Hyperthreading and 3ds Max

by Stephen Gabriel, Senior Application Engineer

I recentely upgraded my hardware to a new duo core Intel i7 processor and noticed some unusual behaviour in 3ds Max 2011.  The software would load and render fine, even showing 4 buckets while running mental ray renderings, but it was sluggish to use with lots of visual artifacts in the viewport.  The key was the 4 buckets which let me know that hyperthreading was turned on.  Autodesk does not recommend hyperthreading with the 3ds Max products because of the way the processors split the data between the cores and how this slows down overall access speeds.  I used msconfig to reset my system to only recognize two cores rather than four which disabled the hyperthreading.  One reboot later and my viewports were as snappy as always and those pesky artifacts had disappeared.  The rendering speed didn’t suffer either.

If your computer is suffering from poor viewport performance, visual artifacts and hangs, then you’ll definitely want to check to make sure hyperthreading is deactivated.  It makes a world of difference.