X4 Ray Tracing - Optimal CPU

[Doug Park]

A couple of comments about X4 ray tracing.

1) You can queue ray traces.

2) You can continue to work in Chief while they run as they run in a separate process.

While this may slow down your work and ray traces it is probably way faster to do them and your work on your high end machine than to farm them out to a low end machine.

In general most of the time when you are drawing plans your CPU will have tons of extra bandwidth. Usually more than 90% of a computers compute power is never utilized so running ray traces in the background while slowing your system slightly will complete almost as quickly while you are using the computer as if you leave it completely alone.

If you are ray tracing and doing work you may wish to select the optimize for Chief option in preferences. This takes one core out of the ray tracing pool to devote to the rest of what you are doing.