Benchmarking in Zbrush

[skullbeast]

My interest have now been sparked. I have a new mac pro (april). Is this a "doable" operation? I saw some installation and removal instructional tutorials on the web it doesn't seem so hard.

Nehalem.jpg

[tez]

This isnt the first time iv seen realy high marks from a 920. Cinebench got higher score than mine at its stock.

[Giantsun]

Allminoxy (http://member.php?u=138598), you showed me the way to go. I was going to get me the 920 i7 and go 3Ghz on it with the noctua cpu cooler. Some 8-8-8-21 1600 Mhz mem, probably 6 Gb. Now I know it is a good thing. :tu: Happy New Year.

If only more software apps were developed like Zbrush...I hope they go stream processing on Cuda base for the next release...a guy can dream.

[machado]

Stock AMD Phenom Black edition 9950 2.6GHZ 8GB ram

mthread.jpg

[Allminoxy]

My interest have now been sparked. I have a new mac pro (april). Is this a "doable" operation? I saw some installation and removal instructional tutorials on the web it doesn't seem so hard.
Hey Skullbeast, are you talking about upgrading your current processor to a Nehalem? I'm assuming you are, but if not, forgive me for misunderstanding your question. In order to upgrade your processor, you have to have a motherboard that supports the new processor. Unfortunately, your current processor is LGA 771 and the Nehalem processor is LGA 1366, which are incompatible with eachother. If you want to upgrade your computer, you would have to puchase an i7 motherboard as well.


Allminoxy (http://member.php/?u=138598), you showed me the way to go. I was going to get me the 920 i7 and go 3Ghz on it with the noctua cpu cooler. Some 8-8-8-21 1600 Mhz mem, probably 6 Gb. Now I know it is a good thing. :tu: Happy New Year.
Hey Giantsun, that's pretty much exactly what I plan to do once I finally get my hands on a Nehalem. The 920's @ 3.0 GHz perform as well if not better than their highly priced brothers (940, 965). Happy New Year to you as well.

[skullbeast]

Allminoxy - Thanks for the tip, I was considering it.

[tez]

If you want to upgrade your computer, you would have to puchase an i7 motherboard as well.
Yes, and by the look of the motherboard prices I wont be upgrading myself as soon as Id like, they are like double the price of any motherboard iv seen.

Average top end LG 775 is about £100, these are over £230 :confused:

To replace my system will all the water cooling e.c.t it would cost £1400, thats UK pounds.

[Allminoxy]

Average top end LG 775 is about £100, these are over £230 :confused: Yeah, I think the problem is that i7 is still too new a technology and they're ~ 30% bigger die size than core 2 doesn't help either. Of course, if AMD's Phenom II was actually competitive with Nehalem, we would see the i7 920 drop down to $200 in a matter of days.

So much for competition...

[Jaycephus]

i7 920 ZB benchmark.jpg

I just built a new system, specs below...

No overclocking or tweaking as of yet. I was able to easily go to over 8 million polys on the soldier model, smooth as silk rotation, editing, etc. I was able to divide it to over 34 million, and with only 1 undo and no excessive number of IE tabs open, I was able to edit this repeatedly, but the 'reading virtual memory' and 'compacting memory' cycles are time consuming, even with compact memory set to 4096. I'm not sure what Ready-boost might do to help this, or what ZBrush's effective software limit is. Since it can only use 4 GB max, I'm not sure if I can improve the performance much more, however, there might be some tweak I could make to guarantee that ZB truly has a full 4 GB of RAM available, i.e. restricing Vista to 2GB. FYI, after some edits and compaction cycles, my title bar reads Mem>48+6681 Free>3897. Also, I haven't enabled Ready-boost yet, and with some extra RAM, there might be a RAM disk trick that could be used to speed up virtual memory reads. Any tweak guides out there for ZB on a Vista x64 system?

