DR not using all cores per machine

[Mokiki]

I have a weird problem that I have not experienced before. I am currently rendering a simple animation and the DR Nodes join pretty much instantly but they use maybe 50% of the available cores per machine. (24 threads per machine)
Sometimes in this case more cores would show up the longer the image renders but not always. I have really no idea what could be the culprit because normally all the DR Nodes work without a problem.

Using: 3ds Max 2016 and Vray 3.30.04

[vlado]

What is the CPU usage on those machines? How long do the buckets take to render? Is there any difference if you turn off the "Use local host" option in the DR settings?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Mokiki]

The buckets take average around 2 seconds (+- depending on the part of the image) and the cpu usage jumps between 25% and 60%.
With "Use local host" turned off pretty much the same behavior.


Edit: Ah I see. If the buckets don't render long enough vray kinda has to cycle through the threads, meaning there is no time to effectively use all of them. Or something like that?

[Zdravko.Keremidchiev]

Yes, most probably this is due to the short render times. To be sure that V-Ray can fully utilize the CPU you can run a simple test with an empty scene with a Fixed Image sampler set to 50.