[msantana]

Hello everyone,

I have been looking at some Maxwell performance issues and thought I would share what I have found, someone may find it useful, especially with the new version 2 coming out soon.

I have a Mac Pro 2007 8-core 3Ghz and decided to install Windows XP (64-bit version), Ubuntu and run a speed comparison on the three environments to see what happened.

When I installed Maxwell in Ubuntu 9.04 I used it with Maya 2009 and I must say that overall the experience has been great to excellent. Installation was not a problem at all, everything worked following the manual. The speed is the best of the three platforms, the memory footprint is the smallest of the three platforms (i.e. it uses less RAM) and the stability is rock-solid. The only negative aspect is that Maxwell runs perfectly, but only once, after you quit it and run it again it gives all kinds of issues. Also, for some reason, sometimes it gave me random errors. I have full details at the end of the post.

For the ones interested, I ran the benchwell scene test twice, just to be sure and found the following rendering times across Operating Systems (remember, EXACTLY on the same hardware):

Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.7) 32-bits:

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1) [13/July/2009 19:24:28] SL of 15.00. Benchmark of 1066.225. Time: 10m04s
2) [13/July/2009 19:48:26] SL of 15.00. Benchmark of 1072.086. Time: 10m01s

Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.7) 64-bits (Tech preview version):

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1) [13/July/2009 19:35:48] SL of 15.00. Benchmark of 1077.014. Time: 9m58s
2) [13/July/2009 21:52:35] SL of 15.00. Benchmark of 1086.342. Time: 9m53s

Win64 (Windows XP 64-bits with SP3)

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1) [13/July/2009 21:21:11] SL of 15.00. Benchmark of 1003.496. Time: 10m42s
2) [13/July/2009 21:32:28] SL of 15.00. Benchmark of 1024.613. Time: 10m29s

Linux64 (Ubuntu 9.04)

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1) [13/July/2009 20:35:44] SL of 15.00. Benchmark of 1141.274. Time: 9m24s
2) [13/July/2009 21:01:07] SL of 15.00. Benchmark of 1153.370. Time: 9m19s  

As you can see, Ubuntu is the fastest by a non-negligible margin. I read on these forums that some people had seen a 10% speed increase from Windows to Linux, I think that is accurate with the above times. I will submit my results to the benchwell site soon.

Some other thoughts on the Ubuntu Linux experience:

1) Trying to launch maya as a background process and then rendering with Maxwell crashes the whole thing (i.e. if you launch maya with an ampersand from the command line it works fine, until you try to render to Maxwell)

2) Textures in TIFF format greater than 1024^2 crash Maxwell. Why it only happens beyond that resolution is not entirely clear to me. The textures I generated were done in a Mac, and I am aware of all the issues with TIFF files across Operating Systems, but isn't just weird that they do work under 1024^2 resolution?

3) If you launch Maxwell, render something, quit and launch it again to render I get the following messages EVERY time:

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X Error: BadLength (poly request too large or internal Xlib length error) 16
  Major opcode: 5 (X_DestroySubwindows)
  Resource id:  0x106
X Error: BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation) 1
  Extension:    155 (Uknown extension)
  Minor opcode: 0 (Unknown request)
  Resource id:  0x106
X Error: BadLength (poly request too large or internal Xlib length error) 16
  Major opcode: 1 (X_CreateWindow)
  Resource id:  0x106
X Error: BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation) 1
  Extension:    175 (Uknown extension)
  Minor opcode: 0 (Unknown request)
  Resource id:  0x106
mxcl: Fatal IO error: client killed

4) Sometimes, when launching Maxwell for the first time, it would refuse to run at all. This was random as far as I could tell, the errors I got where these:

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Xlib: sequence lost (0x109fc > 0xd08) in reply type 0xc!
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 56 (X_ChangeGC)
  Resource id:  0x3a0023e
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 66 (X_PolySegment)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 59 (X_SetClipRectangles)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 56 (X_ChangeGC)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 70 (X_PolyFillRectangle)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 59 (X_SetClipRectangles)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 59 (X_SetClipRectangles)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 56 (X_ChangeGC)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 70 (X_PolyFillRectangle)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 59 (X_SetClipRectangles)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 59 (X_SetClipRectangles)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 70 (X_PolyFillRectangle)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 59 (X_SetClipRectangles)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 59 (X_SetClipRectangles)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 70 (X_PolyFillRectangle)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 59 (X_SetClipRectangles)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 59 (X_SetClipRectangles)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 56 (X_ChangeGC)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 66 (X_PolySegment)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 64 (X_PolyPoint)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 66 (X_PolySegment)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 59 (X_SetClipRectangles)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 56 (X_ChangeGC)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 66 (X_PolySegment)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 64 (X_PolyPoint)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 59 (X_SetClipRectangles)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 56 (X_ChangeGC)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 66 (X_PolySegment)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 59 (X_SetClipRectangles)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 56 (X_ChangeGC)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 70 (X_PolyFillRectangle)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 60 (X_FreeGC)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
  Major opcode: 60 (X_FreeGC)
  Resource id:  0x3a001d2

If anyone has some thoughts and experiences to share would love to hear them! I think I will re-do this with version 2 and see what happens!

Happy Maxwelling!

[mpoole1]

Mauricio,

This is very helpful information. I am working on building a render box with the same set up. How did you handle the issue with the glibc version in Ubuntu?

[msantana]

The glibc version in ubuntu?

I didn't have any problems with it, I just installed as it was and ran without a hitch.