Has any one got any experience in rending on more than 1 pc at a time in vue i am using 2 pcs of following specs  win xp 3GHz dual core 3GB ram and the other win vista 2.2GHz quad core with 4 GB ram. when rendering to disk with them both working on the same pic the dual core is about 30% fater than the quad (judged by the number of tiles each has done ) by current render at 51% done has 1365 vs 916 tiles completed. is it just that the faster dual core is just better ? is it because one is in vista  the other in xp or is it anything to do with the pc that was used to start the image and this is the one that it is being rendered to (the xp one ) any advice or information would be most welcome

It depends on many factors, some features cannot use multi-core.

Additionally unless you have Vue 6 Infinite I believe the max amount of cores you can use is 2 anyway.

Jon

iam using vue 6 Infininite and the task manager shows all 6 cores close to 100% usage

Whether your XP and Vista are 32 bit or 64 bit can make a difference. You also have a bit more memory available with your duo core compared to your quad.  You can figure about 1.5 gig for each core of the duo and 1 gig for each core of the quad based on memory use per core. Vue uses lots of memory.

Are both CPUs Intel/AMD?
If the 2.2Ghz Quad is an AMD it would explain the difference (AMD quad cores are slower than the Intel equivalent).

Otherwise it's probably the memory available per core or maybe the cores competing for the cache on the Quad core causing the slowdown.

both cpu are AMD both xp and vista are 32 bit versions.i know intel quad cores are faster but igot a quad core system for £225 too good a price to turn down!

 I have been rendering some very large files (7957 x 3850) using 4 Macs and 1 PC.  I have found that depending upon the complexitiy of the scene, some machines can lock up if they don't have enough RAM.  I've reduced tile size (from 256 to 128) and they all seem to be rendering OK now.  But finding a good tiles size thats most efficient is tricky as if its too small, the time it takes to send and receive from machines becomes inefficient and slow machines perform equally with fast ones.  So you want a tile size that keeps the machines busy more than the time they spend sending files back and forth. 

However, another problem I notice is that when all tiles are done rendering, with a very large scene, it can take longer to compile all of the tiles that it did to render them!  In these cases, it seems faster for me to render on a single 8-core machine as the compile time is extremely fast.  I haven't timed out comparisons though so I'd be curious to hear the experience of others too.

Equally, with very small files, it doesn't make sense to render across multiple machines as it becomes inefficient - unless you just want them cued for batch rendering during the night.

And again, Mac Intels don't work well as the Master for batch render distribution (but do work well for rendering) - I must use my Mac G5 for batch render distribution for all machines and all file types to be recognized.  E-on should fix the huge bug!  Is this on the list to fix?

ah so at least that explains why you might want to change the tile size i think then i made mine too small at 25x25 most renders i do are about 2500x2000  and most also contain some pose content as well

thanks for that info this turned out to be almost as good as an up grade changing the tile setting from 25 to 128 made no diffeerence to the dual core machine but a HUGE diference to the Quad machine it was rendering about a third slower than the dual core now  it will render about a third faster so a VERY worthwhile improvement  just doing that has turned out to be so once again many thanks for that input.

 Glad to be of help.

Its nice to get a cookie for post.

And you can further optimize your renders by carefully adjusting your render quality settings (AA and sky quality settings in particular).  I just do lots of small tests at different settings to see where the best point of optimization is.  My rule of thumb is to nudge settings up as long as it looks better but if I can't see the difference, there's no point in going beyond.  When comparing, it helps to open both files in an image editor for A/B comparision so you can see the subtle difference in details.