Assigning a set number of cores for AS?

ponysmasher · Post by **ponysmasher** » Thu Aug 05, 2010 3:30 pm

Don't know what the hell i going on but I have some scenes where I've added 3D objects and when I render the sequence on my quad core desktop I will get two proper frames looking like this:

And then two without antialiasing on the 3D objects like this:

Then two with antialiasing, then two without and so on. But when I render on my dual core laptop everything works.

Is there some way, maybe some software that can assign a certain number of cores for AS?

One of the times I tried to render AS didn't even bother rendering the frames that don't have antialiasing, so I got a sequence of files numbered 0001, 0002, 0005, 0006, 0009, 0010 and so on.

ponysmasher · Post by **ponysmasher** » Thu Aug 05, 2010 4:25 pm

Hmm, maybe this is why I've had such troubles with masks lately. I get some frames where masks just don't work. Weird...

ponysmasher · Post by **ponysmasher** » Sat Aug 07, 2010 12:30 am

Well, my solution for now is to use msconfig and turning of two cores for the entire system. That does the trick but I sure do wonder why this happens.

If I have all cores activated and render a scene with only a 3D object in it then the bottom two progress bars will just race by and half the images will not have antialiasing.

Is there anyone else with a quad core system that could try rendering a 3D object and report back?

eok · Post by **eok** » Thu Aug 12, 2010 6:00 am

You could try "SMP Seesaw Pro". It's freeware. Works on my XP systems. I'd think it would work on Vista too. No idea about Windows 7.

It's here:

http://www.mlin.net/SMPSeesaw.shtml

Download the newer "Pro" version. It can handle XP and CPUs with more than two cores. The older non-"Pro" version lacks those features.

SMP Seesaw Pro is a utility that allows you to set Core affinities for running processes/applications. For example, on a Quad core system you could dedicate two cores exclusively to AS Pro. Yes, I believe you can do a similar thing via task manager, but I find SMP Seesaw's Pro's features more useful.

I've used the utility for years now on multi-core or multi-cpu systems. I have a few very old apps that must be restricted to running on a single core to function correctly.