By Arlen Nielsen (Spacemanzot) (216.232.121.51) on Tuesday, January 21, 2003 - 10:54 pm:

I'm in a dire situation. I bought a new G4 Dual 867 Mac that has a lot of spunk. I thought it best to graduate to it from my old G4 450. What I'm having trouble with is that the scene files that I open on the 450 open relatively quickly (about 4 minutes) whereas on the 867 the same scene will take anywhere from 10-15 minutes.

I've also hit a bit of a ••••• when the 867 calculates shadow maps for the scene. It takes forever. whereas the 450 calculates the shadow maps in about 5 minutes or so.

Any and all help appreciated ASAP. You can reply directly to my email box, arlen@fabmedia.com

thanks in advance.
Arlen

By Arlen Nielsen (Spacemanzot) (216.232.121.51) on Tuesday, January 21, 2003 - 11:15 pm:

I guess i should add that the G4 450 is not a dual processor machine

A

By Arlen Nielsen (Spacemanzot) (216.232.121.51) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 12:40 am:

And another addition... I'll crash during a render after the computation of the shadow maps... arrrrgh.

By luka (Lwperth) (203.59.227.82) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 02:27 am:

That sounds very strange as I have upgraded fro a G4 500 to the G4 867x2 and couldn't beleive the speed increase.

settings that I would use before for final renders I am now using for previews.

By the way are you using MAC OSX.2.3 with LW 7.5 OSX?

By Michael Linde (Mlinde) (4.64.207.47) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 08:11 am:

I think more system specs are needed to help here, as well. What OS are you running, what version of LW, what kind of video card, how much RAM, and where are your files located (internal HD, external FW, external SCSI, external USB). Did you get your RAM from Apple, or a 3rd party? Often 3rd party RAM has minor imperfections that can cause an irregular, unexpected crash in a system.

By Michael Fessenden (Mfessenden) (63.89.65.110) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 01:50 pm:

Your scene files take 4 minutes to open? How big are your models?

By kenneth woodruff (Kenneth) (12.236.254.153) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 01:54 pm:

RAM?

By Chris W. (Chriswork) (24.123.214.36) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 02:08 pm:

I've found there's an invisible line in the sand when it comes to shadow map size in LW. Cross it and it's crash city.

How big are you setting your shadow maps to? How many lights have them.

The fact that your scene file is taking longer to load could point to disk/direcroty troubles. Have you scanned your disk with diskwarrior or some other utility?

By Arlen Nielsen (Spacemanzot) (216.232.121.51) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 03:49 pm:

Ouch. Sorry guys. I've been trying to let my machine render for all of the morning.

Okay, here's the systems scoop. G4 Dual 867, MacOS 10.2.3 w/384 Mb RAM and runing LW7.5.

I have noticed that on my G4 450 that LW 7.5 is considerably faster with rendering for the most part. The Dual is quick too, but loading scene files that I've been working on is a pain in consideration with the 450 machine. It's really painful to wait.

Some statistics with the scene file...

the larget object file is roughly 300 K. Most of which are around 30-60 K on average. The main object item is only 60 K. The estimated scene consists of about 26 Mb of data total.

Now I'm not sure really if any of this poses any kind of problem, but in comparison with the 450 machine (single processor I might add) is dreadfully slow.

The scene is lit using Eki's Overcaster with Ambimage, Shadow, and Sun lights. There's a total of 39 lights.

Any ideas and help is much appreciated and I can provide more information if necessary.

arlen

By longchin (Thekeeper) (24.163.28.122) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 04:52 pm:

something is way wrong...no kidding arlen says.
the dualie should be stomping the hell out of the single 450.
is your other stuff running ok on the dualie(ie, PSd. etc.)?
your way short on ram for a file of this type/size....although osx can
handle virtual memory quite well.
have you tested with some of the stock scene file that come with LW
to see if thing are wonky there too? run the benchmark Rtrace your dp867 should turn
in at about 140sec. if you can run this ok, then the scene is suspect.
i would kinda lean towards a hosed install of LW or like chris says, you have hardware
problems, drives, ram etc.......are you running X.2.3 on the 450?as well....? or another flavor.
ekis stuff generally runs ok, but can be"bumpy " sometimes.

By Arlen Nielsen (Spacemanzot) (216.232.121.51) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 07:38 pm:

Everything else seems to work fine, photoshop, illustrator, indesign, golive and even classic apps are working well.

Loading the scene was slow. Bugger me. I've installed LW 5 times now and things are still buggered.

The scene Raytrace under Benchmarks came in at 278 seconds. I don't know if that's good or not.

the 450 is running 10.2.3 as well.

hmmmmm....

A

By Chris W. (Chriswork) (24.123.214.36) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 07:28 am:

To trouble shoot a little farther I'd forget about the current scene you're trying to render and set up a new one for testing purposes.

Just create something simple with a few shadow casting lights and render it on both machines.

If you're seeing the same slowdown then I'd start pointing at something with the software or system.

If it works fine, then I'd add an overcaster to the scene and render another test. If it slows down then it points to somehting with Overcaster.

