Hello. I have had this problem when running ZBV4 as well. Whenever I use ZBR42 in OSX after 20 seconds of use the temp shoots up to over 85 degrees c and the fan comes on and only stops when I’m not moving my Wacom pen about. When running in Windows 7 using bootcamp on the same machine The temp does not go above 75 degrees c and the fan does not come on, which is what I want to happen when using ZBrush in OSX. I’m using a 2011 MacBook Pro with 8gb Ram, 128 SSD, AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1GB Graphics, 2.2 Ghz Intel Core i7 and The same problem occurs in Snow Leopard as well as lion.
Does anyone else have the same problem?
Yeah, since ZBrush 4, the program has become very trigger happy with the CPU’s so to speak. Even when doing very simple stuff such as activating the Brush popup menu with the ‘b’ key. As long as the popup is visible, all CPU cores run full speed causing my MBP to heat up which makes the fans rev up in response. Even when I leave ZBrush running in the background, but have the brush menu still visible, the CPU’s run flat out. Surely that cannot be right?
I’m running on a 15” i7 MacBook Pro with 4 cores/8 threads, 8 GB of Ram, AMD Radeon HD 6750M on Snow Leopard.
Maybe there may be a problem with using the application on the laptops. I have not tested this, but ZB4R2 appears to be running soundly on my Mac Pro quad core desktop machine with a 21" Cintique UX. I wonder if this may have something to do with a different video card. Also, maybe it might be a virtual memory issue, as I have more than a TB of hard disk space.
System is OX 10.6.8 Snow Leopard and the video card is a ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT.
I doubt it’s any of that. The Mac Pros are just much better equipped when it comes to dealing with heat. Don’t have access to my Mac Pro now, but I know that ZBrush caused it to throttle up all it’s 12 cores (as well as the 12 HT-cores) with similar actions. But as the cooling system in the Mac Pro is so much more capable, you’d never know this unless you have an Activity Monitor of sorts running. Try it out… start up the Activity Monitor, Press 'CMND+2’ to bring up a floating ‘CPU Usage’ window and I bet you your Mac Pro’s CPU’s will light up too.
Also, ZBrush is renowned for it’s video card independence, (I’ve run ZB with good performance on a 11” Mac Book Air), so it can’t be that either.
One could argue that ZBrush is just insanely well multi-threaded. But should the floating brush selection menu really max out all cores thrown at it just because it’s being displayed? It really shouldn’t.
I just checked my activity monitor. I have the floating brush palette displayed, but that does not make any difference. On the other hand, you can see the usage go right up with anything doing like zooming, painting etc. Only one core lights up when I am not doing anything in Zb. Zbrush is running in the background as I type this and there is not much activity going on. Very interesting. Thanks for the tip.