Can I force a specific program to use 100% CPU?

[Alduins Khajiit]

not sure if this is the right place to post,

I have an animation program that renders in AVI, but it takes over 6 hours to render a 5 minute video. and my CPU usage is only topping out at 40% (45% when set to Real Time priority)! is there any program or way to force that animation program to use 100% CPU to cut the rendering time?

 

[logicearth]

Im going to go on a limb and say you have a dual core processor and the application you are using does not take advantage of multiple processor cores. You will never get 100% out of that application. At most about 50%. At 50% one core is fully utilized you would need to be using both cores to get 100%. But the application must be made to do that you cannot force it.

 

[Britton30]

Is there an option within the software for using Hardware Acceleration? Turn it on if so, it may be more GPU intensive. How much RAM do you have, that can be another factor in long rendering times.

As a note I have a fractal rendering program and it can take an hour to render one, see my specs.

 

[Mellon Head]

@ logicearth

What about assigning core affinity for the program? Give it it's own core. Would that increase the core utilization?

 

[LMiller7]

Setting core affinity restricts the process to only the selected core(s). It in no way reserves cores for any purpose. The system thread scheduler can and will use the selected cores for any process it chooses (subject to other affinity restrictions). In general setting core affinity is counterproductive but it can be useful in some situations. This does not appear to be one.

Setting real time priority on a CPU bound process is risky. If this were a single core CPU or the application was able to use multiple cores efficiently this would pretty much guarantee a system failure. The problem is that there are critical system threads that have lower than real time priority and they would be starved of CPU time.

If the application renders with a single thread then it can only use one core at a time. That is the reality of the way threads work.

 

[whs]

This is unusual because AVI is one of the 'faster' codecs to deal with. Maybe there is not enough RAM.

 

[Layback Bear]

A little more information could help these good folks.
Your System Spec.

These tutorials will be helpful.

By Brink?
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/180324-system-info-see-your-system-specs.html

By Kari?
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/311593-speccy-publish-snapshot-your-system-specs.html