mike(mpan3)

thanks Eugene! Especially for the ffmpeg integration.

Eugene (etr9j)

Hey Mike, long time no see! :)

mike

hi, render time went from 9:25 to 6:57 on a Core 2 Duo, (and no artifact!) thanks again! Would be be kind enough to compile a MSVC SSE3 version, please? :D

Eugene (etr9j)

I would love to do an SSE3 build (especially since my chip supports it) and this has been something I have looked into. But MSVC8 (which is free) doesn't have that ability as of yet. I think the for-money Visual Studio does, but I can't be sure if it is only available with the 64-bit compilers. If anyone knows a way to do it in MSVC8 I am really interested. Also, if anyone has a scons "sse3" build I'm interested to see how it matches up with the one I posted since I've found that the scons -march:sse3 flag doesn't offer much more performance.

mike

scons/gcc is a tad slower than msvc on intel chips. Oh well, sse3 probably won't offer much performance increase over sse2 anyways, so thanks for your effort anyways.

I am going to try building w/ MSVC again, is THIS the up-to-date tutorial? http://www.geneome.net/index.php/blender-tutorials/building-blender-with-msvc-using-cmake/

Eugene (etr9j)

Yep, that's the one!

Crouch

Thanks for this build. It's 15% faster with rendering for me than the official build.

Eugene (etr9j)

Fantastic. I've aalso seen differences in performance on different scenes and computers. Usually anywhere from 15 to 35%

mchs3d

I have the full version of Visual Studio 2005, and no, it doesn't support SSE3.

James

Fluid is broke. At least on my computer it is.
The official build has same problem.
Will work with saved files, new fluid simulation fails.
2.42a works fine on my computer.

Any ideas ?

Thanks James

Eugene (etr9j)

@mchs3d
Even with the new Visual Studio SP1? They were saying it had Core Duo 2 support, but I'm not sure what that meant.

@James
I just ran a new fluid sim fine. Could you contact me at www.geneome.net? We can then trade .blends to figure out what the deal is.

James

My bad I suppose. Seems if you set no path for bake, it now
fails. It use to just ask and set a path.

James

Donny

I have in my computer 2 3.06 Xeon processors.
Does my machine support SSE2 3 ????
I dont know.....please help

Crouch

A handy tool to test what your computer has and supports is the freeware tool cpuZ. ( http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php )
Among a lot of other things it tells you what instructions your computer supports.

bluelife

optimized render but not optimized simulations?
is that possible?
my (fluid) sims are running slower with this build on a core 2 duo,e6300.
what's wrong?

indigomonkey

Thanks Eugene, nothing like an optimised build to get the juices flowing... :D When you mentioned it I dug out CPU-Z and realised that my AMD Mobile Sempron also supports SSE3, so if anyone does manage to find a compiler that would be great!

bluelife

optimized render but not optimized simulations?
is that possible?
my (fluid) sims are running slower with this build on a core 2 duo,e6300.
what's wrong?

mrcarnivore

I followed the insturctions from blendernation (http://www.geneome.net/index.php/blender-tutorials/building-blender-with-msvc) to achieve a msvc blender build to the letter and still got 42 linker errors (6>IlmImf.lib(imfstdio.obj) : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol "__declspec(dllimport) public: ....)
Anything obvious I might have missed?

Eugene (etr9j)

@mrcarnivore

You should have contacted me through my site. If you read the bottom of the page (under tips) there is a point about the openexr issues (the ilmimf.lib). If you want to trouble shoot some more, contact me through geneome.

@bluelife
The only reason I could think of is that I compile the elbeem library using sse2 but fpprecise rather than fpfast (like the rest of the libs). How much slower are the simulations and compared to what?

Eugene (etr9j)

@mrcarnivore

I've added a section to the tutorial (part 3b) to mention two ways to resolve this openexr build issues.

bruxy

Eugene. While talking SSE3 vs SSE2 optimizations....it is known that 64-bit builds further increase performance, but are not widely used due to .blender file compatibility issue. Is it planned in the next release to get this compatibility issue fixed - so we can start building in 64 bits? Or perhaps start with a 2.43 fix?
Sorry for asking in here... probably not the best place... but I could not find any wish list or next release roadmap. Anyone? Any clue? Thanks

Eugene (etr9j)

There has been some discussion for 64-bit fixes for the next version on the bf-committers but I haven't seen any solid resolution to the issue. It certainly has my support though!

m25

Nice build, as always. btw, do you have an idea of when 64 bits and SSE3 will be supported officially?! Your builds are great, despite some bugs here and there, but for Linux the situation is a mess; I am not finding any build that safely supports at least SSE2 there and really got tired of trying everything there.
We're in 2007 and most CPUs support at least SSE2, many of them SSE3/64bits so why do the official releases render 2x slower than they should?! It's not peanuts but a huge penalty most users are forced to bare and others just fix (or try to fix) temporarily.

