Anyone done any benchmarking on Carrara renders on the new Intel dual core processors (630s) versus the single cores? While 2 cores seems like it ought to run faster on a render, they are a little slower (less than 5% so not much diff there) and their L2 caches are half size (per processor, more significant). If the working set size on a typical render is greater than 1MB, the second core might not add much. Just wondering if anyone has any benchmarking data they could point me to. It's time for a new machine ;-) Thanks, Marc

I think to optimize Carrara they would have to rewrite how the applications multithreads. I am sure that Eovia will be pushed to doing this because soon every new computer will be sporting dual core chips, including Macs!

You might want to PM Patrick_210, I know he just picked up a new dual core machine. Perhaps he can give a little feedback.

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins

Pinklet, Even without a re-write, you could start up a second process, couldn't you? Eric, thanks, I'll try Patrick.

I just got a new machine with dual core and I really like it. I don't have a lot to base comparisons on, but it renders nicely on Carrara. You can watch both processors render independently in the render room, and also in the sky preview and spot renders in the assembly room. Reminds me of watching Bryce lightning. The specs are as follows: 2.8 ghz dual core 800 FSB 2 gig DDR2 ram 160 gig SATA HD XP Pro Seems to render roughly twice as fast as my AMD 2800 processor. I do think the AMD chips are faster, but I got a good deal on this, with 19" flat panel & DVD combo burner the total was around $1500+. Patrick