When I was in UNIX world, there were commands to launch renders only on one processor.
I just bought a dual 250 Opteron system running XP Pro and the Tyan K8W Thunder -- 4 Gigs of RAM (high-end Corsair). The big snit with this box is it's dedicated memory and a motherboard which supports it.
How do I take advantage of
On windows you mean? Im not sure, when you do a porgram you can specify this. But i havent fornd any tool that does this for a program whatre the programmedr didnt account for this in windows.
The help is quiet a bout the subject i did a cursory scan on msds but didnt find anything yet.
Some porgrams like maya do however have flags themselves to specify how many procs you wnat to use.
Thanks for the reply. You're awesome. Please let me know if you learn anything new, will you?
Launching renders on specific procs is one thing, but I'm also having problems with just rendering on one processor -- whichever one it wants. With this new machine (dual Opteron 250s, 4 Gigs RAM, etc.) and Maya 6, I can't get it to render on one processor -- regardless of which one. Weird ehh?
The odd thing is that I never had a problem with them in the past; but maybe I never noticed it before.
When launching from a Maya software render from the command prompt (Render -sw -n # [-n 0, -n 1, -n 2]) the text in the 'shell' render on "2 threads" regardless of the command line settings. This is not a .bat file but an actual command in the command prompt, which I've always thought over-wrote the render globals.
Two threads means with 2 processors, right? I'm not crazy am I?
I've triple checked that this is occuring even when -n = 1.
Yes, I have gone in and changed the default number of processors (a new version 6 feature hidden in the render globals) saved out, and tried it this way.
An additional weirdness, likely related, is that in the GUI where you specify # of processors, Maya's software renderer shows a max of 2 procs available, while MentalRay shows 4 (!???). Weird huh?
....help...
thoughts?
mentalray shows number of threads to use and maya shows number of processors to use. A thread is a independent program exrecution code. MAya shoudl only show you 2 porcs since you hgave 2 and mentalray would show you 4 therads.
My home machine has 2 346 prcs and they render well with either on or two procs.
Im not sure but atleast my maya does not have a -sw flag
is it a typo since -r sw is what i use.
You can specify the processor affinity by hitting ctrl+shift+esc click the processes and right click on the process (mayabatch I think) and there should be a selection for "set affinity". Select that and you can turn on and off processes for processors. This is not commandline simple, but see if it works for you.
don
I think somone hinted that some company made commandline tools that do what the taskmanager does. Maybe it has tools for this too?