Rich_Potter opened this issue on Mar 23, 2010 · 14 posts
Rich_Potter posted Tue, 23 March 2010 at 3:40 PM
Hello.
Im trying to prepare a piece for this evening, and its not going well at all...
I have two computers hooked up and ive got hypervue running (thanks to chipp walters rather useful guide...)
I have hooked up my dual core laptop to my quad core desktop, and it is rendering away merrily, however, the quad core is only using 51% of my processor (normally it is 100%)
Does the renderfarm only process at the power of the lowest processor or am i doing something wrong?
Also when it says "prepass for tile 1 of 9" does that mean that it splits the entire picture into 9 sections or is it that its just being INCREDIBLY slow?
thanks for your help :)
bruno021 posted Tue, 23 March 2010 at 7:05 PM
It is indeed tiled into 9 pieces, and I suspect the prepass is only using 50%, check the CPU usage when it is actually rendering the tile. It is good to have 9 tiles, because if you had say 6, it would mean that a tile on the dual core would take a lot more time processing, and wasting render time, the more tiles, the faster they render.
I wonder though why the prepass isn't using 100% power...
Rich_Potter posted Wed, 24 March 2010 at 12:04 AM
i gave up with the render cows in teh end and went with quad core instead, took 9+ hours with a very noisy blue fanned computer in the bedroom :(
worst part is the render was AWFUL.
ill try again today with some smaller renders and see if it goes up to 100% later.
thanks for the reply bruno!
ShawnDriscoll posted Wed, 24 March 2010 at 2:02 AM
Could it be 50% because 200% would be crazy? So 50% for each system for a total of 100% in the end of pre-pass. I'm just guessing. Or does 50% mean 50% CPU usage instead of 50% pre-pass render complete? 100% would be a better CPU usage if you want things to ever finish.
Rich_Potter posted Wed, 24 March 2010 at 2:14 AM
ah no it was 50 cpu usage on the desktop, 100% on the laptop (i think...)
do the cpus all have to be the same to be used effectively? I know it just borrows idle cpu cycles but im suspcicious that it was only using 50% of a quad core when it was paired with a dual core...
ShawnDriscoll posted Wed, 24 March 2010 at 2:35 AM
I don't know if its a core thing or a licensing thing on E-on's part. Depends on what they consider a CPU maybe? Hardware aware? OS aware? BIOS aware? etc.
bruno021 posted Wed, 24 March 2010 at 4:00 AM
All cores available should be used. Hypervue is based on a machine licence, not CPU. You can use up to 5 machines, whatever the number of CPUs.
I just checked if it was a GR prepass issue, but here, rendering to screen, Vue uses all 4 cores of this machine.
Will check later if it is the same with network.
Rich_Potter posted Wed, 24 March 2010 at 5:59 AM
thanks bruno!
hobepaintball posted Wed, 24 March 2010 at 6:54 PM
I found my main quad core content creator would only run around 50% CPU on a network render and all 4 cores would be 100% on a local render. I stopped using Rendercows until I could get all 5 up to fast dual cores or quad cores with 4gb ram each. (1 upgrade left to go). I will use the same render farm for PoserPro 2010.
ALSO PLEASE DON'T EXPECT IT TO CUT THE RENDER TIME IN HALF. WITH YOUR SETUP EXPECT ABOUT A 15% SPEEDUP
3DNeo posted Thu, 25 March 2010 at 7:55 AM
I'm interested in hearing how this turns out and what the results are in the end. One thing for sure is I would certainly not think the render quality would be any different than if rendered on a single high-end computer. The whole idea of networked rendering is to speed up the entire process so you can do more renders in less time.
Render farms are not anything new, even the REAL expensive ones like Pixar and Dreamworks all have the same goal which is distributed computing. Now, how good Vue is in doing this I don't fully know. If it works as stated you should not be seeing ANY difference in your render quality. I don't know what that would be happening. If it continues, I would ask e-on tech support for help and see what they say.
Jeff
Development on: Mac Pro 2008, Duel-Boot OS - Snow Leopard 10.6.6 &
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon , 10GB
800 MHz DDR2 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT.
Rich_Potter posted Thu, 25 March 2010 at 7:59 AM
it wasnt render quality i was concerned about 3dneo, it was the picture i made that was awful. Nothing to do with vue, all down to me and lack of sleep/time :P
I havent run it through to the end with a renderfarm yet becuase I had to get it to a deadline and it felt quicker/more sensible to use a single pc than half of my faster processor and a much slower processor to do the same job.
