How do I force TMPGenc to use more of my 2 gig memory

[arcorob]

Running 2 Gig ddr (4 sticks of 512) in Dual Channel mode

I hit Taskmgr and I see the two channels working however, it never uses more than about 240 meg of my 2 gig memory...I have tried the memory tweaks for XP , etc...No change. MAde the Page file smaller , put it on a raid drive, no change.

In general , when rendering, etc...How do I force XP to USE ALL I HAVE ?

[studtrooper]

You can't because it doesn't need it. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people nowadays think that the more ram you have past 512MB the better, when in reality the law of diminishing returns sets in after 1GB of ram. The only program I've seen to use more than 250+MB of ram is Photoshop, and it wasn't even that much higher. The new version of Windows (dubbed "Vista") might be more hungry for your memory, but as of right now, you pretty much have 1GB of useless ram

[rallynavvie]

studtrooper seems to have subscribed to my set of ideals here

TMPGEnc will see as much as the max memory utilization you can set in its options, no more. And then it only uses that for when it prefetches bitrates on a VBR pass. 512MB is ideal for WinXP, 1GB may be ideal for some users. 2GB is a lot, and unless you're utilizing it by running a lot of processes in the background you will hardly ever use it. And at that point you better have a good system chipset and processor(s) in order to handle all those little processes.

Some apps I've seen that use quite a bit of memory still:
Battlefield 1942, no Vietnam or BF2 as much, but the original loaded as much of its map into memory as it could and I saw memory utilization peaking around 1.5GB (but remember that includes pagefile usage as well). AfterEffects can eat up as much memory as you throw at it for previewing video with effects laid over it. Beyond those two I haven't seen much top 1GB of utilization so since that number includes your pagefile then 1GB of physical memory is more than enough for most users.

[thevoelk]

You can try giving the TMPG process a higher priority, but I wouldn't recommend it. To do this, go to Task Manager and righ-click on the TMPG listing, select "Go TO Process". Right click on the process, select "Set Priority" and choose the one you want. Choosing realtime will probably slow most of the other running apps to a crawl.

BTW studtrooper, plenty of engineering and statistical programs can utilize much more then 1GB of RAM, not including virtual memory.

[rallynavvie]

BTW studtrooper, plenty of engineering and statistical programs can utilize much more then 1GB of RAM, not including virtual memory.

And the computers running those programs are built for that sort of thing. Consumer-level PCs will probably see a decrease in overall performance past 1GB physical.

[alsyed]

plenty of consumer level computers are running these engineeering and statistical stuff...

and medical stuff also

[Abbadon]

You could contact the programmers or programmer of TMPGEnc and ask them to re-write its code for the use of 1Gigabytes of ram.

Of course, there is no garantee they will.

[thevoelk]

We run alot of this stuff on work at (heavily) upgraded Dell Precision 370/450 workstations and the XPS Gen 2s. By upgraded, we bought it with no add-on video card, and installed 9800XTs we bought on the side, added another GB of RAM, added 10000 RPM SATA-RAID5 arrays (for security reasons we're directed to remove the optical drives).

I will admit, a lot of this stuff is custom developed by companies such as SAIC, BoozAllen Hamilton, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, etc, and not available for the average consumer to buy. Given the investment the DoD puts into things like this, they want it available for years to come.

[rallynavvie]

Upgraded to a 9800XT? Those are consumer graphics cards. The Fires and Quadros have hardware on them to deal with CAD/CAM and 3D rendering apps. In fact my old Quadro FX1100 will smoke my 6600GT when doing realtime rotations and previews of objects in Lightwave. Most of our Precision 340/360s at work are running Quadro 4s and they do remarkably well with complex Illustrator files (thousands of vectors) that brought the 5600 Ultra I had at home to its knees. Weren't the default AGP cards in those Dell workstations workstation cards to begin with? If so you may have downgraded them by leaving them out like that.

[thevoelk]

Compared to what Dell offered at the time, 9800XT were a good option for stats machines. The default Dell offred was a 32 or 64 MB Quardo. Most of the stats machines were for running numbers on test runs, they didn't have a lot to do with high end graphics.

[julitomg]

And what about HDV?..I´m planning to upgrade(well, build a new PC)to be able to edit HDV in a near future(maybe with Premiere Pro or Sony Vegas, I haven´t decided yet) but have read that it´s very memory inensive(not to metion CPU-intensive), I´ve read that you shoul use AT LEAST 1 Gig of RAM

[rallynavvie]

HD video is just a larger res version of D1 so of course it's going to draw more resources. However the reason memory is used in those programs is normally to draw a preview of a segment of video for playback at realtime. I haven't seen Premiere draw much more than 1.5GB total otherwise (this includes pagefile usage). I'd say if you're going to be doing a lot of HD work in a professional app like Premiere, FinalCut, or Vegas that you'd want to build your entire system around that, not just throw more RAM at it.