hi all... just installed vue 5 infinite on my new pc and... the performance are the same of the old pc !!! :( this is the configuration of old pc : pentium IV 2.3 gigahertz 512 mega (in past 1 giga, but in last days 512 mega) video card 64 mega the new PC : pentium IV dual core 3.0 gigahertz 2 gigabytes of ram video card Radeon X600 with 256 mega render time (sample scene - final 400x300) old Pc 2 minutes and 8 seconds new Pc 1 minute and 59 seconds suggestions ? PS : ok, maybe is better if i will make others rendering, but believe me, i'm detronized...........

Very Interesting. :)

Maybe you should try higher render quality and see how the new CPU handles GI for example.

Why didn't you respond to your last thread about suggestions for your new pc before you actually purchased?

purplecloud the new pc come in my house from a good opportunity, and i've saved many money... and, of course, the configuration of this machine, for me, was not so bad... so i've boought it... maybe was an error... maybe... 'coz i've tried with other tests, a little bit better : a 35 minutes render in old pc, come in new in 20...

Hi Luca I would have thought your new PC would give you a significant step-up too - Memory and CPU are the two main factors for increasing speed. I'm wondering if your first PC was 3.2Ghz and not 2.3GHz - i'm not sure i've heard of this speed (just checking)? Some rendering modes use HT more than others - but if you have your old PC available too - you could always use RenderCows! >8o) Also - it's worth checking to see if there are any background services or applications that might be using up CPU %. I'd recommend your having a chat with Frederic Louget - he's a bit of a hardware guru at C3D, so might be able to advise you too. Kind regards

A possible explanation: memory transfers. The P4 dual core chip uses the same northbridge to main memory as the P4 single core version - FSB800 might be the bottleneck. The Athlon64x2 dual core CPU: each core has its own "lane" to main memory, which means memory transfers can be twice as fast. Comparing my Ahtlon64x2 4400 (2.2 GHz) with my Athlon64 3500+ (also 2.2 GHz): the 4400 was almost exactly twice as fast rendering a sample scene. From Frederics CPU comparison sheets I get the impression that AMD CPUs perform significantly better with Vue than Intel CPUs.

May be that there is something in the options to tell vue to use the seccond core ??

Luca,
could you be more precise about your PCs specifications ? I believe also that it's 3.2 GHz instead of 2.3 (not a standard frequency) for your old PC. In that case your second post makes sense : 20 mn against 35 is 1.75x faster, perfectly logical for 2 x 3.0 against 1 x 3.2. I suppose your dual core Pentium is a Pentium D 830, maybe you can confirm that ? And you should try our "official" benchmark with the Cerro Verde scene, there are already a dozen results or so in the General forum at Cornucopia 3D.

svdl,
you are right Vue likes AMD CPUs better. However memory speed has a very low influence on render speed (almost negligible in fact).

emeR,
No there is no option to specify the number of threads Vue can use, it will automatically use the maximum that your CPU(s) can handle. However it would be very useful to have that option (especially for the cows), it is certainly in my wish list. To see if your CPU is fully used, just open the Windows Task Manager, if the CPU is at 100% while rendering all is well :)

Oh by the way my name is Louguet and not Louget :)

Message edited on: 02/14/2006 03:10

Hi Fred - Oops thanks for correcting me on your surname - I thought I might have been spelling it wrong sorry! >8o) Quick thought - although RenderCows max-out CPU usage, is it possible to set >1 RenderCow on a PC, but logged in as a different user (i.e. Switch Users)? Don't know if this would be useful at all - or if changing the Process Priority would have any influence... Kind regards

