Nice Job Michael! The new Isocurves will be very useful!

I tested the benchmarks & saw a substantial speed-up.

I'm running with mesh angle @ 6 deg. & used AutoRotate2 to get an average speed:

April Beta = 53 ms.
July Beta = 17 ms.

got a dumb question. Where might I find my license key?

>Michael

Can you look in your nVidia driver settings to see if there is any option like "Threaded optimization" which can be turned off? Do you see any change in MoI after that?




In the Nvidia control panel,on advanced 3D settings i tried ON-OFF-AUTO,global settings and also -MOI V3 July-dedicated settings




GPU-Z screenshot about my card



during thread optimization turned -OFF- i ran windows task manager and i saw all four threads working(maybe they didn't run?..forgive me if i have misunderstood what you mean)

see below attached screenshots with all options:no great changes

good night Michael (here is midnight) see you tomorrow

Hi beanworks,

> got a dumb question. Where might I find my license key?

Well, it's sent to you by e-mail originally. Right now it is not displayed in the actual program UI anywhere but it is written as a text file which you can open up in a text editor (like notepad on Windows or TextEdit.app on Mac) to see.

The text file is in the same location as moi.ini, and will be named moi_v2_license.key - you can find out where your moi.ini file is at by going to Options > General , and push the "Edit .ini file" button. In the dialog that pops up, it will tell you where the ini file is located at and your moi_v2_license.key file should be in that same directory.

- Michael

Hi danperk, that is a great speedup, and cool twisty model too!

What video card are you using on that machine?

- Michael

Thanks! I'm running an ATI 5870 - 1GB & Intel 930 Quad.

awesome, found it. thank you for everything!

Okay!

I tried a model on my home PC.

I have a Pentium 4 (2 core), 1 g. ram
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4800 SE


I see one core taking the brunt in the older version, and two cores working just as hard in the new one.

MoI's timing with this particular model:

116 ms and 100 ms. %14 (?)

""""""""""""But also now that I see what your test file is like, a "sphere grid" is actually a particular kind of case since each sphere only has a single edge in it. So your test file happens to be heavy on surface drawing and light on edge drawing, and it's actually edge drawing that consumes the most CPU and also therefore has the most to benefit from the multi-core use as well.""""""""""

Rat's... We already talked about that... Shouldve known.... Never mind.

Re-tested on an edgy model.

V2 = 220 ms
V3 = 120 ms

Much better. my bad.

Hi Burr, yup that's more like it... Also an edgy model with Hidden line display enabled will probably see the biggest difference.

With this edgy model, do you see any difference if setting DisplayThreadLimit=6 or DisplayThreadLimit=8 on your dual-quad-core ? I'm still not so sure that one thread per "virtual" core is the best way to go on a hyperthreaded machine or not.

- Michael

Hi Mike,

> I have a Pentium 4 (2 core), 1 g. ram
> NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4800 SE

Not really too surprising there isn't much gain there, because the GeForce4 Ti 4800 SE is basically an antique at this point - it comes from the 4th generation nVidia wave, they are on the 15th generation right now...

Especially if it's in an AGP 1x or 2x slot probably the card is the bottleneck. Multi-core CPU use can only help things out if the video card and bus is speedy enough that the card can handle more stuff than what one CPU can chug out. If the card is not able to keep much ahead of just 1 CPU then having more than 1 CPU also going won't really do much.

However recent trends have been that video cards have become faster at a greater pace than CPUs - for various reasons CPUs are basically stuck at around their current speed and the focus is more on having several cores available, so this new system in MoI is pretty good for the direction that things are going.

Your GeForce4 card though is nearly 10 years old at this point, as far as GPUs go that's like an eternity, it's basically a nice feature that MoI is able to run at all on these kinds of old generation cards (MoI actually does run on the 1st generation GeForce and Radeons!), but you're probably not going to get much benefit for things that are tuned more for current generation stuff.

I would have expected a better result on your work machine though definitely... From what you were describing it kind of sounds like the multi-core use of the driver is still on despite changing that setting, I don't know if possibly that is a driver problem that has been fixed in a newer driver version, but that could be possible.

- Michael

"""""""this edgy model, do you see any difference if setting DisplayThreadLimit=6 or DisplayThreadLimit=8 on your dual-quad-core ? I'm still not so sure that one thread per "virtual" core is the best way to go on a hyperthreaded machine or not.""""""""""

Hi Michael,

Video card defaults
no entry in MoI ini thread limit = 130
thread limit 6 = 140
thread limit 4 =150
thread limit 1 =180

Video card threaded optimazation off in global, no entry in ini file = 150

Seems about right.

Hi Burr, thanks for those tests!

So it does not seem that one separate thread per virtual core (which is what you should be getting with no entry set, or with it set to 0) is hurting anything there, that is good to know.

