Hyperthreading and Fractal Flames

Sun, 12/20/2009 - 17:43 — Grizaptimus

Hey there everyone, I apologize if this is the wrong forum for this but it seemed like more of a question that programy types would know. Would fractal flames get a nice boost from hyper-threading or not. I like to render out some nice long animations and am trying to deiced between a core i7 or something else. Thanks All --Griz--

Sat, 04/17/2010 - 01:19 — Grizaptimus

Sweet Benchmarks

Wow thanks for the benchmarks! That is nice I didn't think that Hyperthreading would help all that much. Glad to see that I am wrong on that one.

Thu, 04/08/2010 - 15:28 — borphos

i have an i7. I can benchmark hyperthreading for you.

I have an i7 and I can tell you that flam3 runs much faster on one that it does on a core 2 quad. I don't have access to a core 2 quad anymore, so i can't do a benchmark on that. Under the right circumstances I can get flam3 to run at fairly close to 800% cpu utilization on an i7. This means that flam3 is able to effectively use all of the logical cores available to it. If I find some time soon, I will benchmark 8 logical cores vs 4 physical, and post the results. I might even benchmark with/without turboboost enabled, although the performance of turbo boost can vary based on the cpu cooler you are using and ambient temperature.

Fri, 04/16/2010 - 00:51 — borphos

Results are in!

On an i7 i rendered a single flame at 1920x1080 with a quality of 1000 and oversample of 2.

With Hyper-threading (8 logical cores): 2min. 4sec.

Without Hyper-threading (4 physical): 3min. 1sec.

Conclusion: Hyper-threading on an i7 makes a huge difference.

Mon, 12/21/2009 - 15:34 — spot

FLAM3 supports multiple

FLAM3 supports multiple threads and multiple cores, so hyperthreading should be beneficial but i am not aware of any benchmarks showing just how much.

Mon, 12/21/2009 - 04:00 — Timeroot

Depends

I don't really know much at all about it, but I think you'd probably need a different rendering problem, partly... just as there is software specifically for CUDA, you'd probably need software just for hyperthreading, that is, to take advantage of it fully.

Mon, 12/21/2009 - 13:04 — Grizaptimus

Not sure

I do not think that is the case here. Unlike CUDA and OpenCL and all that jazz, from what I understand hyperthreading is either the ability of the processor to handle 2 threads per core, or the ability of the processor to very quickly switch between two threads. To the OS and any program running on it, the "fake" cores look the same as any other core. As flames are able to take advantage of basically all the processing power available to it. I am curious if these "fake" cores are actually useful in reducing rendering time.