Prana Studios leverages Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series to get better 3D animation rendering

Submit New Article

July 7, 2009 12:00 AM PDT


Introduction: Prana Studios is a leading Animation house based out of Mumbai and Los Angeles. Prana's core business is focused on four main areas: Long-form CG content, location based entertainment, game cinematics, and feature film effects. They began collaborating with Intel to resolve a technical challenge they were facing while working on an ongoing animation movie co-produced with a leading Bollywood Studio.

 

The Challenge: The technical challenge was to resolve the renderer performance of displacements and 3D motion blur in the Improving SitexGraphics* Air* product .


The Solution: To meet this challenge, the Prana* team explored Air* multi-core software optimizations and also evaluated the latest hardware platform powered by the Intel® Xeon® processors 5500 series with its Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel® HT Technology).

 

The Impact: The performance of Air* renderer was significantly higher on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series-based machine as compared to the earlier generation of the hardware with the Intel® Xeon® processor 5355 series-based platform. The Air* renderer showed phenomenal performance improvement on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series with average gains of 1.8X with Intel® HT Technology ON and 1.45X with Intel® HT Technology OFF as compared to the older generation Intel® Xeon® processor 5355 series-based platform.

 

Application Optimizations in Air* Software: During evaluation of the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series-based platform, the Prana* team found some scalability issues with the Air* renderer when moving from 8-thread to 16-threadexecution. This feedback was given to the SitexGraphics* what? Group?, who investigated the threading issues in the Air* renderer and released a fix that enabled 16-thread execution on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series-based  platform (with the Intel® HT Technology feature ON).

 

Deploying the Intel® Xeon® Processor 55xx Series-based Platform: Performance of Air* renderer was evaluated using workloads that constituted foliage, fur and texture scenes. Performance measurements on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series-based platform were done with both Intel® HT Technology ON and OFF. It was found that the Intel® Xeon® processor 5355 series-based platform took 199, 871, and 728 seconds? while the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series-based platform took 137, 616, and 527 seconds with Intel® HT Technology OFF (8-thread execution) and 93, 495, and 419 seconds respectively, with Intel® HT Technology ON (16-thread execution) for rendering the 3 workloads. Therefore, optimum rendering performance was achieved on the Intel® Xeon® processor5500 series-based platform with the Intel® HT Technology ON (Ref Fig. 1).

The average performance gains on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series-based platform with Intel® HT Technology OFF and ON were 1.45X and 1.8X respectively, when compared to the Intel® Xeon® processor 5355 series-based platform.

 

Fig. 1: Lower is better
Prana_fig+1.jpg

 

 

"Good things" about Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series: Intel® Xeon® processor-based servers provide reliable, efficient, and proven performance, designed from ground up to meet data-demanding enterprise requirements. The Intel® Xeon® processors are the ideal choice for business-critical computing.


Configuration of the machines tested:

Intel® Xeon® processor 5355 series-based Platform
•  Hardware: Dual Processors Intel® Xeon® CPU 5355 Series @ 2.66GHz with 8GB FBD2 800MHz RAM
•  OS: Windows* XP* Professional x64 Edition v5.2.3790 Service Pack 2 Build 3790
•  Software Stack: Maya*2008 Ext2 (32-bit), MayaMan* 2.0.15 (32-bit), SitexGraphics* Air* 8.09 (32-bit)

Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series-based Platform
•  Hardware: Dual Processors Intel® Xeon® CPU 5560 Series @ 2.8GHz with 8 GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM
•  OS: Windows XP Professional x64 Edition v5.2.3790 Service Pack 2 Build 3790
•  Software Stack: Maya*2008 Ext2 (32-bit), MayaMan* 2.0.15 (32-bit), SitexGraphics* Air* 8.09 (32-bit)



*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
Optimization Notice

Intel's compilers may or may not optimize to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors. These optimizations include SSE2, SSE3, and SSSE3 instruction sets and other optimizations. Intel does not guarantee the availability, functionality, or effectiveness of any optimization on microprocessors not manufactured by Intel. Microprocessor-dependent optimizations in this product are intended for use with Intel microprocessors. Certain optimizations not specific to Intel microarchitecture are reserved for Intel microprocessors. Please refer to the applicable product User and Reference Guides for more information regarding the specific instruction sets covered by this notice.

Notice revision #20110804