Dual processor vs. Hyper Threading processor

[Telemachus]

Hey all,

 

I am going to a computer show over the next two days and wanted some insight on how I should upgrade my box.

 

Currently, I have the following specs:

HP xw4100 workstation

Pentium 4 2.8 processor

800 front-side bus speed

1 GB RAM

 

I use Autodesk VIZ. Complicated scenes (like a recent street scene that had 10 houses and street-line trees takes about 9 hours to render.

 

I'm trying to cut that time as significantly as possible. Sometimes, the processor use will exceed 1 GB, thus slowing things down.

 

How does HyperThreading and having dual processors impact large renderings?

 

Or would it be okay to simply increase my RAM to 2 GB?

 

Thanks,

Telemakhos

[kingeldar]

according to what i saw on the web (can't find links will post'em as soon as find'em) max/viz don't seem to be really able to take advantage of all INTEL's new technologies as Hyper THreading so i think considering something like Dual Opteron would be a very good choice to render with viz (or Athlon 64 FX 51 mono proc) considering those 64bit processor are the best 32 bit processors....

 

(i'm running a dual amd2200+ on msi 6501 1.5 gb ram old technology but good, almost same rendering times than a P4 3GHz HT with same HD and equivalent graphic card tested it myself on different scenes)

[Vince Paske]

Try searching the hardware forum, this question has come up before.

 

Here's a link to a great article:

 

http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=487

 

The Xeon's nudge out a small victory over the Opertons in this article.

 

BTW- increasing your RAM won't speed up rendering time, but it may help loading/unloading scenes.

[abicalho]

VIZ 4.2 will get improvement from HyperThreading when processing Radiosity or rendering raytracing.

 

MAX 5 and 6 will get bigger improvements.

 

The best way to actually answer your own question is to enable HT and benchmark your own scenes.

 

Alexander

always running with HT on

[mtutaj]

You will get a really good boost if you use FinalRender with viz/max.. with a dual xeon, you will get 4 buckets to help render.. 2 cpu and 2 HT

[Telemachus]

What is FinalRender? A new product or plug-in for VIZ?

 

I should also mention which video card I have, as that's one of the most important featrues for render speed.

 

It's

XFX nVidia GeForce FX 5200 Video Card / 256MB DDR / AGP 8X / TV Out & DVI

 

GPU/VPU nVidia GeForce FX 5200

 

Video Memory 256MB

 

Memory Type DDR

 

Memory Bandwidth 6.4GB/sec.

 

Interface Type AGP

 

Interface Speed 8X

 

Connector(s) DVI , TV/S-Video , VGA

 

I just got it about a half year ago, so I don't think it's outdated yet.

 

Thanks for any info,

Telemachus

[rivoli]

hi telemachus,

the graphic card doesn't have anything to do with render time or rendering itself. it does not affect your render time in any way, rendering it's a cpu's task. a better graphic card would give better performance for what is concerned with viewport visualization or animation (if you have scenes with lot of polygons and textures).

 

final render is a rendering engine developed as a plugin for max and viz. i don't actually know it since i've never used it, but it has the same capabilities of vray or brazil, that is, GI, photons GI and caustics among the others. for what i've seen the stage 1 version is a very good renderer.

 

for what is concerned with HT you might want to check this article:

http://www.2cpu.com/articles/ht_explored/index.html

hope it can give some information.

[Greg Hess]

As rivoli said, the key component in rendering performance is the cpu. Secondary to maintaining performance is the system ram.

 

More ram doesn't speed up the render, it just maintains optimal speed. If you run out of system ram while rendering, you'll see a MASSIVE drop in performance, as the bandwidth goes from gigs/sec to megs/sec. Adding more ram will "seemingly" increase performance by a great margain, but all its doing is restoring the original performance you had before you ran out of ram.

 

If you really want to speed up render times...either buy a faster machine (Dual 3.06 Xeon's for example), or optimize your current scene.

 

Hyperthreading (if its off on your P4), will speed up your render, so turn it on if you haven't already.

 

Once more...video card has nothing to do with rendering. Only playback (if your doing viewport radiosity flythroughs), and viewport manipulations.