Tiny opened this issue on Aug 16, 2003 ยท 33 posts
Tiny posted Sat, 16 August 2003 at 8:28 AM
I got a new computer doubble the speed of processor from the old one but I hardly see any difference in Vue rendering. Are there some settings or similar I've missed?
Poser shows increadible difference in render time.
sirkrite posted Sat, 16 August 2003 at 9:56 AM
Vue uses OpenGL and hardware acceleration. Even thou your Mother board CPU is twis as fast, your video cards CPU my not be. Poser doesnt use OpenGL or Hardware acceleration; it relies on your Motherboard CPU for speed. In Vue under (File) go to to (Options) and turn off OpenGL and hardware acceleration and see how fast it renders.
wabe posted Sat, 16 August 2003 at 10:52 AM
rendering hzas nothing to do with OpenGL! Only display id affected by it. So there must be a difference in rendering speed, it only goes through the prozessor. Another importing thing is memory. The more memory you have, the better.
One day your ship comes in - but you're at the airport.
sirkrite posted Sat, 16 August 2003 at 11:13 AM
Attached Link: OpenGL
And what do you think makes your hardware accelleration (Video Card) work wabe?wabe posted Sat, 16 August 2003 at 11:21 AM
Display! Rendering is pure math, pure processor power - nothing else. For rendering images you even don't need any grafic card. There are render boxes available where you even cannot connect a monitor to! lol, Walther
One day your ship comes in - but you're at the airport.
sirkrite posted Sat, 16 August 2003 at 12:51 PM
You are missing the piont here! In Poser Tiny's getting. "Incredible difference in render time." No OpenGL NO hardware acceleration. In Vue; OpenGL/hardware acceleration. "any difference in Vue rendering." This would indicate that the Video Card is slowing it down. Bottle Neck! If Tiny sets the options so it doesnt use the OpenGL and Hardware acceleration it might render a little faster. Some computers come with Inboard Video Cards that have slower chips then the Motherboards chip and it will slow things down. Where as if you have a faster Video card, the display work it does for the Main CPU will increase the speed. Because then the main CPU doesn't have to do that work too or be slowed down because the video card can't keep up.
gebe posted Sat, 16 August 2003 at 1:19 PM
E-on's people told me that graphic driver is NOT used while rendering!!! Render speed can be increased in grouping a maximum of objects, using as less as possible reflecting material and lights, not using soft shadow, deepth of field, etc... Guitta
sirkrite posted Sat, 16 August 2003 at 2:17 PM
"E-on's people told me that graphic driver is NOT used while rendering!!!" Well!.... They should be. ;) Now we got to figure out another reason why a processor that is twis as fast isn't rendering twis as fast in Vue.
wabe posted Sat, 16 August 2003 at 2:37 PM
another time - rendering is calculation of the processor nothing else. You can - even with Vue - render on several machines (RenderCow). What role does a video card play there? None. Rendering has nothing to do with display. Even when OpenGL slows down the display mode in Vue (iff), we are talking not even in percentage here. Look, i have started a rendering this afternoon which promises me 16 hours til it is finished. To refresh screen with OpenGL it takes - well - half a second? Ok, let's be hard. 1 second. So the bottleneck in rendering is never ever a video card. It is memory and processor speed.
One day your ship comes in - but you're at the airport.
forester posted Sat, 16 August 2003 at 2:46 PM
sirkrite, wabe is correct. The video card has nothing to do with it. A few months ago, we had a long thread going here where many of us hardware geeks (most of us pros in the trade) ran some systematic experiments and compared render times, etc. to determine exactly which hardware components affect Vue rendering, and by how much. Wabe participated in those studies. If you search through the old threads, you can find those discussions and study results. Tiny, a bunch of us are professional computer scientists and such. If you'll provide an exact description of your CPU (make and model), and your motherboard and RAM, if possible, we'll try to help you figure out what is wrong. Also, for comparison's sake, could you tell us basically what your old system was too? If your CPU and motherboard really are twice the speed of your old machine, but Vue is taking the same time to render, something really is wrong. This forum is to help with things like this, so post some specs, and we'll try to help.
Gaussian posted Sat, 16 August 2003 at 3:02 PM
Sirkrite, Wabe is absolutely right. And oh, you don't need to believe me, even if I'm a professional computer technician working with computers, mainframes and large networks for the last 15 years or so, after all, what do we technicians know about computers, everybody's neighbour knows more LOL
sirkrite posted Sat, 16 August 2003 at 3:45 PM
Actually I'll take gebe's word on it. If E-on told her so, then that is what is. :) As far as some of you being computer Tech and Scientist, I don't know that! Allot of people claim to be allot of things online. Allot of the times there full of it. ;) I do know gebe's the moderator of this forum so I'll give her the benefit of doubt. Wabe; apparently your right then. Sorry!
sacada posted Sat, 16 August 2003 at 6:33 PM
When I got my new box (over twice as fast), the level of complexity within my images increased without me noticing. I, too, was concerned that the rendering time was not considerably faster until I took one of my scenes back to the old box to render and it took days instead of hours. This may be a problem. Another thing to check is for Hyper-threading. This is a new Intel technology that simulates a dual processor on a single chip. I have done experiments on a Dual processor machine (theres a thread on this about 3 weeks ago) but I still don't know the impact on a single processor machine. Go into BIOS and turn it off and re-render (check the time differences)
wabe posted Sun, 17 August 2003 at 2:47 AM
:-)) No need to say sorry. Sometimes discussions like this are refreshing. Lol, Walther
One day your ship comes in - but you're at the airport.
