Virtual Reality and Dual CPU's

I'm running dual 2.4 GHz P4 CPU's with 4Gb of RAM and a Nvidia FX 1000 graphics card, and I am maxing out both CPU's running some specialist Virtual Reality software.

Any ideas on Windows 2K Professional tweaks that I could make to better manage the CPU's capabilities?

Thanks,


The AircraftJunkie

get amd, and use linux. thats my recomendations. but as for tweaks, maybe try to give the process a higher priority.

Dual 2.4 P4s? You mean Xeons? What exact software are you using? wilk is correct, usually Linux will give a boost in performace of workstation apps. Win2k Pro is pretty light as is, you can try setting the affinity of processes to make one CPU do all the OS stuff and the other for the software. Try to have as little swap file usage as possible. You don't need a large swap file, but you do need one. What is the FX 1000? Is that a workstation card?

I have two P4 2.4GHz processors, they are not Xeons and do not have hyper threading, if they were I think my problem would be much smaller!

The software that is causing the problem is from Immersion Corporation called "Virtual Hand for V5." It is a bridge between CATIA V5 and several Virtual Reality devices, such as position trackers, data gloves, head mounted displays, etc...

I have observed the Performance of both processors when just running CATIA V5 and the numbers are really low, even when asking the program to contineously render (ie rotate objects, zoom and manipulate). However as soon as the bridge program is activated (Virtual Hand for V5) the processor usage jumps to approx 70% and when manipulating the objects that number can max out both processors and cause a failure. Throughout all of these activities physical memory usage remains constant at approx 600Mb (I have 4 Gb available).

The graphics card is a high end professional workstation one (Nvidia Quadro FX 1000), and I was suprised to see so much CPU usage when rendering just with CATIA. I do have full acceleration in the graphics card enabled.

I have maxed out the size of the paging file to 4039Mb, it was originally 1024 Mb, but this did not seem to make a difference.

The devices that I am using Virtual Hand for V5 to work with are operating on RS232 (Serial) ports, one communication at a Baud rate of 115200 and the other at 9600. I wouldn't have thought that this would cause any kind of problem.

Again any thoughts would be appreciated.

The AircraftJunkie

What motherboard are you using? I've never seen a dual P4 motherboard.

I'll check it out and let you know later.