ess 7 vs ess 6.5 render speed

#1

I’ve logged a ticket with the softimage folks, but I haven’t heard back as yet. I’m wondering if anyone else has seen this problem and knows how to fix it.

My render times in xsi 7 essentials are much much longer than in 6.5. For example:

If I load the example scene “rendertree_surface_ocean” into a newly opened instance of 6.5 and do a render->preview the render takes about 22 seconds.

If I do the same thing in 7 the render takes 4.5 minutes!

Both are the 64 bit version of essentials.

I can see that 7 is only using one of the cores where 6.5 uses all 4, so I want to understand why and how to fix that, but that is only part of the problem (otherwise I would expect a slowdown of a factor of about 4 vs. 20).

Thanks for any insight into this.

#2

I found the answer and thought I would share it just in case someone else runs into it. It turns out it was a graphics driver issue. I know to check that in a lot of cases, but didn’t suspect it in this case since 6.5 had no problems and it was rendering vs. real time interactivity. Anyway updating to the latest nvidia drivers brought version 7 rendering speed back to that of 6.5.

#3

Graphics drivers have nothing to do with rendering.

#4

Graphics drivers have nothing to do with rendering.

Whether the drivers or the GPU are involved in rendering or not, the fact of the matter is just prior to the driver change the render used one core and took 4.5 minutes and just after updating the driver the render used all cores and took 20 seconds.

I just thought I would let others know, because it isn’t a likely cause.

#5

v7’s new functionality with optimizing rendering that is now an automated feature (Automatic BSP2). thus, you would need to check your rendering your parameters before you jump in and draw a region.

#6

we are having some real render issues (crashing out due to memory issues on a 32GB RAM render farm!!!)

I’m guessing this could be a BSP2 issue?

We are rolling back to 6.5 just for the moment as we have deadlines to hit

#7

You aren’t by chance doing any ICE particle scaling (Set Particle Scale)? I just encountered a problem (reported and confirmed) where if I increased the Y size of a particle, the RAM use went through the roof when rendering… used up my 10 GB and kept on going.

#8

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