NW - Render with HT / SMT or without HT / SMT ?

[Mario Stockinger]

We have a NW Renderer Licence for 64 cores.

I'm Wondering if it would be better to use HT / SMT on the strongest Slaves or use more physical cores ?

All Servers / PC's have HT / SMT disabled atm.

1 have a Workstation with 2 xeon  E5-2680 v4  @ 2,4 Ghz  (28 Cores) , also runs Keyshot
We also use a Threadripper 1950x   Workstation without SMT  (16 Cores) as Slave
And 3 old ESX Server we no longer  as productive systems (Old 2 Socket Xeon 2,2 GHZ) with 8 Cores total per Server)

I guess the best solution would be to have a NW Render Licence to use HT / SMT on all PC's / Servers  ?


What's your experience ?

[Mario Stockinger]

I did a lot of testing in  the last weeks.

I got a testlicence for 128 cores - i could test 64 cores + 64cores HT >> +20% Performance compared to 64 Cores without HT / SMT
and 108 Cores + 16 Cores SMT (=124 Cores)   >> Render Time for my Testimage from  4h to 2h 15 min compared to 64 Cores

Setup in Detail : DL360 G7   40x2 GHZ (NO HT) 4 Socket System Intel
                    2x  DL360 G6    8x2,2 GHZ (NO HT) 2 Socket System Intel
                    1x  DL360 G7    8x2,4 GHZ (NO HT) 2 Socket System Intel
                    1x Custom  Workstation  28x2,4GHZ   (NO HT) 2 Socket System Intel
                    1x Threadripper 1950x    16x3,44 GHZ  + 16 x SMT Cores  AMD

We will add a CAD Workstation with 4 Cores that has a defect SATA Controller so we can't use it for our engineers.
When we replace our ESX Servers then i can use them instead of the 16 SMT Cores from the Threadripper Workstation.

[mattjgerard]

This is good info, as my IT peeps are specing out an HP Z8 machine, and we have to figure out if its worth getting the larger license if we turn HT on or not.

From what I understand HT being turned on gave you a 20% increase in performance?

Also, still wondering how to benchmark a network, since you can't see FPS anywhere.

[Mario Stockinger]

The total render time is important.

You don't know what server is rendering what task. There are tasks that can be done faster and some take much more time.
And a pano i'm rendering with 10k x 5k has 499 Tasks....

Yes HT / SMT gave ~ 20% , but a physical core  is more important.

We got the Quad socket server this week for 1100€ (refurbished Server)  ; Bought it only for the Keyshot render farm.