Utilizing Multi Processors

[loughran.matt]

I dont know if this is right but i currently run a dual xeon quad core processor workstation with 3dsmax 2008 64bit and when ever i look at my task manager max only use's 25% of my processor power and often tops out. This is to my understanding that max is not utilizing the multi threads. If it can can some one please correct me and if it does can it in future please?

[Matt McDonald]

If you are rendering and only seeing 25% processor usage something is amiss. Make sure that "multi-threading" is tuned on under "customize - preferences - rendering".

 

But be aware most functions in Max are not multi-threaded and therefore your 25% CPU usage is normal.

[loughran.matt]

Yes when i render it utilises 100%, but yes when i am in active modeling mode it is in my case only using 12ish% (1 of 8 processors).

So can this be a formal request to post help on sorting this out?

Will max ever use multithreading processors or am i better off getting 1 big single core processor that will use 100%?

 

So many questions

[Matt Clementson]

Not all functions are easy to make multi-threaded, some calculations are required to be done in a certain order which you can't guarantee with multi-threading as you never know which processor will finish first. So it's unlikely that MAX will ever be 100% multi-threaded. Having said that I'm sure some of the functions that are not currently multi-threaded could be converted to be so.

[loughran.matt]

Thanks guys that is pretty much what i finding out through many forums, so i guess i will leave it on the wishlist and keep my fingers crossed.

 

For any others interested this is what was posted as a response on another forum.

 

"What are you processing? Typically other then the second stage of rendering most processes in max are not heavily multithreaded, particularly beyond 2 cores. For most 3d apps the biggest improvement from multiple processors is in rendering. Max used to get a pretty big boost in the viewport display from multiple processors but now we use the graphics cards for all of our acceleration. I’m not a programmer myself but from talking to programmers on our products and others Multithreading is the biggest challenge right now. Essentially intel and AMD could no longer figure out how to make individual processors faster in an economical way and so started creating more cores. Now the software industry has to play catch up and figure out how to deal with this. As I understand it the difficulty is taking existing math which expects to have the answers from the previous operation before doing the next and figuring out how to break those things up to separate processors to do simultaneously. This is hard enough if you know that you will have a specific number of processors. but coding so it deals with and undetermined number of processors is a much bigger challenge.

Yes I know people using supercomputers have been doing this for years. To me it looks like a lot of the things they are doing are in many ways similar to rendering which is much more amendable to threading then say polygonal modeling operations.

This is all just my opinion though as I really am not a coder. Anyone out there actually do coding who can comment?

 

 

Shawn Hendriks

AREA Editor and Chief

Autodesk Media and Entertainment"

 

So i guess thats that for that one for now............

 

Cheers

 

[leonmagnavox]

what is multithread guys?

[SandmanNinja]

A multi-threaded program will look at the program's instructions (op codes), and dole some of the work out to one CPU and more work to a different CPU. This doling out process is a 'thread'. So, more than one thread? Then it's multi-threading.

 

There's something called Branch Predicting also, but I don't know if that's old school now or not.