- Michael

What I need is $2k after taxes. ;-)

The card was a quick replacement after lightning took all kinds of stuff out in my home PC, including the better card.
The motherboard is the only thing left that wasn't (too) effected, and it has evident charring around the power strip connector.

I'm still going to poke around some next week to see what the deal is with my work PC...
My brother put it together a year ago, and he tweaks gaming systems as a hobby.
I believe for the sake of keeping my boss from having anymore headaches, he clocked everything down to "reliable" and "stable" values.
And I remember a lot of stuff done in the fancy BIOS setup.

Ya gotta admit, you can still do a lot with MoI on an old system... the watch, the tank. ;-) Now that's a product.

260GT - i3930K

April

Frames: 76 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 7.600 - Min: 7 - Max: 8

July

Frames: 116 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 11.600 - Min: 8 - Max: 13 No DisplayThreadLimit - Nvidia Thread opt: Auto Hyper Thread ON

Frames: 119 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 11.900 - Min: 11 - Max: 13 No DisplayThreadLimit - Nvidia Thread opt: Off Hyper Thread ON

Frames: 97 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 9.700 - Min: 7 - Max: 11 No DisplayThreadLimit - Nvidia Thread opt: On Hyper Thread ON



Frames: 104 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 10.400 - Min: 9 - Max: 12 DisplayThreadLimit=2 - Nvidia Thread opt: Auto Hyper Thread ON

Frames: 105 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 10.500 - Min: 9 - Max: 12 DisplayThreadLimit=2 - Nvidia Thread opt: off Hyper Thread ON

Frames: 104 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 10.400 - Min: 9 - Max: 11 DisplayThreadLimit=2 - Nvidia Thread opt: on Hyper Thread ON



Frames: 120 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 12.000 - Min: 11 - Max: 13 DisplayThreadLimit=4 - Nvidia Thread opt: Auto Hyper Thread ON

Frames: 120 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 12.000 - Min: 11 - Max: 13 DisplayThreadLimit=4 - Nvidia Thread opt: off Hyper Thread ON

Frames: 119 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 11.900 - Min: 10 - Max: 13 DisplayThreadLimit=4 - Nvidia Thread opt: on Hyper Thread ON



Frames: 120 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 12.000 - Min: 11 - Max: 13 DisplayThreadLimit=6 - Nvidia Thread opt: Auto Hyper Thread ON

Frames: 120 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 12.000 - Min: 11 - Max: 13 DisplayThreadLimit=6 - Nvidia Thread opt: off Hyper Thread ON

Frames: 120 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 12.000 - Min: 11 - Max: 13 DisplayThreadLimit=6 - Nvidia Thread opt: on Hyper Thread ON


Will do an other batch with Hyper Treading OFF ... (does the result make any sence for you Michael Oo)

So my conclusion, the nvidia thread optimisation 'auto' is in fact turned off for MoI.
Forcing in 'on' slow down the result.

So for the next test I keep nvidia thread optimisation on 'auto', but I disable the intel hypertreading on my mobo.



Frames: 120 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 12.000 - Min: 11 - Max: 13 No DisplayThreadLimit - Nvidia Thread opt: Auto Hyper Thread OFF

Frames: 107 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 10.700 - Min: 9 - Max: 12 DisplayThreadLimit=2 - Nvidia Thread opt: Auto Hyper Thread OFF

Frames: 120 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 12.000 - Min: 11 - Max: 13 DisplayThreadLimit=4 - Nvidia Thread opt: Auto Hyper Thread OFF

Frames: 120 - Time: 10000ms - Avg: 12.000 - Min: 11 - Max: 13 DisplayThreadLimit=6 - Nvidia Thread opt: Auto Hyper Thread OFF

Hi PaQ, thanks for collecting that data!


> (does the result make any sence for you Michael Oo)

Sort of... That data does seem to suggest that maybe it's better to use only half as many threads on a hyper-threading machine. Seems to be the opposite conclusion from some of Burr's previous data though.

I guess it's fairly likely that the optimal settings for different things (there are other internal variable factors too like number of buffers used per thread and vertex/index buffer size) is different on different machines depending on all kinds of factors like bus speed and video card speed, etc... and also probably even different on the same machine with different model structures as well.

- Michael

Hey PaQ,
Do you have another display script with the more detailed output from something previous?

"frames" + time

Thanks.

Hi PaQ,

> So for the next test I keep nvidia thread optimisation on 'auto', but I
> disable the intel hypertreading on my mobo.

So it looks there that hyperthreading being turned on in the bios by itself doesn't harm anything but that there's not much to gain there by one thread per "virtual core", and that the increased contention ends up as a slight net negative.

This probably has to do with the whole process being memory bandwidth intensive instead of only calculation intensive which would suit hyperthreading somewhat better I think.

I think it will probably be best to go with a default of one thread per "real core" instead of one per "virtual core" for this particular thing.

- Michael