I can try doing the renderfarm again and see if it goes up to 100% when out of prepass or if it keeps to 50% all the time.
3DNeo posted Thu, 25 March 2010 at 7:59 AM
Quote - I found my main quad core content creator would only run around 50% CPU on a network render and all 4 cores would be 100% on a local render. I stopped using Rendercows until I could get all 5 up to fast dual cores or quad cores with 4gb ram each. (1 upgrade left to go). I will use the same render farm for PoserPro 2010.
ALSO PLEASE DON'T EXPECT IT TO CUT THE RENDER TIME IN HALF. WITH YOUR SETUP EXPECT ABOUT A 15% SPEEDUP
If you would, send me a PM here. I am curious as to your setup because I have two computers now I am using but want to expand that and would like to discuss more on that with you. With 5 different dedicated machines with those specs, you should be getting awesome render times.
Jeff
Development on: Mac Pro 2008, Duel-Boot OS - Snow Leopard 10.6.6 &
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon , 10GB
800 MHz DDR2 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT.
3DNeo posted Thu, 25 March 2010 at 8:05 AM
Quote - it wasnt render quality i was concerned about 3dneo, it was the picture i made that was awful. Nothing to do with vue, all down to me and lack of sleep/time :P
I havent run it through to the end with a renderfarm yet becuase I had to get it to a deadline and it felt quicker/more sensible to use a single pc than half of my faster processor and a much slower processor to do the same job.
I can try doing the renderfarm again and see if it goes up to 100% when out of prepass or if it keeps to 50% all the time.
OK, thanks for clearing up the render quality part because I thought you were saying you could actually see a difference in quality between a networked render and a single computer render and that should never be happening.
I would be interested in hearing your results when you do it again. From what I thought, it should use the full power of the main computer then distribute the rest over all computers networked so it should be going at full capacity I would think for all of them (just divided over the distributed systems).
Jeff
Development on: Mac Pro 2008, Duel-Boot OS - Snow Leopard 10.6.6 &
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon , 10GB
800 MHz DDR2 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT.
hobepaintball posted Sun, 28 March 2010 at 8:35 AM
Quote - > Quote - I found my main quad core content creator would only run around 50% CPU on a network render and all 4 cores would be 100% on a local render. I stopped using Rendercows until I could get all 5 up to fast dual cores or quad cores with 4gb ram each. (1 upgrade left to go). I will use the same render farm for PoserPro 2010.
ALSO PLEASE DON'T EXPECT IT TO CUT THE RENDER TIME IN HALF. WITH YOUR SETUP EXPECT ABOUT A 15% SPEEDUP
If you would, send me a PM here. I am curious as to your setup because I have two computers now I am using but want to expand that and would like to discuss more on that with you. With 5 different dedicated machines with those specs, you should be getting awesome render times.
With my NEW AND IMPROVED setup I expect a 50 to 75% reduction of render times, not 1/5 of the current render time.
I haven't used the cows since Vue 7 when they were mostly 32bit OS, Dual core pcs with 2gb ram. It cut down times quite a bit, but wasted an imense amount of time sending things back and forth on the network. One was a 100mb connection the rest gb connections. It wasn't worth the extra noise and heat at that time so I decided to upgrade all of them to quad core 4 and 8 gb ram 64 bit OS at considerable cost in spite of being home built. The last cow was upgraded this week and I was about to upgrade them all to 8.4 when on Friday my main content creater blew a power supply. I canibalized the last cow (all have 750 watt PS) to fix Main PC but it still took several hours
Since then I blew my main power supply after a 20 mile ocean kayak adventure and near drowning so i'm in the hospital having a stint placed in my heart vein, minor procedure but time consuming.
As I found out, don't even bother with cows that don't support GB network connections, don't throw a laptop or underpowered pc into the mix, its ram limitation and CPU cache etc aren't up to the task.
When I am finished I will not include the content creator in the farm since it doesn't run at full cpu utilization it is free to use Poser and photoshop after effects etc