irender nxt speed issue

Hi,

I have recently upgraded a Dell Vostro pc and ever since irendernxt runs really slow. I know this will be quite an open ended question but am looking for some suggestions and pointers more than anything to start with. So the machine spec is:

Dell Vostro 430

Intel Core i7 2.8GHz

8GB DDR 3 RAM (Was 4GB on windows xp)

512MB Nvidia Gfx Card

500GB SATA Hard Drive

Windows 7 Pro 64Bit SP1

It was originally running windows xp pro sp3, and ran irender nxt fine (you could set it rendering a file with say 40passes and it would do it in a reasonable amount of time). The hard drive has been formatted and windows 7 64bit installed along with an additonal 4GB of RAM. The machine itself runs fine and works quicker on things like autocad. Google sketchup works fine running on version 7 (As that is what is licenced). The irendernxt version is 4.KH24 (Again what is the licenced version). The customer is drawing internal offices in google sketchup then rendering them. What usually happens now is it just causes the whole pc to go unresponsive and it takes alot longer to render files of the same size (Ie has to be left for hours). It does work eventually and for a small file is ok, it often seems better to render a file once then set it render another 30 times for example than asking it to render the file 31times to start with. Any suggestions as to why, what to look at or even how to get the best performance out of the software please (If that means hardware changes please advise).

Thanks

Andy

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Permalink Reply by Mike Halls on January 17, 2012 at 9:19am

Hi Andy

While you are waiting for a technical response from Al or Rich I thought I would post a comment.

With the spec of your machine your renders should fly !

Like you I use Windows 7 64bit.

My Acer machine has an Intel Core i5 (quad core) processor running at 2.8Ghz

I only have 3Gb of RAM on the system.

The attached rendered 40 passes in 6min 30.2secs. (1854x872 pixels)

Its not a very complex model but it does have quite a few lights.

If you would like to private message me with your e-mail address I would be happy to mail the sketchup file to you. You could do the same render and compare speeds.

Hope this helps

Regards

Mike (Mesh-3D)

Attachments:

proposals.jpg, 318 KB

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Permalink Reply by Andy Atthowe on January 17, 2012 at 9:37am

Thanks Mike, it would be interesting to see how long that file takes to render I will pm you

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Permalink Reply by Andy Atthowe on January 22, 2012 at 3:32am

Thanks for the file Mike and sorry for the delayed reply the customer has been really busy and I've just been given access to logon and try rendering it. Unfortantely I can't open the file as it was created in sketchup version 8 and we have version 7. I did check the options and it is set to render with all cores which is the default (Although it shows 8 cores and I thought the corei7 is a quad core cpu not 8 core?). Any other suggestions out there or support would be appreciated.

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Permalink Reply by Mike Halls on January 22, 2012 at 3:52am

Hi Andy

Attached is the file in version 7

Re the cores, probably something to do with 'virtual cores' and 'physical cores' I'm not very well up on the inner workings of processors. Sufice to say you won't get much better than an intel i7 for rendering.

Regards

Mike

Attachments:

proposals_revised_ver_7.zip, 4.2 MB

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Permalink Reply by Andy Atthowe on January 23, 2012 at 1:42am

Hi Mike, rendered the file on 40 passes with the sketchup pixel size and it took 10minutes 26 secs which whilst not horific still slower than your machine. Does antivirus software or something like that have an impact? The customer is only running avg business anti-virus (No firewall in it). Thanks Andy

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Permalink Reply by Mike Halls on January 23, 2012 at 5:36am

Hi Andy

As my machine is an i5 and yours an i7 I was expecting yours to be faster ! Can't see anti virus having an impact (I dont use any !) Mine is a very 'clean' machine with a recent OS installation (5 months) so the disk hasnt had time to get cluttered or fragmented.

Take it you have checked the usual things - plenty of disk space available etc ? and that there are no applications running in the background gobbling up rescources.The renderer could be having to share the processor with something else.

As you said 40 passes in 10mins at Sketchup pixels ain't too bad.

You can check if the processor is working when the macine is supposed to be doing nothing by going to 'task manager' and look at the performance monitor. At rest my CPU usage is 0% - when I start to render all 4 cores run at 90+%.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Mike

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Permalink Reply by Andy Atthowe on January 24, 2012 at 1:20am

Plenty of disk space etc, you got me thinking I hadnt looked at what was happening cpu wise in taskmanager. It is interesting sketchup never uses more than 25% of the cpu and the ram always has at least 4gb free even with sketchup and irender running. When I tell the render to start in sketchup the cpu kicks in but only goes to 13-25% and never above. I tried setting the priority to realtime in taskmanager which made no difference. Irender is set to use all 8 cores, I even set it manually to 8 instead of the default of all. Once the main rendering screen loads cpu useage is at 100% I notice the file name is irednerbatch64.exe (I.e a different version for 64bit machines). On your model the ram usage is low about 170mb (25% of 8gb being used in total), cpu stays at 95-100%.