Xeon E5-2670 V3 slow with Vray 2.3

[Maxilou]

Hi guys,

we just received on our studio Dell workstations with dual Xeon E5-2670 V3 (2.3ghz - 12cores, total of 48cores HT).

I realized that these workstations are slow on rendering (on Distributed render for exemple we're still wating for many cores to finish the render), especially on trees. (All cores are charged, task manager to 100%.)

Nothing special on scene, all subdiv to 8, no filtering on opacity maps (Trees).
I can compare this with other Xeon generations (Dual X5690, 5580, 5450,etc...), all these other Xeon are faster than the E5 on vegetation computing!

This is very annoying because these Dell workstation are still the latest to finish big final computing (5K image), sometimes we've to wait about 1 or 2h more than other older workstations for the cores to finish their jobs.

We're using 3Dsmax 2012 with Vray 2.30.

Is Vray is to "old" for the CPU generation? Any idea...

Help please.


thanks.


Max.

[vlado]

Make sure you turn OFF the "Bitmap pager" in 3ds Max. Some 3ds Max textures (Noise, GradientRamp) don't work too well on multiple cores. Beyond that, V-Ray 3.x will generally handle this better. You can maybe try the demo and see what happens.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Maxilou]

Hi Vlado,

yes the bitmap pagger is OFF.

Ok i'll try Vray 3.0 ASAP and let you know... thanks.

PS: i tried on Cinebench 11.5 64bits and all looks fine on it. The Dual Xeon E5-2670 are 2 time more powerfull than a Dual Xeon X5690. So not the case on Vray 2.3...

[Morbid Angel]

Its a classic case of dynamic geometry with many cores. If your trees are proxies, then most certainly that's what is happening. When you deal with many many threads, ram allocation and thread management become a tough task. One thing would be to turn off HT, I know it sucks but it might speed things up.

[vlado]

Well, if it's proxies then newer builds will definitely make this better. But in any case, the whole dynamic geometry system needs to be rewritten for better performance (which we are in fact working on).

Best regards,
Vlado

[Maxilou]

Hi,

i tried with Vray 3.0 and 3dsmax 2014. Made a custom scene with "the metalball scene" from VrayscannedMtl test scene.
Scene with little HDRI on VrayDome, procedural Mtl with falloff, coat with VrayBlendMtl, and one with NormalBump. Tried with "Embree" ON and OFF.

Still the same thing; this scene compute on 800 X 800px (universal settings):

>>> Core i7-4930K @ 4.1ghz OC (6 cores - 12cores HT) >>> 8min33s
>>> Dual Xeon E5-2670 V3 @ 2.6ghz (turbomode) (24 cores - 48cores HT) >>> 15min01s !!!!!!????!!!

Going to try with HT OFF...

Just for your information these same computers on Cinebench R15 64bits:

>>> Core i7 >> 1093
>>> Dual Xeon >> 2985

So, i'm the only one to get this problem? So sad for 10000$ computer...

[Morbid Angel]

Hi,

i tried with Vray 3.0 and 3dsmax 2014. Made a custom scene with "the metalball scene" from VrayscannedMtl test scene.
Scene with little HDRI on VrayDome, procedural Mtl with falloff, coat with VrayBlendMtl, and one with NormalBump. Tried with "Embree" ON and OFF.

Still the same thing; this scene compute on 800 X 800px (universal settings):

>>> Core i7-4930K @ 4.1ghz OC (6 cores - 12cores HT) >>> 8min33s
>>> Dual Xeon E5-2670 V3 @ 2.6ghz (turbomode) (24 cores - 48cores HT) >>> 15min01s !!!!!!????!!!

Going to try with HT OFF...

Just for your information these same computers on Cinebench R15 64bits:

>>> Core i7 >> 1093
>>> Dual Xeon >> 2985

So, i'm the only one to get this problem? So sad for 10000$ computer...

No you are not the only one

In fact I'm getting the same spec system later next week so I think I will run into those problems. For a long time I was running my xeon x5650 with HT off for various issue like that.

Vlado, its great to hear that you guys are going to change that part of vray since everything is headed into multi-core processing (and I'm wondering how this works on the gpu?)

[vlado]

i tried with Vray 3.0 and 3dsmax 2014. Made a custom scene with "the metalball scene" from VrayscannedMtl test scene.Scene with little HDRI on VrayDome, procedural Mtl with falloff, coat with VrayBlendMtl, and one with NormalBump. Tried with "Embree" ON and OFF.

Can you send me that scene to vlado@chaosgroup.com? I can profile it and let you know what is slowing it down. It may not be related to V-Ray necessarily - like I said some Max components are not really well suited for multithreading.

Best regards,
Vlado

[vlado]

Vlado, its great to hear that you guys are going to change that part of vray since everything is headed into multi-core processing (and I'm wondering how this works on the gpu?)

For the GPU (and V-Ray RT in general), there is no Max stuff, all of it is our own code so we've made sure it runs well. Also, every GPU device is treated completely separately, with separate VRAM and cache so it's not like CPU cores which must often wait for each other. It does slow down significantly if you turn on texture paging though.

Best regards,
Vlado

[vlado]

Thanks for the scene. The problem, as I suggested above, is that the 3ds Max bitmap pager is enabled. Note that you need to save and reload the scene after changing this setting. Here are some timings on a dual Xeon E5 2680 at 2.70 GHz with V-Ray 3.20:

*) All textures converted to VRayHDRI using the Bitmap to VRayHDRI conversion script: 5m 23s
*) Original scene, bitmap pager turned OFF: 5m 31s
*) Original scene (which had the bitmap pager turned ON): about 48 mins

Best regards,
Vlado

[alexyork]

Thanks for the scene. The problem, as I suggested above, is that the 3ds Max bitmap pager is enabled. Note that you need to save and reload the scene after changing this setting. Here are some timings on a dual Xeon E5 2680 at 2.70 GHz with V-Ray 3.20:

*) All textures converted to VRayHDRI using the Bitmap to VRayHDRI conversion script: 5m 23s
*) Original scene, bitmap pager turned OFF: 5m 31s
*) Original scene (which had the bitmap pager turned ON): about 45 mins (didn't wait for the entire image)

Best regards,
Vlado

Bitmap Pager strikes again... Is it possible to force it Off when enabling Vray as the renderer somehow? The vraylog window is usually enough to warn me and I also have saved a modified maxstart.max with it disabled, which seems to have done the trick but something more brute-force might be needed for some users.

[vlado]

Is it possible to force it Off when enabling Vray as the renderer somehow?

I thought about this, but I don't know what to do about the scene reloading. It might be possible to free all bitmaps along with that, so that they are reloaded... will have to test.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

Slam...nice one. Well maya doesn't have bitmap pager.