This (below) is a copy of a post at e-on registered users forum --------------------------------------- Possible rendercow optimization for dual core I would like the possibility to enter the maximum number of threads a cow can use ! The idea is related to efficiency in running more than one rendercow on one PC. It is already possible. I just launched 4 rendercows on a dual opteron dual core, each with a different port (5002 to 5005). It works as if you had 4 cows, but it is not efficient right now, as each cow is trying to use 100% CPU by running 4 threads, and the OS gets a headache. Even with this mess, the render time was only 3:18 instead of 3:09 with a single multithreaded cow. Now if only I could put a limit of one thread max per cow in their settings, each one would use 25% of the CPU without conflict (on a 4 core machines), and we would see if it works. Why bother with multiple single-threaded cows instead on one multithreaded ? Simple : it would probably be more efficient on multi-cores / multi-processors machines to run several independant (2 or 4) cows, rather than having a single multithreaded cow, as a dual-cpu is never as fast as two independant cpus running concurrently (and the efficiency decreases even more with the number of CPUs). On a dual Opteron dual core and with independant rendercows, you could have the equivalent computing power of almost 4 cows instead of ~3 as of now. It would probably help a bit too (though not as effectively) with dual cores. With more cows, Vue also increases the number of tiles for rendering, which is generally a good thing for efficiency in large renderfarms. Of course all this is useful if you have enough memory to run all the cows without swapping, because you have to send the scene and textures 4 times. It would work for cpu-heavy but not too memory-heavy scenes. But if it works, it could be even more effective in the future with multi-cores (4, 8) 64 bit computers. All it would take to put this theory to the test would be for e-on to release a new beta-cow with this option : define max number of threads used. It shouldn't be too difficult, and I am ready to beta-test it and report the results. I believe it is worth trying.

Message edited on: 02/14/2006 05:18

thanx all guys !! i will make other rendering, cerro verde included... Luca.

Do a render size of 1024x768 or larger if you want a better comparison.

well i've tried with SPonza benchmark test on cornucopia forum : 15m 11s tomorrow i will make same test on old pc...

Attached Link: http://www.cornucopia3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1509

Frederic, I don't think it's possible even with multithreading to specify or allocate a specific CPU usage threshold by thread. If the cows become multi-threaded, then they will just transfer the CPU execution priority to the Operating System and contention will continue to occur. The performance would be no different than your test of running multiple cow instances on the same platform. I think what you should be begging e-on for is a 64-bit compiled version of Vue, which would give you 16GB of physical RAM addressability versus the 2GB limit today.

David,

I already begged for 64 bit, many times, and the next version of Vue will be 64 bit, so I am just waiting now :) But I don't think you really understood what I asked. I don't want to limit the CPU usage per thread, I know it's not possible. I want to limit the number of threads per cow. I want to enter '1' in the max threads dialog, to make the cow start only one thread, or two, or four. That is easy to do.

Okay Frederic, I see where you want to go on this idea - sorry about my confusion. Anyways, I doubt very much that e-on will make the cows threadable in the sense that they could launch or execute multiple rendering threads through a single cow. The issue isn't technical, it's licensing. How would you control the number of virtual cows in relation to the physical cows from a licensing standpoint? I think you raise a great point however in that e-on may need to rethink the cow licensing issue if the mutilcore/mutiprocessor market starts to take off with the Vue user base.

Attached Link: http://www.futuremark.com/download/?3dmark06.shtml

Message edited on: 02/14/2006 18:17

David,

I hadn't thought about the licensing thing, yes this is something that will have to be cleared out. But in my opinion a cow licensing should be "by machine". One cow = one machine, even if it has 8 cores. But the user should have the choice (it's what I ask) to run one cow with 8 threads, or 8 cows with one thread on the same machine if he wants to.

NightVoice,

3DMark06 is the new version of a well-known game benchmark, unfortunately it gives no indications at all about 3D creation performance (rendering, OpenGL preview). And its results are to be taken with a grain of salt, especially with ATI graphics card. Personally I don't like synthetic benchmarks (only real applications, or real games), but to each his own :)

Hello,
perhaps this is the moment to place my (probably silly) question about Vue5Inf, speed and memory :
I'm on a Mac G4 with 1 Gbyte of RAM.
When I make a terrain (about 3 million "virtual" polys),
Vue takes about 60 MBytes of RAM and pages 450 Megs to disk.
When I render this scene, RAM usage goes up to 66 Megs, that's all.
But,... System monitor says that 650 megs of Ram stay simply unused.
So I wonder, if giving more RAM to my G4 would speed up anything, exept vendor's turnover...

Louquet

True, that benchmark is not all that useful for real life Vue purposes. But it does give some nice system details to be used for comparison. For example, there was question on if it was a 3.2 or 2.3. Simple program like 3dmark will give exact system details and even compare cpu power. If it shows a huge increase in cpu ratings, then it shows the bottle neck is somewhere else. So while for benchmarking purposes it may not be all that accurate, it gives people a headstart as to where to look for figuring why the loss in results. :)