Why doesn't my machine max out when building?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Ok, I borrowed a nasty machine to test, dual xeon 2.8ghz (24 core 48 thread), titan x card, 64 gb of RAM a promise raid and a few SSDs. (it was a video editing box in a past life)

I’m seeing one thing I think is odd when trying out Infiltrator and other large demos. A first-time load of infiltrator takes about 15 minutes. The odd thing is that none of the parts of the computer ever seem to max out during the build, even when it launches a huge number of shader compiles at once. The overall CPU never goes above 40% and is usually less, it never uses more than half the ram or a few percent of the disk bandwidth.

So it’s not constrained by disk, ram or CPU, so why doesn’t something go up to 100%? I’m wondering if there is something configured wrong on the machine, if something on unreal editor needs to be configured for more threads or if an unreal build/load just isn’t parallel enough to keep 48 threads busy?

I’m using the binary download of UnrealEngine, haven’t made any mods to the settings. The machine is a fairly standard Dell 7910 workstation box. It doesn’t seem that much faster than my Dell 7810 which is 4 core, 8 thread 3.6ghz.

I’m wondering if I should stick to machines with a smaller number of faster cores for unreal work if builds won’t keep a 24 core machine busy?

Any ideas?

2

Loading a project isn’t the same as building a project, and even building will only use what it needs.

3

True, though I’m still wondering if this is a good configuration for general work (loading, building, packaging). Just trying to figure out if I have something configured wrong or if 24 core/48 thread might not be as good as a smaller number of cores that were faster.

Mostly I’m wondering why no part of the machine ever goes anywhere near 100%. Most other benchmarks I do some part of the machine hits 100% and holds back the rest of the parts (ie: disk maxes out so CPU can’t hit 100%) I’m thinking some part of unreal load/build/package doesn’t have enough parallelism to keep 48 threads busy. I’m asking here because I haven’t done enough Unreal stuff to know if having this many cores helps or not.

What do you think is the hardest workload I could do (for the purpose of comparing machines) using something like Infltrator as the test case?