I was able to take the superaverage man to 14+ million, also very smooth editing, scaling, rotation. Did many edits, and the default undo levels did not cause a problem. No time-consuming virtual mem reads/memory compaction at this level.


Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 64-bit
CORSAIR XMS3 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TR3X6G1600C9
ASUS P6T Deluxe LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard

[tez]

i7 920 ZB benchmark.jpg


Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 64-bit
CORSAIR XMS3 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TR3X6G1600C9
ASUS P6T Deluxe LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard

That is a insain score for a quad core pc not even overclocked. Id be taking mine to 3.5ghz and up. Cant even imagine the speed of that.

That spec is spot on what I was looking to get. Now I didnt think Zbrush 3.1 was 64 bit, it dont use no more than 4gb, but does say in product specs its fully 64 bit?

http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/corefeatures/

[Gordon Robb]

Need to try this on my machine. I have a new i7 setup.

Don't think ZB is 64 bit. I think it is a 32 bit application that can somewho utilise some of the 64 bit OS features, like addressing up to 4 gig of memory.

[tez]

Need to try this on my machine. I have a new i7 setup.

Don't think ZB is 64 bit. I think it is a 32 bit application that can somewho utilise some of the 64 bit OS features, like addressing up to 4 gig of memory.
I dont think so either but quoted from the feature list "ZBrush takes full advantage of your 64-bit system." This sounds to me it uses more than 4gb.

[Gordon Robb]

Hmm. I thought that even a 64 system could only use 4 gig per application. Is this a wrong assumption?

[spaz8]

There was a 64 bit build of Zbrush 2 that was for Win Xp 64 but it was only able to address up to 4 gb of ram with pixologic's implementation. I think theoretically a 64 bit system can address up to 18.45 exabytes of ram. But in practice Vista 64 will support up to 128 gigs, which you would currently be hard pressed to build a system with that much ram. I know 32 gigs is quite achieaveble but the apps aren't there yet.

On OSX and Vista I believe you can currently address 4 gigs of ram to ZB 3.12 and 3.1. I'm hoping Zb 3.5 is 64 bit an can address 8 gigs.

[Jaycephus]

I'd like to confirm for everyone that ZB uses 4GB max. When I got Vista Ultimate x64 loaded, and saw that my old ZB downloaded setup was going to install in the Program Files x32 folder, indicating a 32-bit program, I contacted Pixologic tech support to double-check whether there was a different or updated download required for Vista x64. They said no, just install my original ZB3 setup, and the 3.1 upgrade. "The 32-bit Program Files directory is the correct directory." And they stated that "ZB uses up to a max of 4GB."

FYI, a 64-bit system will effectively double the RAM ZB can use, since 32-bit XP only allows a MAX of 2GB to any one application, reserving 2GB for itself. And I've read that video RAM counts towards the max RAM limit addressable by XP x32, therefore, if you have a 512MB video card, and 4GB of RAM, ZB might not see anywhere near a full 2GB RAM available for itself. Especially since all those extra services, IE or Firefox, anti-virus software, music player, etc. running along side of it are all taking up tens to hundreds of MB each. Another point is that you should double check what your virtual memory page file is actually doing. With a default install of XP x32 SP3, I noticed that my VM pagefile was set to 'auto', but that it never really increased above the minimum limit of 2GB even though I had 4GB of RAM!! All apps and services in XP always address the VM addresses, and XP handles the behind-the-scenes swaping of these VM address to and from RAM and HDD. I was trying to do large assemblies in SolidWorks on 32-bit XP on my work PC, and it would throw 'out of mem' errors at only about 730MB, according to task manager. Forcing my VM pagefile to 4GB has allowed me to successfully go above 800MB without the crashes, and I haven't hit a hard limit yet, though I suspect I'll be lucky to break 1GB. The point of this is that in a true 64-bit system with 6 to 8 GB, even if a program is still only 32-bit, that program could actually see and utilize 2-times, possibly as much as 4-times the RAM it every really was able to use under 32-bit Windows, even if you had 4GB of RAM installed. (Depends on how your VM is set, whether you have SEP on, how many RAM-hogging apps and services you have running, etc.)