By longchin (Thekeeper) (24.163.28.122) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 08:34 am:

278...not good the same machine s are turning in at 140 sec over at Blanos.com benchmaarks...
on the same RT scene.

By longchin (Thekeeper) (24.163.28.122) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 09:18 am:

ok... a thought? you say you have 384mb of ram in the dp867?
so they ship with 256 ddram...so where did the other 128 come from?
if my memory serves me, there is an issue of mixing different speed ram in the newwer
machines which slows everything down to the slowest chips rate....
pull the 128 and see what happens....should go faster belive it or not.
as cheap as ram is right now if that thing was mine it would have every slot full of the largest chip i could get.
hope this helps.

By Arlen Nielsen (Spacemanzot) (216.232.125.180) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 11:01 am:

Arrrrrgh. I don't like the sound of 140 sec over my 278. I've been have a horrible week being plagued with project problems and such.

I purchased the other 128 at the same time from a reputable store which I purchase all my RAM (it's a national store here in Canada – London Drugs from BC to Saskatchewan if you need to know). The chip is PC 2100 DDR RAM and I installed it as I was setting up the system. Now I had to reinstall OSX because of a kernal panic as I was registering the OS with Apple. Fine.

I HAVE NOTICED that when I run the CPU monitor, that the processors are only showing about 1/3 to 1/2 (on average) of the actuall processing capabilities. It does show that the system is using both, but Lightwave is only using 1/2 of the processor's potential. Now if I happen to start another application, then the processors max out until the application is running. Now isn't that strange? I figured that the processor's would be used at 80-100% of thier capacity. Can someone confirm this with me?

The only additions that I've made to the system is the 128 Mb DDR chip and a USB board.

What else would you like to know?

Thank you to everyone that has responded and is helping me with this issue.

Arlen

By Arlen Nielsen (Spacemanzot) (216.232.125.180) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 11:15 am:

I went to Blanco.com as mentioned above and eventhough I noticed an increase in performance with LW7.5, my numbers are really out in comparrison to that which are posted for instance Rad. Ref. Things takes me over 3 minutes to render over the 67 secs that is posted. Crap!

A

By longchin (Thekeeper) (24.163.28.122) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 11:25 am:

Arlen, not insinuating that you bought crappy ram...
i dont think you can mix and match ram anymore, pull
the 128 and give it a try...a lot of kernel panics have been related to bad
or mismatched ram ....keep us posted.
There have been several postings here of machines that seem to run fine with everything else
but not LW, LW pushes everything to the limits.

By Arlen Nielsen (Spacemanzot) (216.232.125.180) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 11:31 am:

okee dokee. I won't be able to pull the other chip until later today. I'll let you know if that works. PC 2100 is the right ram chip right? Where can I get a proper chip that is compatible with my machine?

A

By Julian Johnson (Julianjohnson) (62.49.23.72) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 11:36 am:

Hi Arlen,

How many threads have you set Lightwave to use? Your raytrace.lws benchmark looks like it's a single-threaded one..

Julian
The Mac Lightwave Resource Page
http://www.exch.demon.co.uk

By Arlen Nielsen (Spacemanzot) (216.232.125.180) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 11:45 am:

Nope I'm been using 4 and 8 threads for the rendering. I've even tried 2 threads and still not much success in increasing the speed. I'm looking at only a couple of minutes or a few seconds for large scenes like those in the sample scenes provided with the Lightwave CD.

A

By Arlen Nielsen (Spacemanzot) (216.232.125.180) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 11:51 am:

I'm going to try to make the files available for download either later today (tonight) or tomorrow. I'm starting to get frustrated. The new machine should really be kicking ass for rendering but is only about double in speed.

A

By luka (Lwperth) (203.24.54.5) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 03:20 pm:

HI Arlen
I think you were looking at my scores at blanos.com. Seems like a long time ago. Anyway I think It would be a good idea for us to test render your scene then you will have some idea of what is going on here.

By Ted Lee (Tedlee) (66.156.20.99) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 08:02 pm:

Arlen,

If you had a Kernel Panic, chances are it is the RAM. Bad RAM/Bad matches of RAM are the #1 cause of Kernel Panics and OS X Problems...

RAM is so cheap right now, if this is a production machine, you really should go out and get AT LEAST 2-512MB PC2100 DIMMS. Pull the stock 256 and the 128MB stick you installed, and run with the perfectly matched 512MB pair for about a week. If everything hums along fine, then you could add the previous RAM back, stick by stick, running for a few days after adding each stick to make sure there are no conflicts. But my guess is either the speed/volage of the 256 & the 128MB DIMMS don't match.

Good luck.
Ted
http://www.osxfactor.com/

By Arlen Nielsen (Spacemanzot) (216.232.121.51) on Friday, January 24, 2003 - 01:00 am:

Right'o. I'll get the files ready for you in the morning and post them for download. I'll make them available in a .sit format.

Cheers and Good night!
Arlen

By Arlen Nielsen (Spacemanzot) (216.232.121.51) on Friday, January 24, 2003 - 01:01 am:

one other question for each... I have used Saskwatch in my scene files. Now who and what should I do about the plug-in?

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