X4 Ray Tracing - Optimal CPU

[Ian Pellant]

Hi Huckle,

Ray tracing should have very little to do with disk I/O - everything should be in memory once the ray tracer starts. Memory size should not be an issue either - use taskmanager and note that Chief X4 ruinning the ray tracer on the test plan uses very little memory (my old system running 32 bit Chief sits under a 1MB of total system memory usage when ray tracing small plans).

The Xeon processors were developments from the Pentium (sort of solid legacy chips while the newer i-Core series were "getting up to speed").

Great that you can swap a few cpus around and greatly boost performance. The multi-cpu socket mb's were designed for such a reason.

What I can glean from the web - Xeon style processors and boards have now plateaued where the latest i-7 3770 cpus single chip systems can outperform the mutli-chip boards for mid range applications. (Web and database servers are a whole different ball game). There could be a mutli-cpu vs multi-core battle yet to come...

Heavy weight engineering design software (such as ship building) usually sit on a SQL server data base. For those apps the Xeon workstations reigned supreme.

Cheers