Now that I'm on Vista x64 with 6GB of RAM, I'm wondering what tweaks I need to make to it, since it probably does several things differently from XP.

PS: FYI, I had to, at least initially, set ZB to 'run as administrator', even though I was already logged in as admin. Otherwise, the initial license setup app that runs for a fresh install would throw an error, and ZB would hang or crash.

[Erik Heyninck]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit

[spaz8]

I have been reading a bit more about 64 bit implementatrion on a few OS's lately. OSX has a definate adavantage at the moment in how it addresses memory. The impact of 32 bit is more felt on the windows side. I have 9 gigs of ram in my home system and can put a full 4gigs to work with Zb 3.12. There is a performace advantage in WIN in how caches are used, OSX flushes everything anytime a system call is made. But this will no longer be the case when OSX 10.6 appears, possibly in just a few months. The problem with 64 bit is that the hardware, operating system, and software all have to be on par with each other.

[Gordon Robb]

OK ran the test on my machine.

ZBTEST.jpg

Its a Dell i7 940 with 8Gig of ram. Not overclocked.

Is this a good score?

[tez]

OK ran the test on my machine.

ZBTEST.jpg

Its a Dell i7 940 with 8Gig of ram. Not overclocked.

Is this a good score?
A tad better than the 920, no by much to notice. Anythink thats in the range of 0.xx is dam good.

[Allminoxy]

OK ran the test on my machine.

ZBTEST.jpg

Its a Dell i7 940 with 8Gig of ram. Not overclocked.



Is this a good score?Maybe this will give you an idea of just how good that score is:
6Threads.jpg (http://javascript%3cb%3e%3c/b%3E:zb_insimg%28%27120553%27,%276Threads.jpg%27,1 ,0%29)

The test was done on my school's newest workstation, the HP xw 6600:

***9679; Dual Quad-Core (8 cores) E5450 processor(s) (3.00 GHz)

***9679; Quadro 1700 FX 512 MBs memory

***9679; 8 GB 667 MHz DDR2 (only 4 in windows 32X)

(These workstations cost ~ $5,000)

[Disco Stu]

well but i guess the i7 940 coming from dell was dearer than ur schools workstations.

im pretty happy ive found this thread as i ordered my i7 920 rig yesterday.

[siamak_cgm]

Hi everyone. I need a little bit of help to buy a new workstation for modeling and texturing.

Currently at work i'm using a 3D BOXX machine which is fast and i can sculpt about 15 milion polygons.

I need to buy a workstation for myself and i want to buy hp workstation. But the thing is i don't know which one i should go for!

dual xeon quad core 3.0 ghz
8gb ram
500gb hard drive
vga nvidia quadro fx 3700

this one is about 5500$ which is very expensive for me.the other one is:

1 cpu quad core 3.ghz
8gb ram
500gb hard drive
vga quadro fx 1700

this one is about 2500$!

I just need an ideal computer to be able to sculpt smoothly in zbrush without dropping frame rate. So please someone give me a good advice because i don't want to waste my money!

what is really important for sculpting and texturing in zbrush, modeling in maya and also texturing in photoshop? cpu? ram? or VGA?

I'd heard that vga is not very important in zbrush and zbrush can only use 4 gigs of rams! do i really need to get quadro fx or i can get latest nvidia gforce ?

[Allminoxy]

Hello siamak,

Have you ever considered building your own rig? Based on the information I've obtained recently about zbrush performance, Intel's new i7 core is much faster than the current Xeons. We have HP workstations at our school with dual 3.0 Ghz Xeons. I did some tests and one 4-core 2.66 Ghz Nehalem outperforms the dual 3.0 GHz Xeons in zbrush! Having multiple processors will definitely give you a boost of performance, but you're only really going to notice it in applications and tasks that scale perfectly (rendering and such). Considering that 4 cores of Nehalem beats 8 cores of Xeon in Zbrush, I think it's safe to say you'd throwing away some money on that $5,500 HP workstation.

