Rendering Time

[antonio_frias]

What actually speeds up the rendering time in max? Is it the graphics card or the RAM or a combination of both?

[Arnold Sher]

graphics card has nothing to do with rendering time and all to do with how much detail you see on your screen while you are working on your file in max. The better the card the more you see.. Ram does speed up a rendering up to a point but it does not mean that the more you have the faster it renders. It does bottom out once it gets up to a certain point at which point no matter how much extra you put in it just won't help. What helps the speed is the combination of your motherboard speed and the ram. Kind of a simple way of explaining, hope it helps

[antonio_frias]

Thanks, that helps!

[Christopher Nichols]

Actually ram (meaning adding more ram) will only speed up your rendering time if you don't hit your ram limit. If your scene only uses 500 mges of ram, going from 1gig to 2 gig will make no difference. Hardware wise, the number one thing that can speed up your rendering time is the processor. But this is not the best way to speed up rendering time. The best way is to be smart about how you render. Fore example, a few optimizations in the settings of a raytracer can double or triple or more the speed of your rendering. It is what I obsess about, being optimal in the software, getting the best quality in the most optimal time. For this reason, I enjoy rendering on hardware that is not top of the line, as it forces me to work smarter.

[Greg Hess]

Think of ram as gasoline in a sports car. Adding more gas doesn't make the car faster...it just increases the amount of energy it takes to exhaust the gas.

 

And when you finally run out of gas, you have to get out and walk. (2 gb/sec bandwidth to about 60 megs/sec)

[antonio_frias]

Thanks Christopher I like your reasoning!

[kuneho]

when rendering, it's mostly clock speed of the CPU that greatly affects rendering time. Also, these days it's not only those, that matters. There's front side BUS, motherboard chipset, hard drive type, ram type, and all those technical stuff we cg artists really don't want to deal with, hehe. I'm sure computer geeks would be attacking me now, but speaking casually, CPU speed, CPU type is what I see that affects my rendering time. I've used 3 PC's in the past 5 years. The last 2 PC's used dual processors and they just keep getting faster in rendering. The first PC had 64MB video, second one had 256MB video, third one had 128MB video. The third one was actually the fastest machine in the office right now. It had dual intel Xeon processors compared to the older machine that had dual intel Pentium processors.

 

Sometimes I advice the company not to spend so much on a fancy 3D card, and rather spend the money on a second processor and more RAM.

 

Also, when time is very important, I shut off anti-virus software that's running in the background. I also shut off any email software, and other stuff that affects CPU processing.

[aligrafix]

1 month ago, i had my following system:

cpu : 3 GHz (HT, 1MB L2 cache)

Ram : 1 GB

MBoard Intel 915 GAV

built in VGA

i have a scene. i rendered it with above system, i rendered first time in 25 mins, after optimizing the vray, it took 5 min 25 seconds.

After this,i only upgraded my processor and now it is(3 GHz, 2MB L2 cache HT

the same frame took 2 min 15 seconds.

isnt it enough for ya? just upgrading cpu gave me the good result. well i have now installed my video card. rendered that scene again. before using the video card, my ram consumption was going over more than my installed memory. now i have installed my pci e video card. ram consumption at the same scene is 780 MB. i dont understand whats the reason but the video card has made my viewport navigation easy and fast. now i dont need to turn to bounding box, hide some objects in my scene to work better. but i didnt understand that how my ram consumption go down during rendering after installing the video card while every thing is same.

Can u tell me reason behind this "Christopher"?

[IHAB]

built in VGA takes its ram from your 1GB,as it is a built in chipset.There is no relation between upgrading your processor & your VGA.

[aligrafix]

thanks for the info IHAM. now i noticed the reason, sorry but i dont know much much about the hardware.

[radioVOY]

By personal experience I can tell you that CPU and RAM its all that matters.

 

I was working in a dual xeon 3.6 1mb l2cache, with 4gig of DDr2 400 and on one escene that I made for testing purposes I was getting 1.48 sec, the same scene on a dual xeon 3.06 512kb l2 cache 2gig DDR 333 I was getting 2.13sec.

 

cool.

 

but just couple of months ago I just finish to build an amd pc, the first time that I was able to try amd, was an dual opteron 254 2.8ghz 1mb l2 cache 4 gig DDR 333 and with this machine i got 1.12 sec.

 

36 sec of diference what that hell!!!

 

After some research i found out that there is a small cache that nobody cares but its a lot important.

 

Opteron is a 128kb (64/64) L1 cache while Xeon DP is a 12/8kb L1 cache.

It sucks!!

 

This are the full specs:

 

Xeon DP 3.6ghz 800fsb 12/8kb L1 cache 1mb L2 cache 64bit

 

Opteron 254 2.8ghz 1000fsb 128kb (64/64) L1 cache 1mb L2 cache 64bit

 

So making another car comparison:

 

xeon is a ferrari enzo and opteron is a mustang gt, if you need to travel with 4 friends from LA to Las Vegas, the ferrari will get there in 3 hours and the mustang in 5, but the mustang can carry 4 guys at once and the ferrari has to make two travels to get all the people =9 hours.

 

Fast as hell but small capacity thats the main diference in the actual xeon and opteron cpus, and in the rendering theme you need a lot of data to be processed.

 

God help us when amd reach intel's clock speeds with higher caches!!.

[aligrafix]

Its really +ve. Now i got knowledge from you regarding difference between intel and amd. well i also pray that amd reach intel clock speed and we get much benefit. actually i am living in pakistan and here, climate is hot. 3 to 5 years back, amd had very bad market due to its heat and noise problems. thats why asia region, started swtiching to intel. but now amd is coming back with its speed as well as noise reduction and cool and qiete technology. my next worksation will be AMD sure. when i came here, i have heard 80% people have AMD systems while only 20% or less have intel systems including me lol. well its good to hear from you for benchmark with intel and amd based systems. I am with you in prayer that AMD should come and compete intel market coz they are really trying to grasp the market with low speed. streight away means, showing good in front end, but not on back end while all of work has to be taken care of by back end

thanks for info