I'm about to get a new laptop and I want to do everything I can to make sure I squeeze every hertz out of it during rendering.
Currently ... Priority is Normal and Affinity is for every core in the Task Manager. Normally all cores will peg-out at 100% (flatline) but something prompted me to download/install the Intel Turbo Boost Technology Monitor app and I noticed that the CPU never went all Kitt with Turbo Boost and hit the max hertz advertised for the chip. CPU-Z pretty much had the same results. That started me thinking I'm not getting the fastest rendering speed.
My (current) laptop has no changeable Speed Step or Turbo Boost settings in the BIOS and does not tell me what the settings are in the first place.
I'm not looking for overclocking - it's a laptop and quite frankly I know how hot these things get and don't want a meltdown.
I know there are many variables but is there a way to say to mental ray, "Go ahead. Eat it all up. I want this render done this month."
Softimage 2012 SP1
New laptop - Haswell i7 4200MQ quad core, 16GB RAM .. ..
Thank you,
Marc
Maximize CPU During Rendering
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SpookyMunky
- Posts: 102
- Joined: 14 Jun 2012, 00:30
Re: Maximize CPU During Rendering
I guess a good place to start would be to look at your power options, windows likes to cripple laptops by default even when they are plugged in (have even seen it crippling desktop performance which makes no sense). I have never found an option to increase cpu usage above whatever windows is alloting to pc.. could be possible, best to make sure windows isnt crippling first...
Personally I find mentalray always takes up too much cpu time at the expense of everything else so I set it to low priority in task manager - very slight teeny ms / frame drop in render time but you can actually use pc to surf web / stick on a film while waiting on a render
edit: in other words by default it uses more cpu cycles than windows can handle no matter the cpu / cpus ,, always been that way for me.
edit again: hehe, just noticed you said haswell.. at back of my mind I think maybe that cpu by default powers down before hitting a factory set temp which in a laptop might be instant.. look through bios again, google overclocking guides for your bios / laptop.. .. even though you don't want to overclock there is generally alot of rubbish activated by default that will favour slower performance vs higher temps and overclockers generally know all the tricks to get round it ;)
Personally I find mentalray always takes up too much cpu time at the expense of everything else so I set it to low priority in task manager - very slight teeny ms / frame drop in render time but you can actually use pc to surf web / stick on a film while waiting on a render
edit: in other words by default it uses more cpu cycles than windows can handle no matter the cpu / cpus ,, always been that way for me.
edit again: hehe, just noticed you said haswell.. at back of my mind I think maybe that cpu by default powers down before hitting a factory set temp which in a laptop might be instant.. look through bios again, google overclocking guides for your bios / laptop.. .. even though you don't want to overclock there is generally alot of rubbish activated by default that will favour slower performance vs higher temps and overclockers generally know all the tricks to get round it ;)