A Bit Disappointed with the New Supercomputer
ebergerly
Posts: 3,255
Okay, I've got my brand new Ryzen 7 1700 machine with 8 cores, 16 threads, 64GB RAM, a GTX 1070 GPU, and I'm doing a GPU render in Blender/Cycles.
So you might think that my browsing and other non-GPU stuff would be just as fast as always even though the GPU is pegged at 100%, right? Of my 16 CPU's, only a few of them are showing any utilization whatsoever, the rest at 0%.
And as I'm typing I have a 1 or 2 second delay from the keyboard to it showing on the screen.
Which goes to the point I made before... seems like no matter how much of a monster your new computer is, chances are it's just a little less annoying than your last one. But IMO you're not likely to be really awestruck by how incredible it is, no matter what the hype you hear.
And now 120 frames of a smoke/flames render will take about 3 hours or more. Although it said that estimate an hour ago....
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Comments
Machine performance is very much tied to the OS you put on it...
Kendall
Yeah, but internet and OS are a bit irrelevant arent they? If I kill my Blender render, everything is fast and snappy, never had any delay with my high speed internet, and say what you will about Windows 10, it's pretty fast, especially now that it's on an SSD.
I dunno, seems like this super basic stuff like coordinating the GPU and CPU activity to take advantage of both is pretty basic. Hard to believe after all these years they haven't figured it out.
You may also want to make sure you have all your drivers up to date.
Thanks. Brand new computer, brand new drivers.
Do you have your CPU turned off in the Advanced Settings part of the Iray Render Settings? I know that even if I limit the usage to a couple of CPUs, using my computer during a render is still laggy. I have to turn off CPU utilization entirely to get any kind of reasonable other-task performance out of it while rendering.
Oh-- you said Blender render. Dunno about that!
When I got my own new machine (upgraded from a 745 to a 1080, with accompanying upgrades) I immediately plunged into doing much more elaborate renders so it was not the mind-blowing experience I hoped for.... but the renders themselves were quite nice. :-) Once they were done.
Yeah, with Blender it's one or the other... CPU or GPU compute. And the strange thing is if I look at my 16 CPU's in CPUID HWMonitor, like 4 of them are busy, and the rest are just sitting there, even though I can't even type in my browser without delay.
I even tried messing with the GPU acceleration setting in my Chrome browser. Of course it did nothing. And I get the same delay in Word.
I wonder if you can limit Chrome to only using the CPUs that aren't busy.
That's true, usually. Though I found with my Ryzen system I had to do some bios updates. And I had to download something from AMD's website...chipset drivers or something. AMD had to create a custom power plan for windows because windows was improperly parking Ryzen CPU's inactive cores:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-chipset-drivers-windows-10-x64,34254.html
Actually, the issue in that article sounds exactly like what you're describing. Seems like more recently released boards would have all this stuff out of the box, but it's worth a double check.
Not sure how to check what your current chipset driver is, but you can download the latest here:
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/chipset?os=Windows+10+-+64
And if that's not it, consider making sure on the Performance Power plan instead of balanced. I think balanced is the default.
I think it's like Kendall said, a Windows stupidity. Cuz it's delayed in Word, in Chrome, and pretty much anything I do. Windows just isn't taking advantage of the unused threads.
Wow, JCThomas thanks. That sounds like a firm lead. I'll check it out. And now that you mention it I did notice some of the CPU's being "parked" the other day, and wasn't sure what that meant.
Cool, should be a quick fix if it's indeed the issue. Download, install, probably a restart. let us know how it goes.
Keep in mind that the CPUs are very new and Windows doesn't yet know how to handle them. There are likely to be inefficiencies for the next year or so (maybe longer if the architecture doesn't reach critical mass) before MicroSoft will put the money/effort in to make the scheduler and other time critical pieces use the new features of the chips.
Kendall
Okay, just installed the new AMD drivers....turns out they were introduced a month after my BIOS version...
Rendering my Blender smoke scene now...
GPU at 100%...
Wow....all 16 of my CPU's are busy now
And I'm typing this without delay. No delay at all.
Well folks, I think it's official....
JCThomas is SUPER AWESOME !!!!
Thanks dude. Makes a huge difference. I noticed that it adds a new power profile to the Windows 10 power settings, called Ryzen something. Whatever....
There is a barely noticeable delay as I type, but just barely noticeable. And even CPU 14 jumps up to 40% utilization once in a while.
Haha, right on man, glad it worked for you. Happy to help.
It's also possible there might be a newer BIOS then for your board. You could check on the manufacturer's website.
..ahh, so it was a driver issue. Never considered that with new gear, OS, and BIOS.
Myself, I come from the old "quick & dirty" school of computing.
Yeah, we are becoming a dying breed.
And that's my point in the other thread. With all the hype and awesomeness of the latest technology, when it comes down to actually using it, the real world is a lot different from the hype. It's new, so it doesn't really work yet. So you wait for months, and waste all kinds of time trying to figure out what's wrong, and debug, and download drivers, and search the internet, and so on. And all the time you thought you were saving goes into debugging your new technology.
So is it really worth it to spend $2,000 on a new super machine, and will it REALLY make more than just a 20% difference in actual performance, or is it mostly hype?
Well, I think it's 80% hype and 20% real improvement. On a good day....
...this is why I like to let the "dust settle" with any new technology or software update.
