3d Studio Max and 2+CPUs - Core limit?
2014-07
Valentin Flachsel
I am scouting for parts to put in a new machine, and in the process, while looking at different benchmarks I stumbled upon this benchmark and it got me a bit worried.
Quote form it:
Noticably absent from this review is an old-time favorite, 3ds Max. I did attempt to run our custom 3ds Max benchmark on both the 2009 and 2010 versions of the software, but the application would simply not load on the Westmere box with hyper-threading enabled. Evidently Autodesk didn't plan far enough ahead to write their software for more than 16 threads. Once there is an update that addresses this issue, I will happily add 3ds Max back into the benchmarking mix.
Since I was looking at dual hexa-core Xeons (x5650), that would put my future machine at 24 logical cores which (duh) is well over 16 cores and since I'm mostly building this for 3DS Max work, you can see how this would seriously spoil my plans. I tried looking for additional information on this potential issue, but the above article seems to be the only one who mentions it. Could anyone who has access to a >16 core machine or an in-depth knowledge about 3DS Max please confirm this ?
Thank you all in advance !
Edit: If you have any additional info on this like if a fix is in the making if confirmed true would also be much appreciated as it would help me plan ahead.
CajunLuke
The problem is the mental ray limitations – if you want to lunch 3ds max in more than 16 threads you must remove metnalray.dlz (in the %max root%/stdplugs directory). Unfortunately, you can only use an external render engine (like V-Ray) if you remove mental ray. If you don't rename or eliminate metnalray.dlz, 3ds max will not start.
Brettski
I have been asked to put a machine together of a friend who needs to do 3D rendering in AutoDesk 3ds Max. I have not been able to determine if the product support multi-threading and would benefit from multiple cores. Could you please let me know if it does?
8088
3D software rendering have supported multiprocessing for a long time. "Rendering farms" are all about this. Note that I said multi-process, not multi-thread. The act of rendering a picture is often single threaded. but you can process several frames at once when rendering a video. So 4 cores will render video pretty much 4 times faster.
Here's an article on the topic on Extremetech. As you can see, the rendering is about twice as fast on a quad-cores (QX6850) than on a similar-speed dual-core (E6850):
ChrisF
From the 3ds Max homepage (you have to expand the "What Is 3ds Max?" section):
New multithreaded xView mesh analyzer technology for in-viewport reporting on several types of mesh.
So, at least some aspects of it are multi-threaded.
Even if it doesn't make use of the multiple cores directly, or certain features - such as rendering - aren't multi-threaded, you will see a benefit as when you're running other applications (mail clients, browsers, paint programs etc.) they should be executed on the "other" core, thus giving you better performance (less paging etc.) from both 3ds and the other application.