CC3 performance on AMD vs Intel...

I've used CC3 (and DD3) on two different machines, my desktop (AMD) and my laptop (Intel); when I turn on effects, my desktop will just endlessly try to render it most of the time, while the laptop just renders for a few seconds and pops up the map with effects on. I'm not talking about complicated maps, either. I just made this map on my desktop:

Blank Map

If you want to try this map out, New > Dungeons (decide settings myself) > Annual Jon Roberts > 50 x 40 > Grass_green_dark CA54 > Grid Overlay (Square grid, 5.0 spacing, no labelling) > Finish

Now I turn on Sheet Effects > Dungen Jon Roberts and hit OK:

Not Responding

It toggled in and out of (Not Responding) *four* times before finally kicking out the map with effects on. It only gets worse as you add things to the map.

My desktop:
Motherboard: 970 Extreme3 R2.0
CPU: AMD FX-8120 (3.1 GHz)
RAM: 8 GB DDR3-1333
VIDEO: nVidia GeForce GTX 660
SSD (install drive): 256 GB SanDisk
HDD (documents drive): 2 TB Western Digital Intellispeed HDD

Now if I do the same on my laptop, there's barely a pause before it comes up rendered. With a map like this:

Iron Keep, Floor 1

My desktop can't even render it. My laptop kicks it out in about 5 seconds, if that. So what is under the hood of this godly laptop?

MODEL: HP Pavilion dv7 Notebook PC
CPU: i7-2670QM 2.2 GHz
RAM: 8 GB DDR3-1333
VIDEO: Intel 3000 HD *Integrated* Graphics
HDD: 750 GB Hitachi HDD (5400 rpm)

Now on my old AMD I didn't have as many issues--it was still frequently would cycle through the "Not Responding" business, but it would usually complete the render. I thought maybe there were two many cores for CC3 to handle. So I set the affinity to 4 cores, then 2 cores, then 1 core. No difference. I tried pushing the priority to High, no difference.

I have no other application on this machine (including fullscreen streams, fullscreen video rendering, working with massive images in GIMP (half the time from CC3 that I had to render on my laptop!) that even make my desktop break a sweat. But CC3 drags it to it's knees when trying to render effects on an empty, brand new map! What is going on? Anyone else have this trouble with an AMD FX-8120? I mean, if I had these issues with any software I ran, I'd blame the CPU--but I don't. I have a really good video card. I have plenty of RAM. I have a huge SSD. It's really annoying that my old beater work laptop runs CC3 so much better than my desktop.

Comments

  • Hello,

    I tested the map you described (New > Dungeons (decide settings myself) > Annual Jon Roberts > 50 x 40 > Grass_green_dark CA54 > Grid Overlay (Square grid, 5.0 spacing, no labelling) > Finish and therafter turning on the Sheet-Effects).
    My desktop (i7, Win7 Pro) showed the rendered map after about 2 seconds.

    What I discovered is that when I turn on the Sheet-Effects on some of my maps - Fastcad (CC3) seems to hang up in a never ending loop of rendering.
    It seems that a change between focus and lost focus of the Fastcad drawing window forces a redraw of the map - and a ready rendered map never shows up.
    I get some sort of blinking-effect - the map renders and precisely when the map should be ready, the task bar of Windows 7 seems to get busy for a short time and Fastcad starts to render again and so on.

    To stop this behavior I use to click on the sheet-effects button during rendering and after a while the sheet dialog appears - with the ready rendered map in the back.
    After closing the effects-dialog (without turning effects off) the dialog box disappears and for the most no new rendering process is started - so that I get access to the ready rendered map.

    /André
  • 22 days later
  • Eugee, did you get this resolved? I'm new to CC3, just bought it last week, and the rendering performance with sheet effects turned on is utterly intolerable. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does, but even when it does, it can take many seconds to several minutes. The more I add to my map, the worse it gets. Surely this can't be working as intended?! My machine specs are very beefy too, and I have no problem working with huge gigabyte sized panoramas in Photoshop. Windows 7 64bit, Intel Core i7-4930K at 3.40GHz, 32GB RAM.

    Any suggestions? This is beyond frustrating. I love CC3 otherwise!

    Thanks :)
  • JimPJimP 🖼️ 280 images Departed Legend - Rest in Peace
    CC3 uses 2 gigs of ram and ignores your video card. Look for the CC3+ thread in these forums as that is the next upgrade to CC3.
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