I would just as soon have balancing give me 100% when doing only one thing, rather than have 50% sitting waiting for me to decide to do something else. DYNAMIC balancing is what it is called. It is not happening in most instances. Hence, the problem stated at the top of this thread. A 50% waste in many instances.

Thanks Guys!

Anyway, what you guys mentioned are all facts. 50%, ....etc.
It is all happening in the Dual AMD platform.
Call it what you want, Load Balancing, ...etc.
Bottom line is, after seeing the performance in both Dual P4 & AMD + someone who writes multi-threading instructions for CPUs, now I can safely say, VV3 is not optimised for Dual AMD platform.

Now, those using AMDs, please do not feel cheated or offended by the above claims.
I'm just trying to highlight a problem & hope that the relevant parties (SF or AMD)will do something to help me/us.

But if nothing can be done or no real incentive to do it, then too bad, I've to get stuck with this Dual AMD BUT in future, will only get CPUs that SF supports properly.

Regards

Which dual P4 did you see?

Laurence Kingston

...and there's yet another solution, in this day of inexpensive computers.

We are using two different computers to work out our rendering solutions.

While it may seem extragavant, one of the machines is an older one.

We are using a firewire drive to sneaker net files between the two different machines, and it works well.

As we upgrade the version number on the main machine, we copy it to the alternate firewire drive, walk to the second machine, render various scenes, and then walk the finished AVI sections to the main machine. No creative work takes place on the second machine, to avoid losing continutity of thought. It's great not to have to work,and we are considering getting a KVM switch, so we don't even have to walk.

Is anyone else working like this?

vicmilt, you might want to consider Virtual Network Computing which is a tiny bit of free software which lets to take control of another PC using a standard ethernet connection. You can use it at the same time as transfering data over the network. Worth checking out. I use it when I'm transfering files between laptop & desktop.

One of the things I like most about it is that reboots/crashes of either PC have no effect on the other.

Mike K

Mike, you too the words strait from my mouth! =) I'll second the recommendation on VNC. I use it quite frequently here on the local network, allowing me to check the status of renders no matter where I am on campus. The great part is that it can load through an applet in Internet Explorer, so you only need to install the software on the machine you'll be controlling. We're also planning on having students use it on their own machines so they can check their e-mail, messages and such on their own machines using IE on the lab equipment, thus allowing us to avoid the headache of roaming profiles and creating a huge registry mess.

- Nick

They released an updated 3.4.4 version on September 25th - haven't had a look at it yet, so don't know what it offers/improves.

Mike K

Hi Laurence,

For info, I'm also using a Xeon Dual P4.

Regards

If VV is letting the OS "load balance" then it is not explicitly setting "processor affinity". You make a choice when create a thread, as to how its "dispatching" will be handled. You can let the OS do it, or you can HELP the OS do it by specifying on which processor a specific thread should run. It is my understanding that RENDERING is the prime multi-threaded piece in VV3. I would expect this to run on all available processors.

NB Running parallel memory intensive threads may hurt performance (one or more cpus)This has to do with the cache and memory access. The CPU (CPUS) can only run at full speed when fetching from the cache. As a high performance coder, your goal is to promote orderly filling of cache. Shared cache in a muli-threaded app can make it impossible to effectively use the cache. Sometime, good old single threaded MMX/SSE optimized code is the fastest.

Chris

I have a dual AMD 1900 system and VV operates very well. I also have it running on a P-3 dual 600 computer.
I use IDE caddies to share the big files. I'm not sure what real world problems you are having with your set up? Sometimes it's better not to focus too much on the numbers and judge by what you can accomplish.
I find the operation of my dual AMD system is awesome with VV.

One better than VNC at: http://www.tightvnc.com/

Hi Watson,

It seems like your Dual is working fine.
Just checking, do you see your CPU performance at 100% during a single VV3 project rendering? (Inside the Task Manager monitoring)

If you see 50%+, then the Dual is not as awesome as you had thought.
OR
If you do see 100%, guess the problem might be the IDE caddies you were referring to.
Where/How can I access the IDE caddies?

Regards

Hi Watson & All out there,

I think I,ve found the BUG causing all this headaches in VV3.

Eversince my updating of XP SP1 on my Dual AMD & P4, all soughts of weird 'crap' starts happening to VV3; slow down effect, WMV issues & now I found out that the XP SP1 is intentionally forcing Dual CPUs system to be at half power. (try a single rendering to see it for yourself)

So, stop updating XP SP1!!!

For me, have to undo + redo the OS installation all over again.

Regards

Wondering et al - we're looking into this SP1/slowdown issue right now. Any other data you can provide would be really helpful (system info, render settings, anything). Thanks

I just bought a dual AMD Athlon MP 1800 with XP Pro pre installed. How can I tell if I have the SP1 update installed?

Al