With that in mind, you could build (or purchase) a Nehalem (core i7) rig for about $1,500-2,000 and it would perform better in Zbrush than the dual Xeon @ $5,500.

As for the graphics card, Quadro's are basically Geforce cards with higher quality parts and different firmware. From my understanding, they really only offer a performance boost when working with Open GL enabled applications in wire-frame mode (Auto CAD, Maya, etc.). Although I have not had the facilities to test Quadros in Zbrush, I would be highly surprised if the standard Geforce did not perform as well - if not better - than the highly priced Quadro.

So, my advice: save yourself some money and build or buy a Nehalem rig with a Geforce card, 6 gigs of DDR3 should be plenty.

[spaz8]

The graphics card.. as of Zbrush 3.1 is not a factor in performance. Only Ram and Processor speed is. Zbrush does not use open GL except in zmapper which is possibly being phased out.

As for Quadro vs. Geforce.. the difference is in how they render the screen. A geforce card refreshes the the entire screen continually so it excells at things likes games. A Quadro/Fire GL card brakes up the screen into layers. In a modelling environment one veiwport could be one layer, so it is only working to refresh that section of the screen so u get increased performance. The Quadro however gets bogged down with games because there is so many random and full screen elements to track and therefore usually is slower than it geforce equivalant.

Also as of the latest versions of Zbrush, Zbrush itself is only able to address up to 4 gigs of memory. Hopefully that changes.

[siamak_cgm]

thank Allminoxy. Can you telll me what exactly should i buy?

CPU, Ram, Mainboard, VGA ?

I'm using zbrush, maya, photoshop.

[tez]

If I where to build one now, If I could afford to, should I say. The i7 920 cpu would be my choice on a x58 motherboard with 1600mhz DDR3 triple kit of 6gb ram.

I would bulid it with overclocking in mind so we are talking about 3.6ghz here. I would water cool it and perchase a normal mid range graphics card like a 8800gt to keep the cost down.

PSU Enermax range would be my choice, I have one now, they are solid and reliable. Case fans I would stil with my current Noctua NF-P12.

[Giantsun]

i7 920, P6T board, 6 Gb pi black G.skill 1600, 2 Noctua intakes, 1 Noctua exhaust, Noctua cpu cooler with...you guessed it; two Noctua fans on it.
Gfx is Msi 260 and a Corsair TX 850 doing the amp work. This is at 3 Ghz, the proc goes up to 3.6 easy on air, will post later for that speed.
Brutal stuff folks.

[remyglassguy]

holy crap!



.6 now?


and i thought the i7 wasnt going to break .8 after seeing the 940 results earlier...


oh man...2 more days till i can see this for myself.

i have a i7 920
corsair 750w psu
msi x58 pro
super talent 6gb 1333

hope its as fast as that!

ill be overclocking mildly to no higher than 3.6. im hoping i can do this with a nice air cooler.

[--E--]

I just bought and put together the cheapest Ci7 system I could for home use.

ci7 920 stock heat sink and fan, not overclocked.
G. Skill 6GB (3 x 2GB) DDR3 1333
GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD4P mother board

Considering my old home computer is a p4 3.0 and its benchmarks are
single - 10.821
multi - 8.887
increase - 17.77

I am pretty happy with my new setup:D Getting below 1.0 is amazing!

[tez]

I just bought and put together the cheapest Ci7 system I could for home use.

ci7 920 stock heat sink and fan, not overclocked.
G. Skill 6GB (3 x 2GB) DDR3 1333
GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD4P mother board

Considering my old home computer is a p4 3.0 and its benchmarks are
single - 10.821
multi - 8.887
increase - 17.77

I am pretty happy with my new setup:D Getting below 1.0 is amazing!
Thats a prety decent score your getting there, I would be happy with that.:tu:

[Gordon Robb]

well but i guess the i7 940 coming from dell was dearer than ur schools workstations.

im pretty happy ive found this thread as i ordered my i7 920 rig yesterday.I just noticed this, suggesting that my Dell was dearer than the previous guys $5,000 school rig. It Wasn't. It was just under £1,000, straight from Dell, deliverd to my door in 5 days.

