Cores and threads question

[palosanto]

Hi,

I've finished building a dual Xeon 2670 machine. Each cpu has 8 cores and 16 threads so I have a total of 32 threads, but when I render I can count 64 buckets in the frame buffer not 32 ....

When I add another machine as a DR node, its number of threads is not doubled, only in the local machine.

Can someone explain this ?

Thanks

[mnewberg]

Is your local DR spawner in the list of hosts, and enabled?

[palosanto]

Hi Matt,

Yes it is.

These are the scenarios:

1.- DR enabled, local fixed IP enabled, localhost disabled (it's the same), all other nodes disabled == 64 buckets

2.- DR enabled but "Don't use local machine" disabled == 32 buckets

3.- DR disabled == 32 buckets

Also, if I launch the DR spawner (XMLDRSpawner.exe) in local machine it doesn't show any activity, the window sits "waiting for jobs". Shouldn't it be rendering like any other node ?

I'm trying to understand how DR works specially on scenario #1 since I definitly get a faster render with 64 buckets. Is it because Vray is using the local machine AND the spawner (even if it doesn't show up as a DOS window) ?

[mnewberg]

In 2.0 we create a hidden XMLDRSpawner.exe that we use for RT. You can close/restart/kill this process by using the command visDRSpawner. This is most likely the process you are connecting to in case 1.

This extra process is no longer needed for RT with 3.0.

[palosanto]

I see. The process XMLDRspawner.exe shows up in the task manager as background process. When rendering with DR enabled, Rhino.exe and XMLDRspawner.exe show about 50/50 CPU activity.
However, visDRSpawner>kill didn't stop it but forcekill option did.
Then yes, I get only 32 buckets with 100% activity to CPU Rhino.exe

But the thing is, both situations use 100% of the CPU power so it looks like the result would be the same and yet with the spawner running, it renders much faster (64 buckets vs 32) ....