maya 7 on a quad intel mac pro w/ windows xp

[orbitalpunk]

Has anyone trying rendering in maya 7 with windows xp on a mac pro? does it seem like all 4 cores arent running well? my render times are about the same as there on a 2 core machine. I dont see much of a improvment from 2 to 4 cores. could it be cause of the drivers? or a bug in maya? cause my cinebench 9.5, my render screams at a 1058 score in 21 seconds compared to a dual core opteron 2.2ghz 584 in 39 seconds. just wondered if I just need to wait for drivers from boot camp or autodesk needs to fix somthing.

Thanks

 

[seanf]

Unfortunately, Windows XP Pro only supports up to two processors and Home only supports one. You would need a Windows server edition to take advantage of all four cores (assuming there's some sort of hack to get this running on a Mac).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2003 for details of processor support in Server 2003. You would need to ensure Maya is fully compatible with 2003 though.

Sean

 

[orbitalpunk]

Hey Sean, (my names sean to)

I looked up windows xp on wiki and it said this for xp pro

"Home is limited to one processor and Professional uses up to two physical processors, regardless of the number of CPU cores or Hyper-threading"

and i felt this was true already cause like i said cinebench 9.5 test uses all 4 cores at 100% and beat my dual amd pc by twice as fast. and thats impressive since my amd cores are 2.2 ghz and my macpro cores are 2.0ghz. my task manager shows 4 processors.

thanks for your input tho.

 

[seanf]

Hi Sean! Apologies for the confusion on my part. Were you able to get anywhere with this?

Sean

 

[orbitalpunk]

yep. well i think the maya render cant understand 4 cores well, but mental ray does. i have to use batch render and set it to 4 threads. the render time is fast, but the wall clock (pre and post preparations) are slow. cuase the when you run windows xp on the new mac pros, windows doesnt understand the SATA controler. so my hard drives are running in PIO mode, not UDMA mode. and i've even used the new boot camp 1.1 update and they still dont have drivers for this. well at least i understand whats the problem. just need to wait for the drivers to be released.

thanks for asking
sean