[remyglassguy]

i have the same system on the way, -e-. different mb...went with the MSI.
awesome numbers

[remyglassguy]

pleased....i am

[remyglassguy]

stable at 3.8

here is the bench zbench.jpg

[DanRoberts]

Hello siamak,

Have you ever considered building your own rig? ...

So, my advice: save yourself some money and build or buy a Nehalem rig with a Geforce card, 6 gigs of DDR3 should be plenty.Do the 920/940's use the same sockets at Q6600'?

Dan

[--E--]

no, totally different mb and ram are required.

[DanRoberts]

no, totally different mb and ram are required.Ok :(.

Thx for the reply:). I just upgraded this PC about 10 months ago so will prolly wait a bit till i upgrade again but those new chips look sweet.

[ksgant]

Just ran this on my almost 3 year old iMac 24" using OS X 10.5.6. 2 Gig's of RAM and an nVidia 7600GT. This is the original model 24" iMac and came out in the fall of 2006.

single - 4.044
multi - 2.694

[remyglassguy]

ok...i found this VERY interesting...

lately, ive been using OSX alot...but not on a mac.
I installed it successfully on my gateway laptop and got everything working very well, sound, video acceleration, wireless..
i noticed that the laptop seemed to run quite a bit faster with osx (strange considering its not exactly supposed to be compatible..).
it was definitely much more stable than its previous life as a "built for vista" laptop. it was hard for me to compare it to the old setup though because i didnt have any benchmarks that were osx and vista equal..
then i thought of zbrush...
exactly like i thought..the results proved that it was running at least as fast as the vista version, but with the smoothness of osx its not really a competition..

now this brings me to the next topic:
i posted that screen shot up above a few weeks ago when i got this machine (one im using to write this) overclocked to 3.8 and stable (this is my core i7 machine)..running vista 64 and zbrush.

since my recent love affair with osx, i decided to MAKE osx work on this core i7 setup...i had to see if it made the speed difference on this fast setup.
got everything working finally late last night, including ALL 8 CORES recognized and functional.
my geekbench score was the second highest submitted...and the zbench is right here..

this is a Core i7 920 HACKINTOSH @3.8ghz running osx 10.5.6 leopard

[3deified]

How much Ram do you have by the way? And what motherboard are you using?

Any tips for memory settings and configurations? Just got my core i7 and just debating what i should do for ram. 6GB or 12gb? Prices are dropping like mad.

[Disco Stu]

prices will always drop. nothing you can do against it other than buying gold instead of pc hardware.

i got 6 gigs 1600mhz ram in my i7 920 rig and its more than enough for me.
8 mill poly tools work really fine

[M i c h e l]

ZBrushOSXÉcranSnapz001.jpg

Is it good ? Or catastrophic ?

MacPro 8 core 3GHz 8 Gigs of ram. ATI Radeon X1900 XT

[Blaine91555]

I just bought a new i7 2.67 factory overclocked (the GPU does not matter with ZBrush) 12 gigs DDR3 1333. I'm working with up to 18 million polys per subtool without any lag. At 20 million it starts to have a slight lag. I'm not where it is but this is interesting. I'll post the numbers later.

[Blaine91555]

prices will always drop. nothing you can do against it other than buying gold instead of pc hardware.

i got 6 gigs 1600mhz ram in my i7 920 rig and its more than enough for me.
8 mill poly tools work really fineZBrush only uses four gigs of RAM and no more. Its the number of cores that matter. I hope ZB4 will be for 64 bit and advantage it all. The extra RAM is sure nice in other software though. I'm able to stitch HDR images into Panorama's now in PS CS4. Lightwave is like a whole new experience now compared to my old Core Duo 32 bit machine.

