Holy crap!

FrankB · January 05, 2009, 01:44:44 PM

.. I just figured out that I can have TG2 use 8 threads, although I only have 4 physical cores. This can be achieved through the Intel Core i7 supporting Hyperthreading. I can tell you HT is insanely effective with TG2, at least on this cpu. It really looks like twice the speed compared to 4 threads. INSANE!

I'm rendering a modified "cumulonimbus distant shot" scene, with 3 cloud layer and 0.9 quality, Gi 2/2, 700 cloud samples, 32 atmo samples at 1600x800 resolution. after 30 minutes, the GI prepass was done including 20% of the scene already rendered!

Guys, if you can make that possible, drop your whatever most desperate wish for 2009 and put a core i7 on your list instead ;-)

Cheers,
Frank

Tangled-Universe · January 05, 2009, 02:01:56 PM

When we were discussing your machine on MSN I was a bit surprised that you had to use 2 instances to get HT to work. My idea was: if 1 instance can't use it, the second won't too.
But never paid too much attention to it

Great to see it works!

And of course: show us the result

Martin

FrankB · January 05, 2009, 02:03:46 PM

yeah, I really HAVE to set min threads to 8. If I have min threads = 4, it won't use HT.

Cheers,
Frank

Seth · January 05, 2009, 02:48:46 PM

damn ! T-U told me your computer was brutal but i didn't think that much brutal !!!

FrankB · January 05, 2009, 04:55:44 PM

yeah, it's ridiculously brutal at TG2 ;-)

.. the image I just posted finished shortly after 2 hrs. The thick cloud part took a little longer ;-)

Seth · January 05, 2009, 05:08:36 PM

damn only 2 hours for those big fat good lookin' clouds ?! '-_-
incredible ! i need one of those processor ^^

FrankB · January 05, 2009, 05:17:46 PM

... and it's the slowest of the available i7's. mine runs on 2.6 GHz, the fastest one at ~3 GHz (untuned).

old_blaggard · January 05, 2009, 05:27:09 PM

Wow, that's fantastic news! I'm just getting more and more excited about the possibilities here

.

rcallicotte · January 06, 2009, 09:41:47 AM

Slobber.

reck · January 06, 2009, 10:00:04 AM

Oh this sounds very exciting. I'm going to have to save up for one of these chips.

BTW Frank did you read this thread? Didn't sounds like it would make that much difference but it sound like it does.

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5032.0

FrankB · January 06, 2009, 10:20:58 AM

I am not doing benchmarks, but I can tell you it feels like almost twice the speed with HT enabled. At the very least, the difference is clearly notable.
If and when my TG2 creativiy bursts needs a rest, I'll do a benchmark.

Cheers,
Frank

PorcupineFloyd · January 06, 2009, 10:28:21 AM

Ech I wish that GPU-CPU would scale 1:1 in terms of TG2 rendering. It would be beautiful to do some renders on my 96-shader GeForce

reck · January 06, 2009, 10:43:51 AM

Also I seem to remember reading on here that TG multicore support isn't particularly optimised yet, especially with more than 4 cores. So post TG2 we may get even more speed as the multi-threaded capability improves. It would be nice to the get the preview window multi-threaded as well.

FrankB · January 06, 2009, 10:47:49 AM

multi threaded preview... that would be another productivity boost.

PorcupineFloyd · January 06, 2009, 10:53:56 AM

Quote from: FrankB on January 06, 2009, 10:47:49 AM
multi threaded preview... that would be another productivity boost.

I second that.