Progressive + DBR - hardly any CPU usage on nodes

[alexyork]

Hi folks,

How does DBR work with Progressive rendering? I'm enjoying this rendering method a great deal but I've noticed that after LC and IR maps have calculated, my render nodes jump around using between 0 and 30% CPU power at most and are often idle. There are no error messages in the console window.

Am I missing something with this? Using latest official build with max design 2014. (07).

Can't send a scene unfortunately due to NDA.

Thanks,

[alexyork]

By the way during IR map calc the nodes are at 100% CPU usage, so that's all working fine.

I am watching a DBR progressive render right now and the CPU usage on one node is hovering around 50%, sometimes 60, sometimes 35, sometimes 0. All a bit random.

[Morbid Angel]

I bellieve I was told its a network speed thing.

[alexyork]

I bellieve I was told its a network speed thing.

Thanks Morbid. I have a Gigabit switch here with all machines running at 1Gbps as it should be, with no other traffic being sent around, and the scene and buffer is very simple. Wondering if this is really the issue holding things back?

[Morbid Angel]

I also have gigabit, but it not enough do I was told when I brought this up. Working up the shade rate and ray bundle size may help.

[alexyork]

I also have gigabit, but it not enough do I was told when I brought this up. Working up the shade rate and ray bundle size may help.

Thanks mate. I really need to read up about how SR and RBS contribute. I've left those on defaults for now.

[vlado]

My render nodes jump around using between 0 and 30% CPU power at most and are often idle.

You will need to give more work to the render nodes; in progressive mode the servers need to talk to the client a lot more often, so this may slow things down. As Dmitry noted, you can increase the workload for each node by either increasing the min. shading rate, or by increasing the ray bundle size, or both.

Best regards,
Vlado

[alexyork]

You will need to give more work to the render nodes; in progressive mode the servers need to talk to the client a lot more often, so this may slow things down. As Dmitry noted, you can increase the workload for each node by either increasing the min. shading rate, or by increasing the ray bundle size, or both.

Best regards,
Vlado

Thanks Vlado will do some further testing on this and see if it can be improved.

Do you have any other quick tips for working with Progressive mode? Any workflow changes we should be thinking about?