topic Re: How well does Maya utilize multiple cores? in Maya Forum

How well does Maya utilize multiple cores?

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 10:34:14 GMT

My specs:

i7 6700K OC'd to 4.6 GHz

16gb RAM

GTX 1070

I'm not planning on upgrading any time soon, this is a pretty capable beast of a machine. But I do like knowing where my performance needs are being met. I built my computer mainly for gaming and animation, so I figured this was a pretty good balance between the 2, but with the new Ryzen processors out (8 cores, 16 threads at the highest model), I started to wonder about whether an upgrade may be worth it.

Which leads me to the question of whether a processor with fewer cores and a higher clock speed is better, or more cores at lower speeds. On the one hand, I've read that nearly all non-rendering processes are single threaded, so higher clock speed equal better performance. But then I read the Parallel Rig Evaluation uses more cores as well as the GPU to boost performance. So is there a solid answer on this? Will I see increased performance with something like a Ryzen 1800x or an equivalent Intel Extreme i7? Or is it better to stick with a 4 core high speed processor?

Re: How well does Maya utilize multiple cores?

elliotgascoigne — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 10:25:53 GMT

Hi Omare,

I can only explain through my experiences, at work I have a 16 Core 3.5Ghz CPU and at home I have an 8 Core 4.7 Ghz.

And to be quite frank the 16 core CPU is only faster by a small amount, I know alot of people will say its got a lot to do with your other hardware as well But going purely on the CPU alone (being as though Maya is natively a CPU renderer without any third party renderers).

If I were to give my opinion, the price tag doesn't seem to be worth the extra cores at a lower clock speed, I prefer fewer cores at a higher clock speed.

If you have no other programs open and you are just rendering I would say stick with the processor you've got. Despite how tempting the new AMD Ryzen is.

If you would like me to do a comparison of a scene for you I would be more than happy to.

If you send me over a scene file I can render a frame at work and then at home. If this helps at all.

Sorry I can't give you an educated response but I hope my speculative answer sheds a little light on your query!

Re: How well does Maya utilize multiple cores?

david.alin92 — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 10:56:30 GMT

I was googling about this issue while I'm waiting for Maya to wake up from selecting a hundred complex objects.

Mind you Maya is so slow, I've got time to complain about it on a forum before I'm free to work again.

I'm baffled anyone would ever defend Maya's performance. Take just one look at your task manager and you'll see that only one core is ever utilized for any task besides rendering (which is handled by a third party most of the time).

It has been like this for at least 15 years. Back then it wasn't that common to have more than 2 cores.

Today 8 to 16 cores CPUs are pretty common. Maya isn't utilizing the performance of mainstream CPUs.

But they're making tons of money and it is obviously not re-injected into R&D on optimisation of the performance.

I repeat, for more than 15 years, Maya is utilizing one single core of your CPU.

Can you please hire an engineer who can take a look at this. It's been 15 years.