Help me benchmark Lightmass...!

Dashiva

I've come to the point where lighting bakes are annoying me enough to build another cheap box to help my main rig with the Lightmass times. The cheapest 8 core CPUs right now are AMD FX, and while these are generally poorly performing they might be OK for Lightmass when the price/performance ratio is considered. The last benchmarks I can find for lightmass are from 2009 or 2010 or so, and only older hardware is represented, so I'd like to compile a benchmark made up of newer CPUs.

I've already have a thread going on over at the UDK forums: http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/935319-Hardware-and-Benchmarks-for-lightmapping-Swarm-Lightmass - but I'd figure I'd ask Polycounters as well because they tend to be a bit more technically erudite than their UDK forum peers.

Basically, if any of you find time to help me I would be grateful and I think it would be useful for the community in general. All that is required is that you bake the lighting on the UDK example map and report the time along with some of your system stats over here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dEpwLUZLaXJKUTFLa3ZqeU1pdGxacWc6MQ

Alternatively just posting in this thread would be fine too.

Right now I'm finding that the AMD systems I have are only about 15 percent slower than the Intel systems I have, which is something I didn't expect. This leads me to believe that Lightmass isn't very optimized for newer architectures. Thanks.

Dashiva

Just an update. I went ahead and bit the bullet on a Core i7 Ivy Bridge today as they were on sale. My previous CPU was an i5-2400 clocked at 3.5ghz, which is the same speed as the i7-3770 I bought today. The difference beyond the Sandy/Ivy bridge is that the i7 does 8 threads. I expected a twofold increase in lightmapping performance because of the extra thread count. However, this is not the case. Lightmass/Swarm only sees the CPU as a quad core. When I run the bake I only get a roughly 30 percent increase in performance, which is what you would expect going from Sandy to Ivy. While all 8 "cores" are active in the CPU meter when I'm baking this means that hyperthreading is not really relevant to Lightmass. I think I might return the CPU and get an AMD 8350 and see how that works out.

James Ordner

I use a 3770k, and lightmass recognizes all 8 threads. I would try getting it to work before you return it. How, I don't know... My CPU just worked without any tweaks. I don't know if the unlocked version is any different from the regular one, but that's the only difference I can see.

JamesWild

http://ark.intel.com/products/65719/

It's a quad core, but it's hyperthreaded. It can still only perform the amount of work it could if HT was off and it had four threads, but it processes the most ready thread of the two assigned to each core, which is a marginal improvement especially if lightmass is well optimized for cache coherency. It's not like having four dual cores.