I have upgraded from an iMac 24" (2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 duo w/ 4GB SDRAM)
to an HPE 180t i7-920 quad core (2.66MGHz w/ 12GB SDRAM)
to now having a Mac Pro 8 core with two 2.26 GHz quad core processors with 16 GB DDR3.
all within 6 months…trying to get a fast render on animations.
Using the test from the Blender Render Benchmark page I got the following results…
iMac - 00:01:04:00 (using a max of 2 threads) 2.49 32bit
HP - 00:00:25:00 ( 8 threads) 2.49 32bit
Mac Pro - 00:00:21:00 (16 threads) 2.49 32bit
- 00:00:05:82 (16 threads) 2.5 Alpha 2 64bit
At first I had that wow factor…friggin 5 secs on the test render woohoo. However…
As I render the animations I’m building there’s not that much to celebrate. I don’t see any real time difference between the HP and Mac Pro and really not much difference from the iMac. When I look at the activity monitor on the Mac Pro I see that very little of the processor power and ram is being used on the Blender render. I’ll generally see about 14 GB of ram free and the processor running between 150-200% (out of 1600% avail).
On a 200 frame render (about 23000 vertices in the scene with wind particles) on default settings for a quicktime it takes about 00:02:66 per frame to render.
Other than thread settings (which I keep on auto for 16 threads- although 2.5 lets me set up to 64 (which I’ve tried but to no advantage) and playing with x and yparts…are there any other settings I can play with to get more of my processor power to take part in the rendering?
I get the feeling that I’m just restricted by the application itself and that I could throw all the processor power I want and not get any better rendering speeds. Do I just have computer overkill here?
Thanks for any help.
Jeff