For Those of us Stuck with CPU Only....for now

Support Technical Support
1

I know the thing to do is to upgrade my system and get a newer nvidia card that supports CUDA 2.0 and better but for now I must use what I have until I can afford the upgrade. My question is, how do I get the most out of my quad core system when it comes to using cycles? Is cycles strictly built with GPU rendering in mind or is there a way to maximize a strictly CPU system? Or in the case of having only CPU to render, do I just not bother with any user settings as the core/s will be automatically detected and there is no further enhancement to experience?

I noticed in the panel where it says “auto detect” and “fixed” that if I click on “fixed”, it sets the core count to 1 and I cannot change it. When I leave it on auto, i see 4 cores but as though it is kinda greyed. I’m just curious about this area and wonder if I am missing something I can take advantage of.

My specs are in my signature.
My card supports CUDA but seems to be too weak (early version).

2

When you render with auto-detect on… does it render four tiles at once or just one? if it renders four tiles then it is using your whole CPU to render.

3

In terms of program optimization, you can get a significant (around 50%) improvement over regular builds by using a mingw build from builder.blender.org. (mingw builds may have stability problems, so don’t use them for work, only rendering)
EDIT: Looks like mingw is only available on 64-bit. In that case, try the experimental VS2012 build.