Only 50% CPU load under rendering 1

[CNSZU]

Hi all,

When doing rendering (photorealistic/raytracing) with NX8 I've discovered that the windows task manager only reports about 50% CPU usage. For reference, when doing a regeneration, the CPU usage is close to 100%, so no problem with regular modeling. My system is dual core so I don't know if the render engine is using only one cpu core or 50% of both. Obviously this is a major issue since renderings will take twice as long as normal. What is the cause of this behavior?

 

[JHTH]

Have you got the system variable UGII_SMP_ENABLE set to 1? If rendering is capable of multi-threading (and I don't know if it is nor not), you'll need this set or NX won't multi-thread anything.

JHTH
NX 7.5.5 + TC 8.3.2.2

 

[CNSZU]

Yes, I have this line in the ugii_env.dat file

UGII_SMP_ENABLE = 1

but it makes no difference.

 

[JohnRBaker]

And while the SMP variable needs to be set for NX to get the most from multi-core configurations, I think that you will find that photorealistic rendering is not one of the tasks which are multi-threaded.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[CNSZU]

Thanks, now I can ignore the NX renderer with peace of mind.

It's actually stunning that it's not multi-threaded. If there is ONE thing that multiple cores do best, it's rendering. That's why every single render engine on the market utilizes multiple cores. Cinema 4D will render using 12 cores at 100%. Even Solidworks incorporates a renderer (modo) that uses multiple cores. A single-core renderer will be laughed out of town.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Since we depend on a 3rd party supplier for our software rendering tools, it's not really our R&D resources that is at issue here, but rather theirs, and while we can make it known that we would like to see multi-threading supported, it's still their call.

And for the record, with the past couple of releases of NX we have started to put more and more effort into leveraging the 'rendering' capabilities of the graphics hardware so as to provide more real-time and dynamic photo-realistic like imaging, including reflections, shadows, textures, etc. (although I'll be the first to admit that for a very high-quality pixal-based image file for external use, nothing is ever going to replace something like software-based ray-tracing) and while these may still not support multi-threading, by their very nature (being realtime and dynamic) they tend to not be seen as something which takes as much time to do and besides, since this involves both the NX Software and the Graphics Card processors working in conjunction with each other, it's already a sort of 'multi-CPU' solution ;-)

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.