Most powerfull PC takes longest to render - Backburner Weirdness!

[Morne]

Hi all

I'm Net Rendering with VRay via BackBurner. My local machine is an i7 with 8 cores (hyperhtreaded 4 X 2) and 6GB RAM.
Ram usage is around 2GB for this scene.
Other 6 pc's all are old quadcores except another i7.

Manager and Monitor is running on my local machine.
Average frame time is about 10-12 min on all PC's except local. Local is like 22 minutes!

Anybody have any ideas?
(I checked infinity and threads and all is 100%)

Very, VERY Weird

[vlado]

Have you tried turning off the 3ds Max Bitmap pager for your scene?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morne]

I keep forgetting about that. Thanks I'll give it a try

[Morne]

OK I've disbled the pager and so far it shaves off about a minute on all pc's for the prepass. However, my main pc still takes almost twice as long as the others per frame.

[vlado]

Ok, next question. Does it render faster if you use only 4 rendering threads on your workstation?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morne]

as in disable hyper threading or as in set affinity to only use 4?

[vlado]

You can type "renderers.current.system_numThreads=4" in the MaxScript listener (if you type 0 instead of 4, it will return to the default of using all cores).

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morne]

I tried with just a still (not yet tried with Backburner), but so far the 4 threads are SLOWER than 8 threads

[vlado]

Ok; that's good news (sort of ) What if you disable the hyperthreading?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morne]

HT off appears to be about the same as setting threads to 4. All 3 ways mentioned so far is still slower than the other pc's. Very weird. Does it maybe have somehting to do with BackBurner manager running on this PC? I can't see how it can be half slower than the other pc's

[vlado]

Does it happen on any scene or on a particular one? Have you tested the performance of other multithreaded software? Also have you tested regular rendering without backburner?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morne]

as I said, the last 2 renders was without backburner. I have an exact same pc as a slave, and that renderw twice as fast as mine (per frame with backburner) Been using it for about a year, but only just now noticed my pc is slower than the rest (via backburner). More animation tests needs to be done to see if it is just this scene or the pc.

[olly]

We've had two different but similar situations here:

Using Ozone in a background only file with just 2 x vrayplane & 1 x vraysun:
Randomly an i7 980x is 20 x faster than an i7 920 on one job and then 20 x slower than the 920 on the next job from the same scene!

Without Ozone:
i7 980x sits at between 40-60% cpu with about 12gb of ram free. (Dynamic memory limit is set to 0.)

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Olly

[vlado]

If you keep the scene around, it would be best if you can send it to us for investigation.

Best regards,
Vlado