So sad - Dell precision workstation490 - only 15-16fps

[andy.engelkemier]

At first? yeah, it's about 60+fps, then quickly goes less and less till it hovers around 15-16fps. No wonder I'm complaining of slow speeds. I wonder what it is that's causing the slow down because my machine specs aren't any worse than many others that are getting above 60.

Dell precision 490 workstation.
20GB RAM
Win 7 64bit
Dual Xeon CPU 3.2Ghz
not sure of chipset right now

We Are using a dual monitor setup, but have Quadro FX 4600's and 4800's.
I tried it also on a coworkers computer with the exact same results. Mine was the beta, his was 2.1.

[JeffM]

Open up your task manager while KeyShot is running. What sort of usage on your CPU cores are you getting?

Perhaps upload a screenshot of the performance tab of your task manager.

[KeyShot]

It does seem a bit slow? How old are your Xeon CPUs? I get around 30 fps on a dual core i7 (4 threads with HT) MacBook Pro laptop. The dual monitor setup should not affect things. We have seen a little slow down with the Nvidia cards when realtime effects are enabled, but I assume that is not the case?

-- Henrik

[andy.engelkemier]

Hey Henrik, good to hear from you.

The machines aren't the newest. Just dual core Xeon. I believe it's this (times 2. we have dual processors):
   Intel® Xeon® Processor 5060 (4M Cache, 3.20 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)

Not the biggest Cache in the world, but would that really be the bottleneck?

[KeyShot]

Hi Andy,

Yes, that CPU is getting a bit old (it was introduced in May 2006). Imagine if your graphics card was that old
The 5060 is based on the previous generation Core architecture. With the newer Nehalem/Westmere architecture introduced in March 2009 Intel significantly improved the performance of the memory bus as well as floating point performance, which really helps when ray tracing. These newer architectures also give the option of adding more cores. We have a couple of  dual CPU (Westmere 6 core) at the office (24 "cores" with hyperthreading). They are roughly one year old, but still screaming fast :-)

-- Henrik