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pelligrini
15th September 2006, 16:42
We just got in another machine for someone to use 3DS MAX for some renderings. It's a pretty nice dualcore rig; 3.4Ghz, 2 gigs of ram, high end Nvidia 3D card, running XP-64. One of the strange things was that it wasn't an incredible performance boost over the P4-1.7 rig it replaced.

When we were looking at the CPU usages when rendering it was only using one CPU, but it finally used both when we used a different rendering engine. My gut was telling me it was a problem with the 64bit OS. I installed the software on my machine with similar but slower specs. The big difference is that mine is using regular XP. The render was using both processors, but not 100%. Maybe 65% total with an occaisional jump to 72%.

I stopped the two FAH services and it jumped up to 98% on my machine. We had stopped the FAH services on the other machine earlier. I didn't want to check to see if it was the case with the user watching, as they might stop the cores anytime they see them.

This is the first time where I've seen the client really adversely affect performance, other than just memory usage.

TDKozan
15th September 2006, 18:58
I haven't been really taking notes but foreground performance on my laptop has varied a lot lately. May well be one of the new cores is a little more possessive than the earlier ones.

MikeTimbers
16th September 2006, 04:40
Try to re-create the interference and check the cpu priorities. It's possible that 3DSMAX multi-threads with different priorities for its various threads - it wouldn't be the first app that multi-threads badly. It could be just that the coders wanted the extra threads to run but not interfere with OS/Kernel type stuff so they're set to low-priority.

TDKozan
17th September 2006, 23:59
Your tagline makes me dizzy sitting down, Mike.

MikeTimbers
18th September 2006, 02:38
I only wish one of our politicians was clever enough to have said it!