- Thu Oct 09, 2008 5:54 pm
#282154
Hi - I don't know about this check-box issue, but in terms of how priorities work on a single on a single NT/2000/XP/Vista machine here are a couple of points you probably already know:
- if your Maxwell render process/thread is running at low-priority, and you can manage to make nothing else happen on that machine (no Windows updates, no Apple Safari updates, no Adobe Reader updates, no Norton updates, no Norton anti-virus scans, and you leave the keyboard and mouse alone (no web surfing, no 3D modeling, etc)) then: because the low-priority render thread is the only work the CPU has to do, the render work will get done just as fast as if the thread were at Normal priority
- if your Maxwell render process/thread is running at Normal-priority, your render will still complete faster if you try to keep your machine doing as little as possible, more similar than different to the above case. If you do a bunch of web surfing at Normal priority while your render work is also running Normal priority, your web surfing will still get a slight priority increase from NT/2000/XP/Vista, because the operating system assumes that the computer user wants the active application (like the web browser) to be more responsive.
If you can locate the Maxwell process using Task Manager (right click on task bar) for a long-running render, you can increase or decrease the priority of that process. You would want to limit your choices to Above Normal, Normal, or Below Normal, because the other more extreme choices can starve important processes from the CPU. Especially do not choose Realtime.
I apologize if all these things are things you already know; and I post this in the hope it might help others a little bit.
Bruce