Tag Archives: Cores

Choosing hardware for rendering

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In general, the more cores the better.

Here’s some general guidelines for choosing hardware:

  • Arnold scales linearly with increasing processor speed
  • Arnold scales well to multiple cores
  • For a rough estimate of  expected performance, you can multiply the clock speed by the number of physical cores.
  • Get enough RAM to hold your typical data sets (you probably should run
    some tests with your most challenging scenes)
  • Hyperthreading on Intel processors usually gives about 1.2x speedup on average.
  • If possible, running some tests is the best way to choose the best hardware for you

[Tip] Save a few threads for yourself

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As of Arnold 4.2.12.0, you can specify a negative number of threads, and Arnold will leave that many threads free. So, for example, if you want to leave two threads free for Maya while the IPR view is running, you would set the thread count to -2.

mtoa_threads

On a machine with 4 cores and 8 logical cores (aka threads):

| running on StephenBlair-PC, pid=16888
| 1 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 V2 @ 3.40GHz (4 cores, 8 logical) with 16338MB
| Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 (version 6.1, build 7601)

You would then see that Arnold uses only 6 logical cores:

|  starting 6 bucket workers of size 64x64 ...

The advantage of the negative thread count is that you don’t have to know how many logical cores your machine has; you just need to know how many you want to keep free.