set affinity for 3dsmax/win 10, access denied

[super gnu]

im testing the most efficient way to render my animation on my 64 core monster.

the frames render so fast that the majority of the time is spent preparing geometry and saving the jpeg.

ive found that rendering two sequences together, both get completed faster than rendering one after the other.

i wanted to try assigning 32 cores to each render, but, unlike in windows 7 (i miss it!) when i try to set processor affinity in the task manager for 3dsmax, i get "access denied"

it lets me do it for chrome and a few others so its not a "global" issue.

ive tried running task manager as administrator but i still get the error.

any tips?

[suurland]

Tried setting it when starting max? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...d-on-windows-7

[Vizioen]

Same problem. Not a solution anywhere...I want to control this not when starting Max either, just real time.

[fixeighted]

I can do this, so it is probably just a permissions thing. Check whether 3dsmax.exe is read only; if not then make it so and it may then work.

[Vizioen]

Pff this is bullshit. Fucking Autodesk, really, I've had it with this shitty software.

[fixeighted]

Did you not get it to play nicely?

Permissions are always messing with me...even sometimes when they have been granted something will kick them back to locked and it is genuinely exasperating.
I rather think it's a Windows thing rather than AD, although wrath can be evenly split, just to be sure

[Vizioen]

Naah, still getting this BS, can't set the affinity, and 3dsMax is the only piece of crap that doesn't allow it. Don't get me started on permissions in Windows either. Just need to ventilate a bit.

[yavor.rubenov]

Affinity is not the right thing to touch (never has been).
Affinity tells the process to run all of its threads on the specified cores but it does not tell it to limit those threads in any way.
Example:
- you have 64 threads
- you use affinity to set the process to run only on 32 cores
In such case V-Ray (and not only) will see that your machine has 64 cores so it will start 64 threads and buckets. Then the OS will schedule those 64 threads on the specified 32 cores. This means that there will be two threads fighting for one and the same core - slowing each other.
The correct thing to do is to instruct V-Ray to use only 32 cores. You can do it in two ways - per scene and for the whole machine:
- per scene - with this MAXScript

renderers.current.system_numthreads=32

(0 means use all available)

- for the whole system - you can use the environment variable VRAY_NUM_THREADS


Hope that helps,
Yavor

[Vizioen]

Thanks Yavor,

It's a bit of a hassle really. I've now used the env. variable but that means that if I'm not using my workstation it's also using less threads, so I would have to change the variable and restart Max each time I want to render overnight. Shame we can't control it more in real time. Thanks for the input.

[fixeighted]

Whilst I won't attempt to argue Yavor's point...I'm sure he knows far more and in detail what this stuff actually does....I would have to say that setting the affinity on an old machine ages ago enabled me to actually
finish a render without my machine bluescreening. I don't know why that is, unless I missed something in the explanation, but it worked.
I even remember it being a solution I found to specifically solve that sort of issue, as I woould never have known about it in isolation. Weird.

[glorybound]

Can share the specs on your 64core monster?