Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Maya Mental Ray problem with new Mac Pro

fluidedge said:
yes maya is still a Carbon app. Blame apple for dropping support for Carbon, a Cocoa rewrite is a monumental task. I wouldn't expect it for Maya 2010 as internal betas are already floating around for that.
Click to expand...

I understand that, but surely enabling the use of 16 cores/recognising the difference between threads and cores would surely not need a total rewrite? I'm hoping for a service pack to 2009 that sorts out some of the problems with the release including this issue. Anyone know if there's a service pack planned?
 
robinp said:
it's a 2.6 QUAD not octad that I'm comparing it to and beside that, I really don't follow your logic. There are clearly some serious flaws with the way the processor preference pane works with these new chips - I guess we can expect a new version with Snow Leopard/WWDC
Click to expand...

Hey what the hell! Someone changed my post. I noticed that you had a quad and edited it and changed the last paragraph to light grey because it wasn't talking about the right computer, and made a different comparison right after. WTF. Well I'm not going to both rewriting that.

But I am still surprised you don't get the logic. If you disable hyper threading and the last 4 processors vanish, it seems obvious that the last 4 processors were representing virtual cores... what's so hard about that?
 
robinp said:
I understand that, but surely enabling the use of 16 cores/recognising the difference between threads and cores would surely not need a total rewrite? I'm hoping for a service pack to 2009 that sorts out some of the problems with the release including this issue. Anyone know if there's a service pack planned?
Click to expand...

If there's an "extension" due it'll be out around september when the last one came out. But since 3DS Max is gearing up their 2010 previews i think autodesk might just push ahead with maya 2010. The extension to maya 2008 was really to introduce maya muscle.
 
ok, if you want proof that it isn't using the cores/threads efficiently this should do it.

I managed to get Maya to render 2 scenes at a time (one on 2008, the other on 2009). I will give the times for the 2009 one (the one I had running on 2008 was far more complex with lots of particles etc) and I don't have time to mess around for hours.

Test 1, with 2 renders going: 3:14
Test 2, with only the 2009 render: 2:48

When running the two renders at the same time, all 16 threads were being used. For the pleasure of rendering images at once, I only saw a 26sec reduction in speed which is somewhat phenomenal and actually could be quite useful so I'm not too fussed... however, it would be nice to be able to use all the power on one scene if I wanted. 😕
 
fluidedge said:
If there's an "extension" due it'll be out around september when the last one came out. But since 3DS Max is gearing up their 2010 previews i think autodesk might just push ahead with maya 2010. The extension to maya 2008 was really to introduce maya muscle.
Click to expand...

there was a Service Pack as well as the extension. The service pack came out in the first few months of 2008.
 
i really think you're making a fuss about nothing here. You have an extremely powerful computer that is showing *considerable* (170%) speed updates. That the computer is not using 100% of the power available to it is neither here nor there imvho. There are overheads involved, system resources etc. It is not a direct proportionality that if you double your threads you half you render times or else Pixar would be rendering at 1 frame a second by now.

Try rendering from the command line to reduce the overhead of the Maya GUI running. It's really not important if something takes 2:48 or 2:30. It's not like you're twiddling your thumbs watching a batch render. You can be checking your email or making a coffee! 😉
 
fluidedge said:
i really think you're making a fuss about nothing here. You have an extremely powerful computer that is showing *considerable* (170%) speed updates. That the computer is not using 100% of the power available to it is neither here nor there imvho. There are overheads involved, system resources etc. It is not a direct proportionality that if you double your threads you half you render times or else Pixar would be rendering at 1 frame a second by now.

Try rendering from the command line to reduce the overhead of the Maya GUI running. It's really not important if something takes 2:48 or 2:30. It's not like you're twiddling your thumbs watching a batch render. You can be checking your email or making a coffee! 😉
Click to expand...

dude, you are making a hell of a lot of assumptions here. For a start, I'm just using a very simple scene to do these tests because I can't be wasting hours waiting for a more complex one to render. I've routinely been rendering single frames that take up to 15 hours. Of course it is good that it is better than my old machine, and it bloody well should be at £600 more and 2.5 years down the line. It is annoying when you spend a lot of money on a bit of kit that doesn't perform as well as it might. This is a matter of both principle (that things should work) and of practicality (I could really do with the extra speed)
 
robinp said:
dude, you are making a hell of a lot of assumptions here. For a start, I'm just using a very simple scene to do these tests because I can't be wasting hours waiting for a more complex one to render. I've routinely been rendering single frames that take up to 15 hours. Of course it is good that it is better than my old machine, and it bloody well should be at £600 more and 2.5 years down the line. It is annoying when you spend a lot of money on a bit of kit that doesn't perform as well as it might. This is a matter of both principle (that things should work) and of practicality (I could really do with the extra speed)
Click to expand...

Without knowing any of the details of course, but i'd hazard a guess that 15 hours is too long for a particle render. Have you properly optimised the Mental Ray settings? BSP, diagnosis etc, pixel filtering, performing motion blur in post? I'm sure you probably have. So without a renderfarm you'll have to take what you get.
 
