X4 Ray Tracing - Optimal CPU

[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.