Best Renderama Setup for MacPro 8 Core

#1

Hi,

What is the best configuration for MacPro 8 core to optimised the performance of renderama?

1.0 Amount of RAM allocated to each slave

2.0 Amount, size and make of of of Hard drives

3.0 Is ATI 1900xt good enough?

Thank you for any advice!!

Burney

#2

Hi !

I think the n°1 depends on the complexity of your average scenes, but i would think of 1-2GB per node, 2GB being the biggest RAM allocation you can do to each Camera…

According to Ian (Halfworld…), the best would be to have more than 1 hard drive, so i’d think 2 or 3 drives, size in this case doesn’t matter, except for your own needs in storage capacity.

Having seen EIAS’s OpenGL performance, i think the ATI should be more than enough, given the fact this card will receive the help of 8 cores to do all the calculations of the geometry transformations. :cool:

Hope it helps, and probably someone with a real experience of those things will chime in and give better advice ! :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette :slight_smile:

#3

Ian uses 6 drives in his 8-core.

#4

Hi Laurent & Dave,

Thank for the response. Hope Ian will share his performance secret.

Thank all!!

#5

Hi Burney,

As Dave said, on our 8 core we have:

2 gigs of ram per slave
1 hard drive per slave
6 slaves in total
This means we can continue working even when we are rendering on 6 Cameras at once.
In this case I’m tempted to say 6 HDs is nearing over-kill, 4 is also a good number.

In our Quad core we have:

2 gigs or ram per slave
3 HDs
4 Slaves

And this works really well too.

Our 3D scenes really push the limit of Camera so we need maximum Ram for each camera as we regularly have scenes with 6 or 7 million polygons with GI and lots of RT. We’ve got the 512mb Radeon cards for our MacTels, can’t remember the model number at the moment but they are really very speedy.

On a recent animation, Rendering to one Camera on the 8 core took 15 minutes a frame, and when rendering to 6 Cameras simultaneously, it took 15 minutes per frame (but there were 6 at once so it was really just over 2.5 minutes a frame) - Adding a 7th or 8th Camera really started to slow things down (all slaves taking 25mins+ per frame) - so I’d say 6 Slaves is optimum.

Ian

#6

Ian,

You are the master and the above info really very valuable and will save us much time going through the trial and errors. As always, thank you very very much for the sharing.

#7

Another questions Ian,

  1. Why is important different hard drives ?
  2. How could increase this fact or with one HD?
  3. Could be partitions of the same HD?

Thanks in advance !

#8

Hey Chaps,

You are most welcome.

  1. Multi processor machines are not 100% efficient for two big reasons. Number 1 is semaphoring where sometimes you can’t start the next calculation until the current one is complete. Number 2 is reading and writing to hard drives (to access the CachePageFile for example). If you only have one hard drive and 6 slaves, only one slave can access the CachePageFile at once - so the other slaves have to wait their turn to read it.

This is because hard drives only have one head (reader) - they can only read at one place on the disk at a time. This is why if you have 4 slaves and 4 hard drives you can read four things at a time. This is obviously better :slight_smile:

  1. Partitions of the same hard drive do not work because you still only have one hard drive head to read files from all partitions.

Hope that helps!
Ian

#9

From what i understood in the other thread where Ian was talking about this, it helps the slaves (Renderama nodes…) to access datas on HD faster, as each slave can read and write on a single HD. :slight_smile:

So it’s more of a performance factor than anything else.
You don’t have to have multiple HD, it’ll work with only one, but that could impact overall performance.
So that answers your question about partioning the HD, as the number of heads reading and writing data remains constant…

However i think that the performance hit isn’t that huge and only impact heavy scenes with heavy textures.

Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette :slight_smile:

Edit: oops, Ian has been faster than me on that one ! :wink:

#10

Laurent is 100% correct, it will only affect large scenes (like the one’s I do :slight_smile: where the cachepagefile is regularly 700mb +

Ian

#11

Perfectly explained it. > Understood

:wink:

Thanks !

#12

Everyone should understand that it is possible to have a small project, with a big cache page file.

I did a test for this not too long ago and was able to generate a file over 2GB in size with a very small project (under 1MB).

So it has a lot to do with which rendering features you are using, not just how many polygons, and textures.

I think the new Layers system in v7 can generate particularly large files.

#13

Double post

#14

I’ve been rendering 6-8 slaves on my OCTO since I first got it 3 days after they were announced. I was originally using 1 HD and ran into some issues with initial frames taking sometimes 20 minutes when it should have taken 2. I added 3 HD’s and things have been much better. I run Animator from one HD, My EI Project from another, even numbered slaves from the third and odd numbered slaves from the fourth.

I launch the slaves 2 at a time, aprx 15 seconds apart and everything runs great, even while running 8 slaves at once.

I allocate 1GB per slave which works fine for most renders, I decrease the amount of slaves and increase the allocated ram as needed.

The ATI 1900xt is better than good enough, it’s really works well with Animator.

Peter

#15

Great information, thanks for the insight ! :thumbsup:

I hope i’ll be able to give EIAS v7.0 a test drive in a near future, as it seems that its future is a lot brighter than it seemed to be in a not so distant past. :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette :slight_smile:

#16

Hi Peter, Thank you for sharing. So your setup is on a PC?

#17

oh, heavens no… I’m a mac man all the way. :wink:

#18

The 8cores MacPro is a really great machine, isn’t it ? :wink:
I have one here for testing purpose along with a QuadroFX4500 and a 30" Cinema Display and i must say this comp is absolutely fantastic ! :bounce:

Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette :slight_smile:

#19

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