Interesting, what if maya uses 8 virtual threads located physicaly on 4 cores (so rest 4 cores isnt busy), in this case it will be slower than on 8 core 2008 macpro 🙂

I hope OSX can handle virtual cores proper way.
 
fluidedge said:
Without knowing any of the details of course, but i'd hazard a guess that 15 hours is too long for a particle render. Have you properly optimised the Mental Ray settings? BSP, diagnosis etc, pixel filtering, performing motion blur in post? I'm sure you probably have. So without a renderfarm you'll have to take what you get.
Click to expand...

I'm not just doing particle renders, but to be honest, I'm almost entirely self taught so I'm probably not getting the settings bang on. Going for some decent lessons is something I'd like to do one day, however, in the mean time I'm stuck with what I have as you point out. Never mind, I never meant to bore people with it: just see if there was a solution and to let people know.
 
netkas said:
Interesting, what if maya uses 8 virtual threads located physicaly on 4 cores (so rest 4 cores isnt busy), in this case it will be slower than on 8 core 2008 macpro 🙂

I hope OSX can handle virtual cores proper way.
Click to expand...

I think this is something along the lines of what is happening... actually it's random - it appears that there is no particular preference for which threads to use on which cores, OS X just distributes the threads to whichever virtual core it likes.
 
robinp said:
When running the two renders at the same time, all 16 threads were being used.
Click to expand...
robinp, I keep telling you that this is very likely a licensing limitation on Mental Ray's side!
The behavior you see seems to prove this.

From what I remember what a Mental Ray senior trainer told me is that the MR version that comes with Maya will only ever render on 8 cores (real or virtual). That's the license you get with Maya. If you have 16 threads available then you would only see 8 being used.

Now if you run Maya 2008 and 2009, that's 2 different versions of Mental Ray and hence 2 x 8 licenses running.

I would call up Mental Ray or Autodesk and check if that 8 core limitation still exists with MR for Maya 2009.
I think it does.
 
I agree with Dreamail here... It's likely a MR license limit. Stop faffing around and call your reseller/AD to get confirmation.

Dreamail said:
I would call up Mental Ray or Autodesk and check if that 8 core limitation still exists with MR for Maya 2009.
I think it does.
Click to expand...
 
it's actually turning out to be quite a bonus being able to 2 two renders at once... I have maya 2009 set up with a slave (my old quad 2.6) churning out the higher quality stuff, and using 2008 to do most of the tweaking. Pretty handy really.
 
hy robinp !! (and the others 🙂)
Like a hundred users here, I'm trying to figure out which macPro will fit better with my needs : the 4x2.9 with 8 GigRam or the 8x2.26 with 12 gigRam??

It will be my first macPro and replace my MBP 2.8 unibody, 4gig of ram which is quite struggling to make my renders

Great dilemma here, and it seems the answer is in the applications i use :
Mostly maya/MR, afterEffect, and soon StarCraft2 (which isn't multiCore able i gess)

I know : A lot of threads deal about this choice, but your is the only one that is about maya

I wondered if you succeed to use all of your core without making two render at the same time

I also wanted to know if you already tried some games in hiRes and noticed some lags ?

How much ram do you have ? and is it full busy during your render ? (only 3 gig of ram are busy, and i don't know why the last Gig is still available)

read you next 😉

robinp said:
it's actually turning out to be quite a bonus being able to 2 two renders at once... I have maya 2009 set up with a slave (my old quad 2.6) churning out the higher quality stuff, and using 2008 to do most of the tweaking. Pretty handy really.
Click to expand...
 
Help!!!!!!!

I have the new Mac Pro 2.66 with 16GB of ram, ATI 4870 video card. Maya 2009 is totally fine on the Mac side. Modeling.. everything ok. Rendering... sexy!

I also have vista SP1 64 bit (bootcamp). Running maya 2009... however!!! zoom in/out is slower than the mac side. Jagged. delay. just very slow, rotate in perspective is also slower. NOT only for Maya. Also, slow, delay, jagged in Rhino, zoom in/out and rotate in perspective. pretty much the same problem as Maya.

So looks like it is not my Maya or Rhino problems. it must have something to do with the system. Video card??? Can someone help me? I have no problem doing rendering in V-ray Rhino. Fast as hell... as sexy as i am. 16 threats in v-ray. oh my god... cumming...
 
sexxxxxxxxx

rotate in perspective in rhino...... super slow. everything is slow, zoom in and out. but rendering is NOT slow at all. Help@

the new MP. 2.66 with 16 gb of ram is doing this??? explain....
 
there was a problem... it is now fixed

I was right. There was an issue with these new Mac Pro's with Mental Ray. Turns out Autodesk fixed it the middle of last month with SP1a - a minor update to SP1. I'm not getting 1550+% all the time and the renders going much quicker.
 
Have you tried bumping up the render thread count? Its default setting is "Use all available processors" but for some reason it's not very smart. You can find this in the Rendering menu .. then Render > Render Current Frame > Option Box OR Render > Batch Render > Option Box.

Manually enter 16 processors to use. That should really speed things up. I believe if you enter 32 processors the cpu usage goes to 100% .. which could lock down your system until the render is done.

:apple:
 
found this via Google and thought I should let you know that Maya 2009 SP1a fixed the threading limitation with Mental Ray. It uses 16 threads on my Mac Pro 2009. Maya 2010 should do the same
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back