X4 Ray Tracing - Optimal CPU

[Allen Brown]

James,

Post script:

Have you tried running several intances of Chief at the same time and seeing if that loads up the cores more effectively?

It's am old Chief trick:
After starting Chief Architect once, start another session while holding down the <Ctrl> key. Then with 2 instances of Chief open, run the ray tracer in each.... halves the overall time?

Hypothesis:
With 8 cores, run 4 sessions of Chief and ray trace 4 plans at the same time.

Cheers.

Ian, you sure about that? You cannot open the same plan in two sessions of Chief, unless you do a "file>save-as" and change the name.

[Ian Pellant]

File locking will prevent a plan being opened by another session of Chief....

I need to ray trace many plans. Not many views of a single plan. (Brochures only need one view per house plan).

So what I tested was opening 2 copies of the test plan and ray tracing them simultaneously. I did not open the same plan file twice. In practice, they will be plans of different houses.

On my old P4 the cumulative processing time for two simultaneous sessions was the same as running from a single session of Chief and batch queing two ray traces. No time gain.

Overclocking has shown promise. The over clock ratio gives a very linear improvement in the ray tracer - probably due to it being almost completely CPU bound. Turning on overclocking with a software tool once Chief is loaded seems the best way to overclock - it allows overclocking to be turned off for "normal" use after ray tracing, which reduces power consumption, heat, system stress, etc.

Cheers.

[lbuttery]

Allen:

turn off "file locking" in preferences

it is highly recommended to not make edits to both plans while they are open this way - could lead to file corruption

probably best to clone the plan before doing this - for safety

I have used this method for doing presentations

instance A shows one view or set of views

instance B is then used to move around the plan to show other view(s)
while being able to hop back to instance A view(s) and not lose postion in either

this can also be done while comparing Chief X3 versus chief X4 for example

Lew