Digital Art Zone

I’ve been using Bryce in Mac OS for years and love the fact that when I render, using high priority, it uses a high CPU percentage (between 250-300% on a MBP i7 dual core 2.66Ghz) to do fast renders.

On a new machine, due to the fact that Lion is not supported, I have had to resort to using Windows 7 Pro. Everything runs fine except the render. I’m using an iMac i7 quad core 3.40Ghz. When I check the processor utilisation during a render I’m disappointed to see it only using around 7% at best.

To this end I ran a test on both the aforementioned MacBook Pro vs the new iMac. Using the same scene (default new document) with exactly the same render settings, both set to high prioritisation, the MBP took 7secs and the iMac took 25!!!!

Is this the norm or is there something I can do to get it to use more??

Any help and advice is most appreciated.

Rickard - 05 June 2012 01:38 AM

I’ve been using Bryce in Mac OS for years and love the fact that when I render, using high priority, it uses a high CPU percentage (between 250-300% on a MBP i7 dual core 2.66Ghz) to do fast renders.

On a new machine, due to the fact that Lion is not supported, I have had to resort to using Windows 7 Pro. Everything runs fine except the render. I’m using an iMac i7 quad core 3.40Ghz. When I check the processor utilisation during a render I’m disappointed to see it only using around 7% at best.

To this end I ran a test on both the aforementioned MacBook Pro vs the new iMac. Using the same scene (default new document) with exactly the same render settings, both set to high prioritisation, the MBP took 7secs and the iMac took 25!!!!

Is this the norm or is there something I can do to get it to use more??

Any help and advice is most appreciated.

Interested as well.

Nothing!

Someone must have an idea?

Maybe it’s the obvious….. windowz isn’t up to the task? PC users haven’t been wondering why their complex renders take 6 months to render??

Perhaps it’s something to do with boot camp??

Please, any suggestions are most welcome!!

I’m sorry, Im not on the Mac and do not know where the discepancy in render time comes from. What I have tested is to run a Win XP in my Win 7 and XP only uses 1 core of the 8-way i7 processor. Therefore a Bryce 7.1 render takes as long as Bryce 5.5 and earlier. I also run a Win 2000 in the Win XP on the Win 7 and also only get 1 core. It might be the emulation software. Hopefully, someone on the Mac will pop in and shed some light.

Rickard - 11 June 2012 10:03 AM

Nothing!

Someone must have an idea?

Maybe it’s the obvious….. windowz isn’t up to the task? PC users haven’t been wondering why their complex renders take 6 months to render??

Perhaps it’s something to do with boot camp??

Please, any suggestions are most welcome!!

I’d like to suggest that you post one of your complex renders so we can get an idea of what’s taking you so long to render.

Dark Rider - 11 June 2012 11:29 AM

I’d like to suggest that you post one of your complex renders so we can get an idea of what’s taking you so long to render.

Good idea. There are some render hogs. IBL and transparencies, for example; many light sources, soft shadows, TA, DOF, high TIR settings, etc. etc. One should compare two identical scenes. And then, there are strategies to bring render time down without noticable quality impairment.

Dark Rider - 11 June 2012 11:29 AM

Rickard - 11 June 2012 10:03 AM

Nothing!

Someone must have an idea?

Maybe it’s the obvious….. windowz isn’t up to the task? PC users haven’t been wondering why their complex renders take 6 months to render??

Perhaps it’s something to do with boot camp??

Please, any suggestions are most welcome!!

I’d like to suggest that you post one of your complex renders so we can get an idea of what’s taking you so long to render.

I gave this some more thought, but other than what you’re rendering, the fact that it sounds like you are running windows on an apple (simulator over OS 200186650.998/A rev b?) and the fact that Bryce being 32 bit has some sad and serious memory access limitations, I can’t think of anything.  Windows is a resource hog, but I’m running an old 3ghz dual-core with only four gb of ram and I blow Bryce out ram-wise long before I slow it down…

Hey guys,

Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately due to the sensitive nature of what I’m rendering I can’t post an image.

I don’t think this problem has anything to do with what I’m rendering anyway, refer back to the original post. This is about CPU utilisation by Bryce in windows. It uses more CPU percentage when loading up or editing scenes than when rendering, this is why it is so slow.

Please, tell me, when you guys render in Windows 7 it is using more than 6-8% CPU in the processes section of the task manager!!??

Rickard - 15 June 2012 08:29 AM

Hey guys,

Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately due to the sensitive nature of what I’m rendering I can’t post an image.

I don’t think this problem has anything to do with what I’m rendering anyway, refer back to the original post. This is about CPU utilisation by Bryce in windows. It uses more CPU percentage when loading up or editing scenes than when rendering, this is why it is so slow.

Please, tell me, when you guys render in Windows 7 it is using more than 6-8% CPU in the processes section of the task manager!!??

I’m on an old, slow Dell Precision 490 3ghz dual-core with 4gb ram running Bryce under Win VPig home premium. Vpig reports me at 48-50% usage of my CPU using Bryce to “render to disk” with Win mail and Firefox running. 49-50% with only Bryce rendering.

I have a list of render times from different computers using the same file which is also available http://horo.dyndns.ch/raytracing/tests/rendertest71.html - the tests were done with bryce 7.1.

Horo - 16 June 2012 02:08 PM

I have a list of render times from different computers using the same file which is also available http://horo.dyndns.ch/raytracing/tests/rendertest71.html - the tests were done with bryce 7.1.

IE9 says your url is nonexistent, should I retry under Ff?

Oh crapo! Of course it doesn’t. I have discontinued that webserver on my netbook. I apologise. This is the one that is online: http://www.horo.ch/raytracing/tests/rendertest71.html

Just FYI, Bryce 7 running natively in Windows runs just fine. Set the render priority to high, and it will chew up all available cores and threads. Lack of cpu utilization in Windows on a MAC is more likely an emulator issue, as suggested.