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Performance in Fusion

PostPosted: Tue Nov 20, 2018 3:07 pm
by flavincitx
Hello all,

I have a beast of a machine at work and should be able to "scream". But somehow when I am for example doing simple particles, I am getting 3FPS with barely any CPU or GPU usage. 14% has been the max. What am I missing?

Thank you

Re: Performance in Fusion

PostPosted: Tue Nov 20, 2018 4:42 pm
by Chad Capeland
Let me guess, you have either a 6 core or 12 core CPU?

Re: Performance in Fusion

PostPosted: Sat Dec 01, 2018 9:03 am
by Borrodin
@Chad,
Is this a known issue? Is there a workaround? I'm seeing this too.

Re: Performance in Fusion

PostPosted: Sat Dec 01, 2018 10:01 pm
by Chad Capeland
Borrodin wrote:@Chad,
Is this a known issue? Is there a workaround? I'm seeing this too.


Get a CPU with fewer cores and higher performance per core.

Re: Performance in Fusion

PostPosted: Sat Dec 01, 2018 11:17 pm
by Kel Philm
The 8700k is plenty for Fusion.

Bottle necks can occur in many places. CPU, GPU, Ram, Disk speed. If all these are up to scratch, start looking at your Comp, it can be very easy to create a poor performing comp by processing way more data than necessary. I would suggest turning on DoD view (domain of definition) and reading up about it, I've had massive speed increases by optimizing some flows. Also look into the memory preferences where you can increase multi thread support (sorry not in front of fusion at the moment so I can't tell you exactly what they are). Outside of that there are some nodes that just are unable to utilise multi threaded processing as much as others.

Re: Performance in Fusion

PostPosted: Sun Dec 02, 2018 4:08 pm
by Chad Capeland
Nothing will help other than a faster CPU. DoD doesn't affect particles.

Re: Performance in Fusion

PostPosted: Sun Dec 02, 2018 10:57 pm
by Kel Philm
He was using particles as an example I was looking at a broader picture.

Re: Performance in Fusion

PostPosted: Mon Dec 03, 2018 2:07 pm
by GeorgeDrake
What is the best CPU for fusion? As I start to use it more it is bringing my 8 Core PC to its knees while doing similar things I did in AE with no issues. So maybe it is time for a new build...

Re: Performance in Fusion

PostPosted: Mon Dec 03, 2018 7:16 pm
by Sander de Regt
Can you describe what kind of things are bringing the software to its knees?
I have a 5 year old 4-core i5 with 16Gb of RAM and I can still do production work on this system.
(slowly of course, but Fusion doesn't bring it to its knees)

Re: Performance in Fusion

PostPosted: Mon Dec 03, 2018 11:40 pm
by Chad Capeland
The best CPU is one that has a lot of memory channels and PCIe lanes (for NVMe). The memory lanes is most important, though.

Most 2D tools will benefit from multiple cores. Most 3D tools will benefit from high clock speeds.

But really, you have the ability to network render on tons of machines, so it's really interactive performance that matters, and for that you want RAM.

For instance, if you work in float16 with 4 channel images of UHD size at 60 fps and you want to merge BG over FG, that's 8 GB per second. To cache a CC after that, and maybe a blur, you'd need 16 GB per second. If your shot is 3 seconds long, that's 48 GB in addition to whatever other tools you have plus the overhead from Fusion, plus the overhead from the OS and drivers and such plus other programs. Basically you'd need 64 GB to do a 3 second shot interactively. That's just rule of thumb, I've had comps that needed way more and I've had comps that I aggressively managed proxy, resolution, ROIDS, bit depth, channel counts, etc...

Re: Performance in Fusion

PostPosted: Sat Dec 15, 2018 10:19 am
by Borrodin
Chad Capeland wrote:
Borrodin wrote:@Chad,
Is this a known issue? Is there a workaround? I'm seeing this too.


Get a CPU with fewer cores and higher performance per core.


Are we really saying that's the recommended solution? Downgrade to older technology? Others are saying more express lanes, which would imply an i9, which also has many more cores than the 8th gen i7. Is that significant investment in replacement hardware going to be a net improvement or a step backwards due to the core count?

The config guide suggests the issue isn't necessarily with the core count, as it recommends 10, 12 or 16-core systems. That would make the express lane supposition closer to the truth of the issue.

What is still getting me though is that people with older systems (my older system included) are getting better performance than my new desktop system, which might suggest something else is a factor here. I don't appear to be alone here and the common theme appears to be the 8th generation CPU.