It was so frustrating not knowing why my batch renders were taking several times longer than my single frame test renders (which were also only using a fraction of the machine’s power.

Jon :@Dennis Volkertsany updates? I myself have a core i7 860, with 8gb ram, and i barely see 3.3 used in my rendering, i use batch render settings, applying the 16 threads, and massive scenes over populated to cause tension in the rendering process, but my memory usage sucks…. can disabling the pagefile potentialy help this matter?

yes i have an update.
well… a solution that worked for me.
I used Ika’s Renderview render. a script you can download at: http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/utility-external/misc/c/ikas-render-view-renderer.
It seems to work great! using 99 of its CPU.
the only problem is that it renders all your frames in the maya renderview, so you cant use maya while its rendering.
good luck guys! squardis@hotmail.com

IT’s WORKING!!! i change it to 8 thread, and now my maya use 100% ~
my render is faster, not 100% faster though

Is there something like a plugin to render just in the maya window the whole sequence?? mail: squardis@hotmail.com

I have Maya 2010 and only 1 core takes the load upto [100%] the fullest, while the load on the other is 1-5%, any setting I can set to make maya use both cores/threads…?

I’m not sure what might be going on. If the CPU usage has gone up, it would make sense that it’s got to be doing *something* more, but if your results aren’t reflecting that, I’m really not certain.

You could watch the resource meter, and double check to make sure it’s staying at 100% the majority of the time (if it’s often dropping for significant periods, it’s possible that the hard drive or something else is the main thing bottlenecking your renders). Also, obviously make sure you’re rendering the same scenes when doing the comparison.

It would be interesting to know what processor you were using also. This would just be a theory if it were happening on an i7 processor, but the theory would be as follows:
-”Auto Render Threads” option maybe used 4 threads (despite 2 being shown in the greyed out box)
-Manually setting it to 8 simply would have then filled up work for the 4 HT “cores”.
-Mental Ray perhaps doesn’t benefit much at all from Hyperthreading.

If that theory were correct (and really I’d be making a LOT of assumptions, so I’d only deem it a rather small *possibility*), then it could account for 8 threads not having any significant impact on output despite the CPU usage going up because of the HT “cores” not having much benefit.

In any case, I’d play around with the threads, trying 4, 8, 16, etc. If there’s really no difference in rendering output, just use whatever keeps the computer usable during rendering, or stick with the default. If Mental Ray doesn’t benefit from HT, then disabling it from within the BIOS and then playing with the threads would be an interesting test to see what results might be.