Processor bottleneck

[P3nT4gR4m]

So I have 32 gigs of ram and a GTX 1080 tooling away under the hood but lately my core-i5 is proving to be the weak link in the chain. Once I'm north of around 20 gigs of sdf data I get an attack of the laggychops and a perfmon quickly shows that my cheap and nasty cpu is hitting 100% whilst the rest of my box is barely breaking a sweat.

However, upgrading to an i7 is going to set me back around half a grand so, before I drop that kind of dosh I'd like a good idea of how much difference this is going to make in real terms. I'd be especially interested in hearing from anyone who has 32 gigs and an i7 and ultra interested in anyone who's upgraded from i5 because of lag?

The way I see it there's two possibilities - either I slap in an i7 and all my woes melt away or I shell out 500 quid and get barely any discernible improvement in performance and then all sorts of broken stuff starts appearing round my house and fist shaped holes appear in doors and walls and whatnot.

[cleanupdisc]

You dont need 32 gigs. 16 gigs of ram is more than enough. Im sure the i7 will help. Which i5 did you have?

[P3nT4gR4m]

@cleanupdisc - 16 gigs is significantly less than I need, did you miss the part where I mentioned I was regularly using upward of 20? Welcome to Medium! 

Current processor is a 6600K clocked to 4.5ghz

[falken76]

What is it slowing down in?  Medium?  Medium is like designing with Metaballs, it's VERY CPU and memory intesnsive.  I have an I7 2600k w/ 16 gigs ram.  This machine is 6 or 7 years old now.  It is a solidworks machine for it's main use.  This CPU is old as dirt in technology years and it runs everything VR related I put on it if it's gaming related.  I've played around with medium.  Personally I think it sucks to do design work standing up with a sweat inducing box strapped to your face while you stand up and mimick sculpting, but I did play around with it.  Medium would kill the performance on my machine simply because of the way the models are made.  But that's because Medium creates heavy meshes like Zbrush or any sculpting type software would.  You would probably see a difference in performance on Medium but not on many games.  Games like Az Sunshine claim to have some perks or special options for the I7 Intel chip set.  I have a rift, my friend has a rift and so does my brother.  We all have I7's so I don't know what special options Az Sunshine has, but I'm guessing it's not impressive or worse yet, probably not even noticeable unless you are looking at a screenshot, otherwise existing screenshots would look different or at least someone would complain about their I5 version not looking like the videos or the screenshots.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Question is specifically - How does i7 compare with i5 when dealing with Oculus Medium SDF engine? If you don't know what Oculus Medium or SDF is then I'ma have a hard time taking your advice seriously.

Assume I know how much ram I need (cue a bunch of "experts" telling me I'm wrong and 4gb is more than enough to run an XL spreadsheet on windows xp)

Assume the lag I'm experiencing is genuine lag based on CPU regularly hitting 100% utilisation on taskmon and not something I've imagined based on a dream I once had about someone on the internet slagging off i5's

[falken76]

Ask the developers of medium, maybe they can answer your question.  I think you'll see a slight increase w/ an I7.  I am certainly not suggesting you don't need 32 gb of ram, more ram is always better.  I'd get more if the Motherboard you get for the I7 will support it.

[MattHickman]

So yeah @P3nT4gR4m sculpting operation latency will be largely on CPU.

The GPU and one thread on the CPU is just working its butt off on rendering the sculpt itself, all the other stuff we send to the remaining threads on the CPU. Also if you start eating through memory to the point your system will start paging to disk you're going to see everything eat it in that case.

So in short, frame rate issues usually GPU, sculpt operation latency CPU, low memory will bork everything at some point.

[DeadlyJoe]

I'm still using my old i7 4790k with a GTX 980Ti and I don't experience any severe hiccups when Medium exceeds 20GB (out of 32GB DDR3-1600 installed). Churning that much geometry does definitely drop the frame rate, but not to the point where it's unusable.

[nalex66]

I'm using an i7 5820K OCed to 4.25 GHz with 32 GB of RAM. I don't notice any lag while sculpting, but two caveats:

1. I'm generally not pushing the layer resolution as high as you do, and;
   
2. My CPU is a 6-core, so I'm not sure whether I'm benefiting more from the extra threads versus having an i7 instead of an i5.
   

[Shuflie]

Have a look in resource monitor to see if all four cores are at 100% utilization, if they are and medium is the only program you are running then an i7 may help. I'm not at my main computer at the minute but perhaps someone else with an i7 and medium could check and see if Medium makes use of all 8 (or 12 or 16) threads when running. Programs that are properly multithreaded and can make use of all available threads run much quicker on i7s than i5s. One thing you could try yourself is to run a bench test of your i5 in CPU-Z then select a similarly clocked i7 from the drop down box to compare it against, if you get roughly the same single thread performance but a much improved multithread performance then you should see an improvement in Medium.