Multi Core Rendering on Mac OS

[EclecticGorilla]

I have a 10 core iMac Pro -- would love to utilize those cores when rendering. Any chance in the future for this?

[synthsin75]

I have a 10 core iMac Pro -- would love to utilize those cores when rendering. Any chance in the future for this?

Moho 13.5 now supports rendering on all cores.

[Greenlaw]

FYI, Multi Core performance still needs work, at least for some users. On my system, the rendering process is initially much faster, but then one processor will get hung up at the end, and the rendering winds up taking as long as using 4 CPUs to complete. A couple of animators I'm in touch with have reported similar problems, and in some cases, they're seeing longer rendering times with increased settings. For now, I've set mine back to 4 CPUs since I'm not seeing any benefit from higher settings.

I'm glad this feature is being implemented though, and looking forward to using it in a future release.

Your mileage may vary of course. I'm assuming Multi Core rendering currently works for some users.

[synthsin75]

On my 8 core system, it renders fastest using 6 cores.

[Greenlaw]

Yeah, same here on my laptop, which can use up to 8, but setting it to anything above 4 takes about the same time to complete a render.

In a test with 8 CPUs, I took screen caps of the render progress window at different stages, and one CPU was clearly lagging behind. The project appeared to 'finished' rendering in about half the time as 4 CPUs, except for the last CPU which continued rendering. In the end, the render completed in about the same time it took when set to 4 CPUs, so I lost any gains made by the other CPUs. I saw similar results in another test using 6 CPUs.

I've been meaning to test this on my desktop, which has 12 cores. Will try to make time for that tonight.

BTW, in case anybody wants to test this, the test project I used was Chucky's Crustacea. This is a good benchmark project because it's a fairly heavy render. (I rendered at half-res to save time.)

[Greenlaw]

Correction: I revisited the results from my test last week, and the 'drag' is actually happening with half the processors, not just one. So, when I tested with 8 threads, 4 of them held up the process which resulted in almost no speed gain, or basically rendering with 8 threads was the same time as rendering with 4 threads. This is on a Xeon system with 32GB RAM.

I'll run the benchmark on the i7 desktop system with 12 threads this evening, and update this thread with the results.

FYI, this might be a PC/Win-specific problem, as I don't think I've heard from Mac users about problems rendering with the new multi-threading options, so maybe it's all good for Mac users?

[alanthebox]

I was curious about this as well, so, I rendered the same scene with different core settings. Here were the render time readouts from the Moho exporter.

24 cores - 0:25 seconds
16 cores - 0:25 seconds
12 cores - 0:25 seconds
10 cores - 0:23 seconds
8 cores - 0:24 seconds
4 cores - 0:25 seconds

and for old time's sake, I rendered the same scene in v12.5 - 0:36 seconds

I also did some tests where I rendered the same scene using the Export Animation option instead and was surprised to see the render times really balloon up.

24 cores - 2:10
18 cores - 2:09
12 cores - 2:08
4 cores - 2:14

I've used both export options in the past and never realized there was such a difference in render times. So, I think I'll stick to the Moho exporter and 10 cores.

[synthsin75]

I was curious about this as well, so, I rendered the same scene with different core settings. Here were the render time readouts from the Moho exporter.

24 cores - 0:25 seconds
16 cores - 0:25 seconds
12 cores - 0:25 seconds
10 cores - 0:23 seconds
8 cores - 0:24 seconds
4 cores - 0:25 seconds

Are we sure Moho Exporter uses the max render threads preference? Those results are almost identical.


EDIT: I just checked, and Moho Exporter uses all 8 of my cores, even when I have max render threads set to 1. Since the Exporter is so much faster, I wonder if the graphical overhead of the Export Animation render window is bogging it down.

[Greenlaw]

To be honest, these times are so small, I don't consider them improvements at all. By adding more threads to the process, especially doubling the number, should have a dramatically larger impact on the render times.

This is why I suggest using a heavier project like Crustacea...the differences should be more noticeable with projects that take a longer time to render. But in my tests with Crustacea, I think the time differences are still too small for me to believe this feature is working properly (on my system anyway.)

Years ago, when I used to see similar issues with multi-threaded rendering for a 3D program I used, the problem was not enough RAM for the computer to render multiple copies of a project in memory before paging, but I don't think that's what's going on here. Moho projects aren't nearly as RAM and CPU intensive as 3D projects, and they really should be flying with more threads.

Since I'm not seeing enough improvement, I'm leaving the settings to the default of 4 for now, so I have the rest available for other tasks.

[synthsin75]

I just checked, and export animation and Moho Exporter use all of my cores to render, regardless of what I set the max render threads to....and this is true for 12.5 as well.

Seems both completely ignore the max render threads setting.

[arglborps]

Rendering on the CPU is nice, but GPU rendering would be sweet.
Apple Motion is just insanely fast when rendering projects, sometimes you think it failed, because it's done in seconds. (Real time-play back of the timeline is also really smooth), and that's because it's making use of Metal 2 and GPU acceleration excessively. There's just no comparison to e.g. After Effects which take 5–10 (!) times a long to render the same scenes.

So for macOS it would be nice if they could make more proper usage of these performance enhancing and computing APIs. It's good that I can now render my projects on all 16 (virtual) or 8 physical cores of my MacBook Pro, but if I could actually render it on my eGPU (Radeon Vega 64) I think it would be a different ballgame altogether.

[mrgozvn]

render on moho seem too bad.
im using windows 11 with i5-10400 8 core 16 threads with 16gb of ram. but i always get lagged and crash while working
they seem don't want to boots performance of moho

[davoodice2]

FYI, Multi Core performance still needs work, at least for some users. On my system, the rendering process is initially much faster, but then one processor will get hung up at the end, and the rendering winds up taking as long as using 4 CPUs to complete. A couple of animators I'm in touch with have reported similar problems, and in some cases, they're seeing longer rendering times with increased settings. For now, I've set mine back to 4 CPUs since I'm not seeing any benefit from higher settings.

I'm glad this feature is being implemented though, and looking forward to using it in a future release.

Your mileage may vary of course. I'm assuming Multi Core rendering currently works for some users.

use png for render. all cores render in same time. but in mp4 there is core problem. I think its because of encoding during render

[davoodice2]

do you want use all cores on render? this is my way:
1-use image sequence instead of mp4.
2-install thinkbox deadline.it's free for one computer.
3- in create some virtual slave (4 for example). each slave Each is considered as a new computer.
4- render with deadline and splite frames for each task(e.g. if you have 1000 frames,set each task render to 20 frames). 100% of your cpu will be used.