Tiny posted Sun, 17 August 2003 at 1:13 PM
Thank you all for helping out. :o)
Here are some facts about new and old computer. I hope I've gathered the right info.
Old computer:
Athlon 1.33 Ghz
1.25 Gb of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX/MX 400 (graphic)
SL-75DRV series (mainboard)
New computer:
Intel P4 3.04 Ghz
1 Gb of RAM
Club3D Radeon 9600Pro (graphic)
MSI 865PE NEO2 (mainboard)
Poser render.
A scene with lots of textures, transparencies and such.
Old computer: 4 minutes 50 seconds
New computer: 2 minutes 3 seconds
58% faster
Vue render.
Scene = 04_Dordogne.vue (comes with Vue)
OpenGL off. Res 800 x 600, 300 dpi, Anti-aliasing
Old computer: 19 minutes 45 seconds
New computer: 14 minutes 48 seconds (no difference with openGL on)
25% faster
Do I understand things right that there is no gain rendering one image with RenderCow? I have the 2 computers connected. Is there another way I can use both to speed things up?
wabe posted Sun, 17 August 2003 at 1:22 PM
Sorry, i am on Mac so i can't help you with all these details. But i think you are right, RenderCow only makes sense for animations.
One day your ship comes in - but you're at the airport.
forester posted Sun, 17 August 2003 at 1:38 PM
Good data, Tiny. Let me research out your motherboard for a little bit. I want to look at the bus speed for that board. Your machine certainly should be faster. The CPU is the first most important factor, and the motherboard's bus speed is the second most important factor. For a 3.04 Intel chip, your motherboard should be operating at 800 Mhz, instead of at 533. After these two factors, RAM, and then the Hard Drive Controller are the next most important factors. Sometimes, the Hard Drive is the bottleneck. Let me check some details, and I'll get back to you.
forester posted Sun, 17 August 2003 at 1:53 PM
Hmmm! Nice motherboard, Tiny. Also, and interesting one because the RAM affects the bus speed on this board. According to the MSI technical specs, we should find out what your RAM is (DDR266, DDR333 or DDR400) and who is the manufacturer. Apparently, on this motherboard, the BUS speed adjusts itself down or up, depending on the kind of RAM you have. A lot of the RAM manufacturers whose product is approved for use on this board only run at 512 or 533, thus slowing down the entire motherboard processing by a great deal - enough to account for the minor gain in rendering time you are reporting. So, can we trouble you for this informat on your RAM also. Incidently, here is one URL for your motherboard, so you can go take a look at this yourself. http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/mainboard/mbd/pro_mbd_detail.php?UID=433
Tiny posted Sun, 17 August 2003 at 2:51 PM
hmm...
It says about RAM:
Kingston KVR400X64C25/512 (2 of that)
Hard drive... I have 2 of them:
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus 80 Gb SATA
I recognise the 800 Mhz thingy but I can't figure out where I check it on the computer.
Dale B posted Sun, 17 August 2003 at 5:57 PM
Hmmmm. Sorry to get in so late.... :) On that setup the memory -looks- like the proper kind to invoke the 400mhz DDR frontside bus. It may very well be the SATA drives that are the current bottleneck; SATA is a new technology, and has gotten nowhere near it's potential as yet.
forester posted Sun, 17 August 2003 at 7:00 PM
Yes, I agree. The memory will allow the Motherboard to operate at full speed. So, it is likely that the SATA drives are the bottleneck. The MSI motherboard has "Northbridge" limitations with respect to the SATA drives. Tiny, do you have two drives? If so, saving your scene to the second drive, and then rendering the picture after that. You may experience a slight speed increase.
Tiny posted Mon, 18 August 2003 at 2:35 AM
Ok I'll try that, Forester.
"the SATA drives are the bottleneck"
Is there a better driver for this? Or is this not "fixable" ever? :o(
Tiny posted Mon, 18 August 2003 at 2:46 AM
It says in the catalogue that transfer speed for the SATA drive ought to be 150 Mb/sek compared to 100 or 133 on the old ones. Are you saying the old ones are still faster?
Another thing. Why is Poser 58% faster apperently using what power there is. But Vue not? For me as an amateuer it looks as if the problem could be within Vue.
:oP
MightyPete posted Mon, 18 August 2003 at 2:52 AM
Tell you a secret. Over a 3dcommune.com in the Mojoworld forum somebody there found a similar problem with there new computer and Mojoworld. You might want to find that thread cause he figured out how to fix it. Maybe the post is 6 months old.... You never said what operating system...