m25

Nice build, as always. btw, do you have an idea of when 64 bits and SSE3 will be supported officially?! Your builds are great, despite some bugs here and there, but for Linux the situation is a mess; I am not finding any build that safely supports at least SSE2 there and really got tired of trying everything there.
We're in 2007 and most CPUs support at least SSE2, many of them SSE3/64bits so why do the official releases render 2x slower than they should?! It's not peanuts but a huge penalty most users are forced to bare and others just fix (or try to fix) temporarily.

eonmach

everything works ok, but I am a little confused and "scared" about one thing, when you check the system information, the results say that two modules are missing (i think they are gzip and zlib) and it warns that some scripts may not work properly)... i havenīt found any other gap, itīs fast, the FFmpeg and the new icons are cool things that make this my favourite build by far

Eugene (etr9j)

@m25
I have no idea when optimized builds will be supported officially. I'm not sure why they don't now :\ You mention some bugs here and there, what are they... and are they also found in the official release?

@eonmach
How are you checking the system information? As for the gzip and zlib modules missing, this shouldn't be the case, but I'm not sure where you are getting the error from. Post back so I can take a look at that.

m25

@etr9j
Well, not on this build, but I use your 2.42a optimized for SSE3/64bit for rendering speed reasons and it very occasionally (once in two working days maybe) crashes when entering edit mode. Don't know if this also happens in the official build because I don't use it since V2.40.
The one I use also crashes (at random times) most of the times trying to render the test.blend scene found on this page:
http://www.eofw.org/bench/
and I know for sure the official ode does not crash.
My config is Win XP x64, Athlon64 X2 4200+ (@2.45GHz), the video card is a FX5200.
I look forward to seing a SSE3/x64 optimized build from you and hopefully, something like that that works on linux too; +16% of the x64 is not to be discarded. (I am planning to transfer most of my activities there)

m25

@etr9j
Well, not on this build, but I use your 2.42a optimized for SSE3/64bit for rendering speed reasons and it very occasionally (once in two working days maybe) crashes when entering edit mode. Don't know if this also happens in the official build because I don't use it since V2.40.
The one I use also crashes (at random times) most of the times trying to render the test.blend scene found on this page:
http://www.eofw.org/bench/
and I know for sure the official ode does not crash.
My config is Win XP x64, Athlon64 X2 4200+ (@2.45GHz), the video card is a FX5200.
I look forward to seing a SSE3/x64 optimized build from you and hopefully, something like that that works on linux too; +16% of the x64 is not to be discarded. (I am planning to transfer most of my activities there)

Eugene (etr9j)

@m25
Ah, the 2.42a 64-bit isn't from me, that was probaly adkiller. As you've already seen, it was plagued with issues (like the edit mode one you mentioned). I too am looking forward to 64-bit safe code since I'm definitely ready for the 64-bit versions to dramatically reduce render times.

m25

yes, it was addkiller...
however, go with the SSE3/x64 builds; the world desperately needs them.

mpan3

m25, sse2/3 and ffast-math is definitly possible on linux. In fact, it is probably easier to obtain since all one has to do is compile the source with some optimization flags in the scons config file. what distro are you using?

mpan3 (again)

i wouldn't expect the performance increase of 64bit to be anything astonishing. Granted, I am no coding guru. But Povray is already 64bit and the performance benifit is marginal. (except for the larger addressable ram space). The same story goes to Mental Ray 64bit: little performance increase.

m25

to mpan3:
Well, the problem with me is that I don't know anything about Linux. I am using Ubuntu a 64bit 6.10 but I don't know how to compile the thing myself (have some C++ and VisualBasic experience but no works on Linux or Python).
I know 64 bits is not killing but it gives you up to 15-16% and that's still a lot if a walkthrough takes you up to 12 or 20hours to render.

eonmach

About the system information issue (like I said before)... blender runs well, but when you check on the menus help/system/system information, it shows opengl info and python path and all stuff...buy also warnings that some library modules are not found, like i said before, but everything works ok to date...and again great build!!!! my favourite :)

Eugene (etr9j)

@eonmach
I found the issue. it turns out the zlib.pyd file wasn't inlcuded. After re-adding it, this module issue went away. I'm trying to update the build but I'm getting errors when I try, so I'll post it as soon as possible and make note of it in the main description.

Eugene (etr9j)

@all
Build updated to inlclude the zlib.pyd module that was missing.

m25

@etr9j:
I think that at the end we're near to it! The first target for Blender 2.44 is to make it 64 bit; have a look:
http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-243/

eonmach

thanks Eugene!!! downloading...

adkiller

Hey Eugene!

I sent you an e-mail requesting the sources you patched for this release. Please reply.

Thanks!

Eugene (etr9j)

Hey ad,

I haven't received an e-mail from you... what address did you use? Could you send again?

adkiller

I sent it to your blendernation email address. Could you send me an e-mail with your current e-mail address? Send it to adkiller at post dot com

Thanks!

Mindaugas_HW

I think that it would be available to build it with MVS7.1 compiler (it is free, and is called somehing like this: 'Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit 2003'). You can use code::blocks (www.codeblocks.org) to compile it. What concerns 64bit I do not know.
Happy Blending :)