[DayUSeX]

Well i have noticed that foldingat home takes up about 80% of my CPU usage when i render out in max. AHHH, otherwise max doing creation, it is fine and usually hovers around 20%. So why is it when i render Folding@Home decided to take up all my CPU cycles. Is there anyway to simply have folding at home chill. i realise there is a pause option, but when i render overnight that is alot of time wasted not folding, and i know max ususlaly only takes up about 80% of CPU, so i figure why not give that other 20% to something usefull. Thnx

[Quailane]

Is the core priority set to idle? If not I don't know what your problem is. Anyway, if you're doing one of those long rendering projects, shouldn't cpu usage be 100% anyway, even without folding? I mean, that would be a 25% decrease in rendering time.

[DayUSeX]

its not long rendering, that is done on a seperate machine, this is single, or 60 frame rendering just to give an idea of progress overnight, so that is why not the concern.

ill check the priority option in task maanger.

[drshivas]

Yeah, if the core FAH core priority is set to idle, which is default, FAH will back off whenever a more important process is present. I do mpeg4 compression with FAH running, and it takes the same amount of time if FAH was off. Sure, my frame times get murdered, but it yields to more important processes.

Also, if you watch task manager for a while, you will see that how FAH will jump anywhere from 0-100% while another heavy duty process is running. FAH will use any spare cycle, for example, if your rendering is pausing for some I/O operation.

So you should be fine leaving FAH running 100% while rendering overnight.