4 x Xeon E7-8870 using only 50% of the threads.

[SaY]

I tested it with Cinebench - works great, full 100% load.
But in Vray task manager shows 40 theads at 100% load, the rest is at 0.
Any ideas why its only using 50% of the threads?

[vizuall]

Same problem here 2xe5 2696v3

[SaY]

That suck. I was going to get E5-2699v3 for my main workstation.
Will it be fixed anytime soon?

[Morbid Angel]

I think this is mentioned in another thread on this forum, its something to do with windows thread allocation. When you have that many cores its reaching its limit there. Vlado can clarify of course but it sounded like unless you use linux or perhaps new windows will address that?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Windows is limited to 64 threads or something like that so u kinda have to start DR server on that PC and assign 2 CPUs to it I think.

[vlado]

Dariusz is right, currently the way to get this working at full speed is to run a local DR server assigned to the two CPUs.

We are looking into ways to make V-Ray itself use all the threads, and we mostly got it working, but some unexpected issues came up when the user manually overrides the CPU affinity for the 3dsmax process.

Best regards,
Vlado

[SaY]

Windows is limited to 64 threads or something like that so u kinda have to start DR server on that PC and assign 2 CPUs to it I think.

I believe the problem is with Vray - other software can load all the cores/threads. Cinema renders at 100% CPU load.
Besides, I'm using windows server on this machine, as far as I know it has 4000 or something like this max threads number.

[SaY]

Dariusz is right, currently the way to get this working at full speed is to run a local DR server assigned to the two CPUs.

We are looking into ways to make V-Ray itself use all the threads, and we mostly got it working, but some unexpected issues came up when the user manually overrides the CPU affinity for the 3dsmax process.

Best regards,
Vlado

Thanks Vlado, looking forward for this to be resolved.

For now I will try to use 2 DR servers on this machine. Would I need a separate node license for 2nd DR server?

[vizuall]

Thats strange cause IM using DR spawner and i got 72 buckets in scene,anyway processor consumptionis still 50%

[vlado]

Would I need a separate node license for 2nd DR server?

No. The licenses are per machine, no matter how many copies of V-Ray are running on it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[GLASS-CANVAS]

As a separate observation, I've noticed that if you have buckets that render quickly then you will reach a point where the DR system won't be able to keep up with keeping all processors occupied all the time. Just now I tested this by sending a render to about 300 buckets, and looking at the task managers on the individual machines saw that CPU utilisation was running at around 50%. When I reduced the number of rendernodes to about 150 buckets, I was getting almost 100% CPU on those machines, and also getting a render back faster than when I had twice the machines assigned to it. I then increased the size of the individual buckets, sent the job to all 300 buckets and got 100% CPU efficiency. So for this particular scene it would make sense to increase the size of the buckets to give each render node more to do.

TL;DR: CPU efficiency can be scene-related

[vlado]

As a separate observation, I've noticed that if you have buckets that render quickly then you will reach a point where the DR system won't be able to keep up with keeping all processors occupied all the time.

This is true; the client machine must handle communication with all other nodes and if there are a lot of those, it might not be able to keep up. There is a lot of room for improvement here though.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Rhys]

I always make sure I turned 1-2 cores off on the host machine that is rendering when DR, this makes sure the machine can still perform background tasks without max taking it all. seems to work well.

[SaY]

Vlado,
How soon would it be possible to revise this problem, or at least get a temporary build with the fix?

Running 2nd DR is not really a solution, it doubles the amount of memory required to render the scene..

Thanks

[vlado]

I can probably get you an experimental build to try out; we don't have a machine to test it properly here anyways. It is very likely that DR will perform better though.

Best regards,
Vlado