BTW, I'm kinda hoping this new AMD driver will fix the weird issue I had the other day with a blue screen and automatic shutdown of my PC, for what seemed to be, based on what indecipherable error codes I could see, to be a power issue. Maybe this new Ryzen power profile fixes that.
I hope....
My newer machine is more inclined to seizing with windows 10 when I render in daz despite the muscle power and system resources. Wish I could revert to 7 but sadly there aren't Drivers for some of the critical system bits
Another Windows insanity...
When I built my new machine I transferred a runtime folder with a lot of my texture images to my SSD. I copied the folder. Simple, right?
Well, no. Turns out some of the images showed up in the new folder, but upon inspection they arent' really there. So I open a D|S scene, and it says it can't find the images. And I look and they're there. Although the icons aren't showing the images, just the blank image icon thingy. So I'm scratching my head, and go into surfaces and it shows the image is loaded, but the preview icon is this blue-white low res image of nothing.
Huh?
Well, turns out the images didn't copy over correctly. So now when I load a scene I have to pay attention to see if any images didn't load, and re-copy them from the old drive.
I hate Windows. I've always hated Windows, and I will always hate Windows. It's a horrendous mess.
And BTW, to re-copy the images across the network I had to share the folder. So I shared it with the Homegroup, and with my username. So I try to access, but I don't have privileges. Huh? I tried 3 times, but no luck. So then I did right-click and Properties and shared it that way and it worked.
Same insanity I've been having with Windows since the very beginning.
I hate Windows.
Really neat seeing all of this help and these suggestions. Things like this are why this is such a neat board.
Bob
ebergerly, in my case when I transferred terabytes of data to my new 8 TB drive, I lost ownership of about 25% of the copied files and folders. I had to grab ownership again.
Yes, Windows 10 is a mess.
Chrome gets laggy for me rendering with Daz Studio and Iray, even though my CPU is only about 40%. Word is a bit laggy too.
Firefox works just fine.
Edit: My CPU is unchecked for rendering.
I noticed in your other thread that you were upgrading from from an i7 6700, right? To be fair to your new build, your Ryzen system is more of a side-grade than an upgrade, especially since you've got the same 1070 in there.
If you'd been upgrading an older i5, or an AMD rig prior to Ryzen, I think you would have been astounded at the performance difference. It would have seemed less hype at the very least.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy your new rig and get the rest of the kinks ironed out.
For what it's worth to anyone contemplating building a Ryzen rig or wary of Windows 10, I had 2 512GB SSDs on an older build, a 4TB hard drive with a ton of ripped blurays, and added a 1TB Intel 600P nvme drive and 1 TB Crucial M.2 SSD to my Ryzen system. Didn't lose anything. No movies or DS content, nothing.
I don't mean to contradict the experiences of others or belittle anyone's woes, but things do just work the way they're supposed to sometimes. My personal experiences with Windows 10 and Ryzen, or any intel chipset for that matter, have been all the time.
..yeah I hope my latest purchase is not a disappointment
...then again, I am on wireless.
The time taken for a shiny new superfast computer to feel slow and you realise you need a new faster one is approximately 8 minutes and 4 seconds!
And that's my point...CPU speeds have been pretty much flat for a long time. So a new "monster" processor doesn't mean your system is necessarily faster. What you're getting is more cores, which may or may not be a benefit, depending on whether/how much your OS and video drivers and chipset drivers and everything else work together to utilize them, and whether your software gives a damn about additional cores/threads.
The hype is "WOW wait for the Ryzen CPU's they're so much better than Intel !!". And "WOW wait for the Threadripper it will blow the shorts off everything !!".
Well, maybe or maybe not. As you showed, if the chipset drivers aren't yet working to allow the CPU to work with the OS, then it's a waste of money until (and if) that gets ironed out. And IF your software cares about all those threads, which many don't.
And yeah, a new GTX 1080ti is awesome, but in practice maybe it's not nearly what you'd expect. For example, the Ryzen doesn't have an onboard GPU, so you need to use your GTX to drive your monitors. I have 3 monitors, and it *appears* that Windows grabs 2GB of the 8GB VRAM on the GTX 1070 as a placeholder for driving the monitors or some such nonsense (which nobody really seems to understand). So then if you have a memory intensive scene you need to render it might just run out of RAM and start using the CPU, thereby slowing things down drastically. In that case, was $800 for a GTX 1080ti worth it? Well.....
And as you showed me, if the chipset driver doesn't work well with Windows to allow you to do other stuff on your computer while the GPU render is going on, and the system is pretty much unusable due to the delay, what's the real benefit?
It's real complicated, and there are a lot of "it depends" in the equation, so my only point is that unless you're willing to look the other way at all of the debugging and limitations you'll probably experience, the ACTUAL benefit of all this new technology at the end of the day might be much less than the hype might suggest.
I think the issue is a lot of us don't really mind all of the debugging, and we look the other way at the limitations because it's kinda fun to play with technology, so few people really look at the raw numbers to determine that ACTUAL costs and benefits. Yeah, we save 10 minutes per render with the new GPU, but it took us 7 days of chasing drivers and debugging stuff to get there. That's a lot of 10 minute renders to make up for 7 wasted days of our time.
Kendall,
I would be interested to know which version of Windows is the best for running DAZ Studio / Iray. I started on W7 and my current render PC runs W8.1. When I buy my next render box, in about two years time, I suspect the only option will be W10.
Cheers,
Alex. (No, not that one, the other one.)