Tiny posted Mon, 18 August 2003 at 3:00 AM
I'll look for the thread.... thanks. Operating system: Win XP home
Tiny posted Mon, 18 August 2003 at 5:30 AM
The thread on 3dCommune said that he manually did something with BIOS which fixed the problem. I have no idea what to do with BIOS, and should probably not mess around with it. :o) Any suggestions?
Dale B posted Mon, 18 August 2003 at 9:08 AM
SATA drives have the =potential= to throughly blow the current PATA drives out of the water.... but the technology is still in version 1.0 (literally 4 days after SATA became an offical standard, they were waxing rhapsodic about the speed you'll get with the upcoming SATA II specification). On some operations, like the loading of a lot of sequential data, like a huge texture, a SATA drive does exceed the throughput speed of of a parallel drive; in a random access job, the PATA drive is just as good, or better. At the moment (this is like when they came out with the UltraDMA specification; at the very beginning, people saw no real difference in performance over the old PIO mode 4 drives, either.) As to something in the BIOS. I would wager a bit that what was done is that Hyperthreading was turned -OFF-. Intel's Hyperthreading isn't all they want you to think it is. It allows the processor to run more than one process thread at a time, and that is about it. It does this by utilizing pipelines in the CPU that aren't being used at that time (like the MMX pipe, for a quick example). It doesn't magically make your system think it's a dual processor system, and to get any real benefit out of it, your application has to be coded to take advantage of it. With current software, Hyperthreading can actually hurt your system's performance, as the processor is wasting cycles trying to do something that is utterly unneccesary. Poser is a bute force application. P4 uses a scanline renderer; this uses CPU and memory, the more you have the better it runs. So those numbers look about right. Vue is a bit more complex, so throughput time from your system memory and the swap file come into play. And one caveat to keep in mind, the days of 'Double the clockspeed, Double the performance!' are over, and have been for several months. The Athlon's have been hanging in against P4's that are clocked 600mhz to 1ghz faster. -How- a chip was designed is what matters now, and real world applications are the only way to judge the results. Benchmarks are too easy to rig against one or the other. Poser isn't a multithreaded application to my knowledge. Vue is. In your BIOS, there should be a single line something like 'Intel Hyperthreading' and across from it the word ENABLE. Just highlight it, and use the up down arrows (or page up-page down, depending on who made the BIOS), and toggle it to DISABLED. Then save the change, let the system boot, and run the Vue test again.
MightyPete posted Mon, 18 August 2003 at 12:37 PM
Attached Link: http://www.rojakpot.com/
Bios is easy but only make a single change at a time and then reboot. Write it down what you did. It's important when you make changes to the bios that you know exactly what you did where it is and how to undue it if problem come up so you can easily fix it without creating yet more problems. Bios is key to making a computer run best and by default lots of things are turned off because they have know way of knowing if your equipment can handle the new settings so they keep it turned off cause it creates problems for you. Like for instance Printers have a old low speed tranfer and a new (1995) highspeed tranfer. Guess what you cannot even buy a old slow tranfer printer anymore even if you tried but the bios is set to go the old slow way just incase, even today by default. So best to check the bios. Go here and read all about it. I also posted a link here not to long ago about tweaking XP for more speed. Look around for it.Dale B posted Mon, 18 August 2003 at 3:30 PM
PS: Ignore the typos; I'm at a family members home, and the keyboard I was using was.....dying, shall we say? This is the new one.
Tiny posted Tue, 19 August 2003 at 6:30 AM
Guess what!
I disabled the "Intel hyperthreading" and rendered the Dordogne in Vue again.
Result 9 minutes and 2 seconds!
Compared to earlier:
Old computer: 19 minutes 45 seconds
New computer: 14 minutes 48 seconds
That is increadible! It is similar to the Poser speed. I must get back and test some more before I believe it. ;o)
Just wanted you all to know.
Thanks a million to all of you!
shouting and jumping around...
Dale B posted Tue, 19 August 2003 at 8:34 AM
You're welcome, and Happy Vue-ing! (Adds another notch to the Geek Victory Post... :P )
NightVoice posted Tue, 19 August 2003 at 10:19 AM
You think you are happy now, just wait till you see that it just shaved 2+ days off a huge render. :)
Thalaxis posted Tue, 19 August 2003 at 12:45 PM
Well, I think it's obvious that E-on seriously needs to rebuild Vue4... I was going to suggest a quick test of downloading CineBench and running on both rigs... but I guess it's moot now, eh? The problem with HyperThreading is that the processor is reported to the OS as 2. If the OS is unaware of the difference between physical and logical processors, you can kiss efficient scheduling good bye. The problem is that there is only one floating point add/mul pipeline, so that particular resource is shared; if the SMP code in Vue is unaware of the difference between physical and logical processors, that would be a bottleneck, since it would likely be trying to perform simultaneous floating point ops rather than accessing memory while one thread is crunching... the net result being that it thrashes the floating point pipeline. It's probably not E-on's fault that this is a problem, it is more likely that they just haven't updated the rendering engine yet. Just for reference... rendering in Cinema4D R8.1/2 ALWAYS shows better performance with HyperThreading enabled than without.