[maingon360]

Heres mine, What is good and bad, I dont know whats good or what the numbers mean


heres mine

Single: 2.561
Multi: 1.104


Is recommended 56.79999% increase


Is this pretty good?

[Giantsun]

If it is not slowing you down maingon360 then it is pretty good. What are the hardware specs for that benchmark result btw. :tu:

[Micheloupatrick]

Mac Pro 2009, 2 x Quad 2.66 GHz Xeon "Nehalem", OS 10.5.7, zBrush 3.2:

Single : 2.981995
Multi : 0.698997
426% increase.

And btw, GoZ is awesome!

[rolilli]

ScreenShot002.jpg ScreenShot001.jpg

8 GB Ram

[ambient-whisper]

ZBrushOSXÉcranSnapz001.jpg

Is it good ? Or catastrophic ?

MacPro 8 core 3GHz 8 Gigs of ram. ATI Radeon X1900 XTyour score is perfectly fine. mine is between 1.4- 1.1 ( depending on what i have running in the background, and if i have my computer underclocked, or running normal. ). ive worked on some heavy files and its been good so far. getting a score of 10 on your rig would be catastrophic :D

[slocik]

2,66 single
1.14 multi
57% increase

core2quad 2,4ghz
2gigs ram
i think its perrty good for a 3 year old pc ;]

[dokt]

Single: 3,442
Multi: 1,584

increes by 53.9%

q 6600(2.4 ghz)
8gb ddr2

[CowboyBunny]

Anyone done a test too see what the differences memory speed make?
I'd love to know

[silvaticus]

Oh, I forgot about this.
I always get a nice decrease, 1.5 or so.

I suck at computers but I think this is what I have:
Intel core 2 Quad CPU Q8200 2.33 Ghz

8 GB of RAM

Any idea why it shows a decrease?

ZBrush works fine for me, I`m used to work on a crappy old computer with 256 MB of RAM for years, being above that is pure bliss for me anyway.

[ambient-whisper]

hey guys. I am curious about the latest hardware when used with Zbrush. I just finished up on a huge job and it brought to light some sore spots with my hardware setup.

I have with one PC a score between 1.4 and 1.1, and another PC that has more cores, but they are slower, and the score on that machine is 1.8, roughly. It is a nice machine for rendering, but for working in Zbrush, the quad core seems to be slightly faster.

Could someone with a sandybridge/ ivy bridge pc post some benchmarks? I would love to see what kind of increases in performance people are getting in ZBrush specifically.

I know that these scores arent bad, but trust me, when it comes to massive projects where you are constantly using Project all, relax, multi map exporter, etc, you end up wishing you had a much faster machine.

Anyone have an overclocked sandybridge? ;)

[TVeyes]

Hi Martin,

I searched for some benchmarks a while ago, but stopped searching when I realised I could not even afford the upgrade to a pair of shorts for the summer ( I cut the legs of my jeans instead ).

Anyway... I did find this bit of info:

Mac Pro 12-core Westmere Xeon 2010 2.66GHz
MacBook Pro 2011 i7 quad core Sandy Bridge 2.5GHz

MME displacement map from ZBrush 4R2b
Mac Pro 12-core: 54 seconds
MacBook Pro: 23 seconds

Alas, no data for the viewport performance, which AFAIR is all the ZBrush benchmark is testing. But I am pretty sure the above systems would be neck and neck. While editing an actual, very demanding project the viewport performance would probably be in favour of the xeon systems. AFAIK the map generation, project all, etc are not as heavily threaded as the sculpting in ZBrush ( which is excellently threaded and thus scalable ).

But please let me know the Ivy Bridge scores when you upgrade your PC in a day or two ;)

For reference, here is the link to aforementioned data: http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-1036294.html