Max Out Processor Utilization

[chepmedia]

Anyone ever have it where most scenes will MR render with the CPU (Task Manager) pegged out / flat lined at 100% for the whole render ... and OTHER times (like now) - it'll crawl and look like a heartbeat graph, chewing at 30, 35, sometimes 40% cpu?

Example - forgot to render a matte so I went and made a new pass with all the lights off and the materials set to a Constant shader and this thing is just craww-ling as if it was rendering the original beauty pass. No AO, FG, no area lights / shadows ...

All processors are enabled in Task Manager, plugged-in processor Max at 100% etc. but wondered if anyone knows if there's some magic switch in MR I'm not flipping for these scenes. Brand spanking new scenes are fine-ish, but these recent scenes are just dragging. Is there such a thing as a scene being "busted"?

Tx,

Marc

[chepmedia]

Update - I wanted to eliminate the laptop hardware from the equation so I used wPrime to test-peg the processor. I ran it and seeing all those cores go to 100% utilization was a beautiful thing to see. So I'm battin' the ball back into MR's court..