for your reply.

While I am the person who will be using the system, I have been also talking to a colleague who is responsible day-to-day for our IT systems, his thoughts and feelings are below.

A bit more background to our needs. As previously mentioned, we have 4x 55inch 4k screens.

In our setup, these screens will be in portrait and the 4 (portrait) screens will be side by side. Our plan is to band three of these screens together as one using Nvidia Surround and display one video. The 4th screen will be independent, but simultaneously showing a different video. This means that we will need to create content with a resolution of 11,520 x 2160 for the three merged screens. The other will be a normal 4k video, but in portrait. Videos will be bout 3 minutes long.

We understand your comments about the core count, as we have also read articles and seen reviews which mention that there is a point of diminishing returns when it comes to core count. However we have also seen benchmarks from Puget Systems which notes that the 32 Core Threadripper Pro is not a bad choice for AE, however at the end of the day these are benchmarks and may not be applicable to real-world performance. Again based on these same benchmark, it suggests other Ryzen (5000 series) chips are better than their Intel equivalents. However these chip top-out at 128 GB max RAM>

You mentioned the i9. Interestingly enough, we did have an octa-core 11th Gen i9 with 64 GB RAM and a 8GB Radeon W5500 card, but we ran into all sorts of issues, including AE reporting insufficient memory. This is what has lead us to feel that 128 GB still might not be enough and in some cases has put us of the consumer Intel chips for this system. Due to the problems, this system has gone back to the manufacturer. In light of this were are currently using AE on a hexa-core i7 with 80 GB RAM and using templates from and we are sometimes struggling.

RAM is also another reason we felt that the Threadripper Pro was a good choice. Consumer level chips top-out at 128 GB RAM. If we when with such a system and then found 128 GB was not sufficient, we would have nowhere to go without buying a complete new system, whereas with the Threadripper Pro, we could grow to up to 2 TB if we were mad enough. To do the same with Intel, we would need to go to the Xeon-W range (if memory serves correctly).

Our though was to drop to the 16 Core Threadripper Pro, which has a higher base clock and probably get a better GPU, however again based on the benchmarks from Puget Systems, it does suggest that in some cases the 32 Core is significantly better than the 16 Core in certain metrics. So as you can probably see we are a big confused as to where to really go.

You also mention taking time to properly configure the GPU and hardware acceleration - any recommendations on how to do this?

The bottom line is this:

* What would I need, both in terms of CPU, GPU and RAM to create 12K videos?
* The system would be in use for 4 to 5 years and would need room to grow.

I also understand you point about cost, our company does not have infinitely deep pockets, however the price we have been quoted for the system detail seems reasonable given that the system will be used for 4 to 5 years and compared to the cost of having similar work done externally over the same time period.

The display for the final output is likely going to be the least of your worries - set the desktops to mirror on all four screens in the NVidia driver, switch VLC to fullscreen and the driver takes care of simply duplicating and piping the buffers into all desktops. Outside that the normal rusles for AE apply: All processing is limited by how optimized some code is to use parallel processing and multithreading. That simple truth still applies even with the new multiframe rendering. A 32 core Ryzen therefore makes little sense, especially when working with 4k. Get a processor with fewer cores, but strong TurboBoost liker a core9i. Similarly, 512 GB of memory is probably overkill and will only raise your electricity bill. there is no reason that even under ideal conditions a 128 GB system would not suffice. Point in case: While everyone rides this "More RAM is better" for AE or 3D programs, there are simply practical limits as to how much memory apps will even use to do their thing. 512 GB really would only make sense if you ran complex simulations in Houdini or did compositing of 32k panaoramas in Nuke to create virtual sets for IMAX films. Of course none of this may matter if your company realyl doesn't care about the cost, but I'd take a night's sleep to get to a rational level. It really comes back to the fact that you can't kill/ coerce/ coax AE with hardware and have to be smart about what system you get, how to configure it properly, how to structure your projects and ultimately how to use soem features in AE in an intelligent manner instead of brute-forcing it. On that note: Be prepared to spend some time configuring your GPU and hardware acceleration settings. Many users report issues if graphics driver versions and overall configuration don't work well on RTX cards.

 

Mylenium