Team Animation & CAD Workstation Issues

[Dan 1038]

Hey all,

We have decided to upgrade our hardware for the CAD and Animation teams this year and I have run into some issues with our initial test PC. Here is the build:

Intel Core i5 750 CPU
Gigabyte P55M-UD2 Motherboard
4GB DDR3 1033 memory
PNY NVidia Quadro FX380 Video
500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA Drive
Windows 7 Professional 64 bit

I have loaded both the 32 and 64 bit versions of 3dsMax on the machine and have some perplexing results on a render of a test scene from last year...

Old team PC - 2:28
New 64 bit - 0:58
New 32 bit - 0:29

Now, my question is why is the 64 bit version of 3dsMax 2X slower than the 32 bit version on a platform running a 64 bit OS and a 64 bit processor??? Think this is a Windows 7 issue or am I missing something? HELP!

Thanks,

[keehun]

Are you using a 3rd party rendering engine? that could be why.

[Dan 1038]

Originally Posted by keehun

Are you using a 3rd party rendering engine? that could be why.

I am not using any third party apps, both versions of 3ds Max were clean installs right off the Autodesk web site and both have SP1 installed...

[Trent B]

That is really strange, have you run the tests a few times to make sure it wasn't a fluke?

Is there a chance your graphics card drivers are somehow optimized for 32 bit or 3dsMax 64 isn't optimized for graphics.

Just trying to throw out ideas

Trent

[Tristan Lall]

With any other processor family, I'd wonder if the 64-bit version was set to use two threads, and the 32-bit version four. Render operations tend to be very closely correlated with the number of cores and processor speed, and are usually pretty easy to distribute across multiple processors without significant penalties. If the 64-bit software was ignoring two cores, this would usually result in exactly that type of performance pattern—exactly twice the performance.

But this being a quad-core Core i5, you actually wouldn't expect exactly double the performance, because of the "turbo mode". On this architecture, when cores are inactive, turbo mode will automatically increase the clockspeed on the remaining cores (by substantial amounts, in some situations), in order to take advantage of the thermal headroom afforded by inactive cores. In essence, these chips overclock themselves dynamically to operate at the highest clockspeed at which they are stable and not overheating.

In 3DSMax, rendering is all about hardware floating point capability. Has nVidia come out with a driver to offload some of the rendering work to a GPU (to lessen the load on the i5's FPUs)? If you're just using a conventional video driver, it won't be doing much of anything while the processor is busy rendering, so it's probably not the problem here.

Just for comparison, try rendering one of the built-in demos on both platforms, with the default settings. (Eliminate as many variables as possible, and see what happens.)