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TLobes
12-24-2007, 08:19 PM
Ive set up another PC as a mental Ray slave machine with 8.5 SP1 on the master. I've tested it and the slave machine does in fact render, but, its rendering horribly slow. If I were to render the same frame out on the slave machine in Maya, it would be literally 50x faster.

Windows XP Pro SP2 32-bit are running on both machines, master is Maya 8.5 SP1 Unlimited while the slave has the raysat85 SP1 counterpart. Firewall openings are setup, both are on the same gigabit network. They see each other fine, rayhosts is setup, no problem there. While both computers render, it's simply not making full use of the slave machine by any means.

At most, raysat85.exe will use 40 megs of ram during a render and about 10% of the cpu while the master machine chugs away. Nothing else is running on the slave machine that could affect this.

Any ideas?
Bitter
12-25-2007, 05:16 AM
How complex is the scene? As a rule satellite only really helps when the workload is pretty high, otherwise it doesn't help at all or even hurts. It's best for complex scenes.
TLobes
12-25-2007, 05:40 AM
The scene is quite complex. It's Jeremy Birn's current lighting and texturing challenge 13 (1 million plus poly) Christmas scene. With textures and such, its about 200 megs right now.
Htogrom
12-25-2007, 10:48 AM
I was testing mental ray satelite on five machines. One host and four slaves. All slave CPUs were runing on 30%. Rendertime was maybe 70% of rendering in one machine.
Then, just for comparison friend set up Vray satelite rendering. Render was somwere between three and four times faster.

I wonder what is Autodesk logical explanation for this...
joie
12-28-2007, 08:56 PM
Well, I render a really big scene with five machines and it renders really quick.

In one computer the rendertime is 1h 30m.

With MR Statellite it renders in 16m only.
TLobes
12-28-2007, 10:02 PM
It turns out if you set processor scheduling in Windows to "Background services" (System Properties->Advanced->Peformance Options->Advanced), the mental ray sattelite will make full use of the machine.
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