New Mac Pro + Multithreading

[Linz]

Hi folks,

OK, I had a year of problems with my PowerMac G5 Dual 2.0 so Apple have finally replaced it with a shiny new Dual 2.66 xeon Mac Pro!!

Obviously I'm very happy but after testing my apps (as you do when you've got a new machine) I'm finding certain operations in Carrara to be a lot slower than I'd hoped.

I've loaded a few of the demo scenes and they often seem to be slower with multithreading ON than with it OFF. The Demo scene "Global Illumination" is a good example; If I render using multithreading it finishes in 1:25 but if I turn multithreading off it renders in 0:46!! Looking at Activity Monitor, running with threading ON uses about 75% but OFF uses around 25%, so it's definitely not using all the cores but rendering faster. I've tried different tile sizes and everything but there's just no way to get the multithread speed up. Simple scenes seem to benefit quite a lot however, but GI is really what I need in my work. I realise certain processes are more suited to multithreading than others but I've tested demos of other apps and they really make use of the 4 cores, especially for GI.

I also noticed that, despite upgrading to the 5.1 UB version of C5Pro, Activity Monitor and the file Info still report Carrara as PowerPC. I tried to run the demo of Anything Grows too and only the PowerPC version would work.

Maybe I'm not doing things right so I thought I'd ask here if anyone else has noticed this or if there's and solution.

Thanks,

Linz

Mac Pro 2.66, 3GB RAM, 250 GB SATA, OSX 10.4.8, Carrara 5.1 Pro

[ewinemiller]

Linz,

Are you sure you installed the UB patch and not just the old PowerPC 5.1 patch? I'm on a MacBook Pro and the UB version of Carrara shows Kind: Application (Universal).

Here's where I got the UB patch

http://www.daz3d.com/program/carrara/carrara_5/

If you get that going you'll really be smiling with that new Mac Pro!

Regards,

[Linz]

Originally Posted by ewinemiller

Linz,

Are you sure you installed the UB patch and not just the old PowerPC 5.1 patch? I'm on a MacBook Pro and the UB version of Carrara shows Kind: Application (Universal).

Here's where I got the UB patch

http://www.daz3d.com/program/carrara/carrara_5/

If you get that going you'll really be smiling with that new Mac Pro!

Regards,

Thank you so much Eric!!!

I had downloaded the 5.1 update from Daz 3D's downloads section without going through my account - I forgot there was already a PPC 5.1 before the UB

So yeah, you were right - I'm extremely happy now! The render times are even better than I expected. I mentioned the Global Illumination demo - It was around 0:45 with one core, 1:30 with 4 and now that I've got the correct update it's 0:08 - Quite incredible!!

I owe you one...so I'll pop over to Digital Carvers this weekend and buy whatever plugins I can afford

Thanks again,

Linz