Maxwell Render | Official public forum

HI guys,

I'm having a problem with a new machine that maxwell/RHino doesn't seem to want to use the full power of the chip. I have two other computers as reference, all rendering the same file. Computer 3 has the problem.

Computer 1 = Vista 64; dual Xeon 5550; total 8 cores: Maxwell log says processors 16 logical, 16 physical (which is correct)

Computer 2 = WIndows 7 ultimate 64; single core i7 980 extreme; total 6 cores: Maxwell log says processors 12 logical, 12 physical (which is correct)

Computer 3 = WIndow 7pro 64; single Xeon W3680; total 6 cores: Maxwell log says processors 6 logical, 6 physical (which is strange it should be double that)

Increasing the threads in maxwell render doesn't seem to do anything? I am loosing about 25% performance based on other benchmarks. Any thoughts.

Thanks,

When you say 'the same file', do you mean the Rhino file, or the MXS that the plugin writes from it? Can you confirm that the MXS being rendered in all cases is using Threads=0? In the plugin, this is @ Scene Manager > Output > Engine > Threads. In the maxwell.exe interface, 0 threads is shown as 'Automatic' in the Render Options panel.

If so, you might also try setting threads specifically to 12 and see what that does. As far as it goes, the plugin's only involvement in this is in writing the Threads number into the MXS file; what maxwell.exe does with it during rendering is out of my control.

All this is to say that you need first to determine whether this is a plugin problem (i.e. the wrong Threads number is written into the MXS), or an engine one (i.e. number of threads is correct, but performance is not as expected).

It weird though, like hyper threading is not active or something. We bought two of these machines and I just tried the second one and it does the same thing. I tried manually setting the threads in MW, but it does the same thing.

Interestingly, inputting 0 threads is 20% faster render time than typing in 12 threads.

Well, I don't know if this is the case with newer chips, but on the dual Xeon I had a long time ago, I could disable hyperthreading in the BIOS. And by 'a long time ago', I mean a long time ago: I'm talking about a P4-generation Xeon. So who knows...

I was on tech support with Dell and he looked in the bios, but didn't find anything. I may call Intel just in case.

Thanks !

may be the problem on the windows xp, I try windows xp pro 32 bit on my 12 cores, i have something problem, but I can't to solve this problem, e.g. can't update patch, can't install new harddisk. So, i think you need to re-install windows or update to windows 7