new server performs slower than old system

[stevesideas]

Hi guys. I have a real problem and quite worried. I have just spent a fair bit building a new system and the performance of vray using distrubuted rendering (so i have 12 cores all together) is slower than using just my quad core system.

A simple scene I made takes 112 seconds on the quad core 6700, when using dr it takes 238 seconds. The xeons seem to sit for ages on the last 2 buckets.

I have 2x quad core 5300 2.66 Ghz xeons. 4gb in the server and a supermicro x7dwa-n motherboard.

Any ideas ? I thought the xeons would be at least as fast as my quad core...why are they running so slow ??

[stevesideas]

Sorry guys, i thought this might be something to do with with DR, but it seems that when i just use the xeon machine it is slower....what the hell. I'll post another topic in off/topic as this doesnt have anything to do with vray (i think anyway)

[natty]

You cant compare small scene's with DR,, it takes time to load the scene, and then to save irrmap and unload the scene ..

[stevesideas]

ok, but i tried it without dr straight from the station with the dual xeons, and it works out more than twice as slow... how can this be ?

[natty]

mmm so you have twice the power but you are twice as slow ... damn, did you load the cpu drivers? .. correct ram? correct voltage going to the cpu's ? (should alreay be correct but hey)... did you build the system yourself? ... well for sure something is a miss.

[stevesideas]

cpu drivers ? - ram is fine as far as im aware...its 667 mhz corsair ram. The voltage is regulated by the bios and cant be changed as far as i can see.

Ive never needed cpu drivers before...

[natty]

well just a thought, you did load the motherboard drivers? ...

[stevesideas]

Yes. That was the first thing i did after installing xp

[stevesideas]

Although, saying that. When i installed what I thought was the chipset drivers, it installed a load of inf files somewhere. So im not sure if it using the correct ones or not.

[pinpan71]

hi steviouk, i seem to have a similar problem. please read here:
http://chaosgroup.com/forums/vbullet...ad.php?t=40702
didi you find a solution to your issue?

[DIGITAL_FACTORY]

For rendering, not all CPU are equal, I think. I think the 5300 is considered a transactional power horse, which is not necessarily what is needed when rendering.

We find that the 6600 and 6700 (as well as our new 9300) represent the best bang for our bucks.

[stevesideas]

What is a transactional power horse ?

Every other test I performed on these cpus proved that they were twice as fast at processing as the qx6700. Maths calculations, which is what we are talking about here.

Theres no way a quad core 6700 would be slower than dual xeons rated at the same ghz and with a higher level 2 cache....im pretty sure anyway.

[paulison]

have you tried a range of scenes to see if they all get the same result?. the only thing I can think of is if you use lightcache and still have the number of passes set to 4 instead of 8 (2x quad core xeons right?) but even then, it should be faster.

Maybe check the temperature of the CPU's because don't they slow down if overheating?. I remember ages ago reading that intel does this instead of allowing the CPU to have a meltdown

its funny though that this only occurs with vray rendering but every other test you have run indicates the correct speed difference. So now i'm thinking that it may be worth trying out some other versions of vray - or at least contact Vlado to see if he can help figure it out. Hopefully its not a problem specific to that hardware setup in vray!

[stevesideas]

The xeons were not overheating, i made sure to keep a close eye on that. So there was no steppig down or throttling invovled.

The tests I did included vray and the scanline renderer. They both proved to be a lot slower. Maybe this is just a max issue. I didnt have time to do any other tests as Ive now sent the items back for testing. Still waiting to see if they come up with anything or not, and if I can exchange for a different set of components.

[vlado]

In general, for such issues, it is best to test a few different scenes with varying complexity. Different components of V-Ray will stress different parts of the system (e.g. smaller scenes with no textures and with brute force GI will stress raw CPU power; irradiance map/light cache/textures/proxies depend a lot on memory access too).

Best regards,
Vlado