I’ve been using Windows XP 32-bit for a really long time but I upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit yesterday. Having a 64-bit processor was quite a waste in XP I know.
Anyway. I set up some benchmarks just for fun to test if there would be any significant differences between Windows XP and 7. CPU being faster in 64-bit was expected but GPU rendering in cycles was around 50 seconds slower.
Internal renderer CPU comparison
WinXP: ~5min45s
Win7: ~4min37s
Cycles GPU comparison
WinXP: Tested once, ~7min
Win7: Tested twice to confirm, ~7min51s and ~7min47s
The only differences here are ofcourse Blender versions, (2.63a official 32-bit and 2.63a official 64-bit) Windows versions and drivers. The scenes are the same. I shut down Blender between tests to make sure nothing was preloaded or cached or anything like that.
So would anyone have any ideas why this would happen? Is windows 7 really such a graphical resource hog or are the new Nvidia drivers crap? Any ideas would be welcome.
right click my computer and go to properties then go to advanced system settings then go to performance then click settings and change it to best performance and see if that changes any thing… no one make fun of me idk what im talking about xD but its worth a shot
win 7 uses over 1 gig of memory while xp used less than half a gig. basically you cut half a gig out of your ram. actually right click on what ever you use to launch blender, then select properties at the bottom, go to the compatability tab, check the box for disable desktop composition under settings then go up and check the run this program in compatability mode for win xp service pack 2. you aren’t going to get all your ram back but you should get most of it back, and definantly enough to tell the difference.
i have vista not 7, but i have heard of an xp virtual machine in win 7, that might work even better. worth a shot to see if you get all your ram back.
I’m certainly not making fun of you, thanks for the suggestion I’ll try it out.
Alright but thing is that in XP the most a single process can use is 1GB and I definitely don’t even use that for this particular scene so it shouldn’t be lack of RAM. Besides having 4GB doesn’t fully allow you to use 4GB in XP but around 3GB.
Also it’s VRAM that cycles needs if I use GPU rendering. So in fact I should have more usable RAM in Win7.
I appreciate your help but I don’t think it’s lack of memory that affects the speed but something with the actual computing process during rendering.
Any more suggestions or ideas on this would be appreciated!
MiniGW builds primarily affects CPU render times. His GPU render times may only change by 5 secs at most, but that’s if the scene he is rendering is quite large.
