More Parallel?

[leisurehound]

Recently got a new MacPro for some other needs and was really looking forward to faster RaceRender processing as well. However, on the 6way Mac Pro, I'm only seeing 200% CPU usage; in my MacBook Pro (which has 2 CPUs and 2 "virtual CPUs" I believe) I can saturate all "4" CPUs. Is there a JVM setting to get RaceRender to use more resources on the 6way Pro or are there only 2 threads created by the app?

[Weston@HPTuners]

RaceRender uses optimized native code for both Mac and Windows versions, so there's no Java or VM to speak of (those would be much too slow for us). It will attempt to use all of the CPU cores that your system has available (even virtual or "threads"), which can be verified by going to "Help" -> "Show Diagnostic Log"... A few lines down, you should see a line that says something like "CPU Count: 8 (8 active)", which is what it shows on a 15" rMBP with an Intel i7 CPU (4 cores x 2 threads per core).

The low CPU utilization you're seeing is probably misleading. It should just be a 200% overall average, rather than an indication that only 2 CPU cores are being used. That's most likely a result of having faster and/or more CPU cores on your new system, and is not uncommon or a problem, but often an indication of increased performance... The actual rendering speed should be faster overall, and it's just not maxing-out the CPU constantly because most of the threads are completing their work quickly while waiting on something else to finish processing. Typically, the majority of that wait is for media decoding and encoding, which is handled mostly by the operating system and may be offloaded onto the GPU (it's faster than the CPU for some tasks, while also decreasing the CPU load). Intensive Disk I/O and/or RAM I/O access are also common bottlenecks that could impact this, but probably not much of a concern on the particular system that you are using, unless you're directly using input or output files on a memory card, network share, external drive, etc.

[leisurehound]

Thanks for the clarification Weston. I guess I assumed it was Java as it looks more like a Swing front end than a Cocoa based one. The overall performance is faster indeed, tho not as comparatively faster of Final Cut Pro sharing/rendering between the two machines. Thus was a little surprised the brute horsepower of the MacPro wouldn't have helped the create video more quickly, on par to the speed up of FCP.

[leisurehound]

Found a way to sort of make this faster. On OS X, start multiple instances via the command line:

open -n /Applications/RaceRender\ 3.app

Each instance utilizes about 250-290% CPU (depending on which is in the foreground) and can get 3 renders in about half the time of 1 on the older MacBookPro.

w00t!

Only downside is the Display Object Properties panel proliferates and tricky to keep the right pane with the right instance.