How Well Does Maya Scale with Multiple Processors?

[Elfear]

Like the title says I'm wondering how well Maya scales with processing power? Is it worth the extra cost to go dual Clovertown quadcores with all the associated server costs or would a single Kentsfield scale almost as well?

 

[Duvie]

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000655.html

I found this one....I have the program but not installed...the problem is as seen in my other CAD programs is a very nice gain with 2 cores but less of a gain with 4 cores....Unless I rendered in HD codec I didn't see much gains...

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...hreadid=1830732&enterthread=y&arctab=y

Look near the bottom and you will see only when using radiosity did I see huge gains in performance....

I would think perhaps MAYA is not coded properly for it, but could be later on...4 cores would give you room to render and still effectively have anopther PC ready to do other test...Rendering large projects take long enough, and at least you still have a useable PC.

 

[Elfear]

Originally posted by: Duvie
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000655.html

I found this one....I have the program but not installed...the problem is as seen in my other CAD programs is a very nice gain with 2 cores but less of a gain with 4 cores....Unless I rendered in HD codec I didn't see much gains...

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...hreadid=1830732&enterthread=y&arctab=y

Look near the bottom and you will see only when using radiosity did I see huge gains in performance....

I would think perhaps MAYA is not coded properly for it, but could be later on...4 cores would give you room to render and still effectively have anopther PC ready to do other test...Rendering large projects take long enough, and at least you still have a useable PC.

Cool. Thanks for the links Duvie. I'm not too familiar with Maya (this question is actually for a buddy of mine). Are any of the programs you tested similiar to Maya? I know that Maya is multithreaded and it seems like some of the multithreaded apps scale very well with more cores and some not so well.

One quadcore seems like plenty in my eyes but he has a nice freelance business where he works with Maya a lot so the extra cost for two quadcores isn't hugely prohibitive like it would be for the average hobbyist.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

From looking at Duvies work and others who have tested multithreaded apps, it definately appears that there are diminishing returns as the number of cores increase.

As Duvie shows the performance increase going from 1 core to 2 cores is usually substantial, going from 2 cores to 4 cores shows much smaller performance increases. Following that same trend going from 4 cores to 8 cores will most likely have a very negligable effect on performance in the vast majority of multithreaded apps.

I would venture to say it will probably be quite a long time before we see any desktop apps that can truly utilize 8 cores, showing any meaningful performance increase over a single quad core chip