3D rendering benchmarks?

[flippant]

Hi cmndr_andi,



More hardware to check out, my poor old head.

Thanks for the info/links.

Regards,

- Stem

I had a similar dilemma about 6 months ago; go with sandybridge stick with 1366 or wait for 2011? fortunately it's not a hobby so I had a fair bit of leeway on price, I ended up with an SR2 build, 1366 was end of line, but 2011 wasn't out, so I took the plunge. I have to say that nice as the 2011 machines are, they still don't out-render the dual hex core xeons yet and six months down the line the SR2 has paid for itself.

I could have waited for snadybridge-e, ivybridge-e, haswell or whatever comes next, but I needed to do some work then, and there is always something new on the horizon.

There is a lot to be said for doubling up your workstations, even if you only use one to render you can still be productive. I'd recommend a decent KVM if you plan to do that, I have a dual monitor one that works, it's not flawless by any means, but it saves on monitor space.

Using multiple machines to render it's a joy to behold, you can't beat a spot of 40 threaded rendering, well until it crashes anyway

 

[Zuban]

Hi embalse,



It is something I have thought about, and although it is not something I have completely dismissed, I really have to think if it would be the best direction for me.
If I look at the cost of that CPU+motherboard = £680, that, with the other parts I will need, would take to around the £1100 mark, which is over what I was initially thinking (I was wanting to keep it under 1K). That would give me approx 40% more rendering power. (than current i7)
Now if I was going to spend over the budget, then I could also start thinking, rather than spend £680 on that CPU+motherboard, I could get 2 x i7 + 2 x gigabyte boards which would actually cost a little less, then I could purchase the other parts for the new build and strip down my old system for its parts. I would only have to purchase an extra DVD player / memory. That would give me a slave i7 rendering node, which would increase the rendering speed beyond that of the 3930K (or so I would think) for similar outlay.

I am still thinking about what to do. Nothing is set in stone in my mind, well, apart from the minimal CPU I want, which is the i7.

Regards,

- Stem

i thought about that before getting my current 3930k, but i decided against it and went for the 3930k because as i'm going i tend to do a lot of test renders, and if i'm waiting to long for test renders i find i can get distracted and lose my rythme, i felt going for the most powerfull cpu i could get would help me more and its really great being able to get test renders off in a fraction of the time i used to. I've ended up with renderslaves as a byproduct of various upgrades over time and by just buying the odd cheap gfx card or psu to finish off a spare parts special. It depends how you work though, i'm still using lightwave 9.6 so dont have the nice viewport renders that newer 3d apps have.

 

[Chaos]

There was a recent article on benchmarks for Blenders Cycles GPU renderer if you were to use that in the future -

http://oenvoyage.wordpress.com/2012...are-using-the-benchmark-spreadsheet-analysis/

 

[Steve.m]

Hello Chaos,

I had seen some results for Blender cycles, but had not seen that page you linked to, showing all the result together. Many thanks for the link.

Even if I was to follow the path of going for a GPU rendering setup, I will still need a full system upgrade to get a motherboard capable of taking full advantage of a top end GPU.
I will have to re-check to see if I can add (or more to the point, want to add) more funds for the new build.

I also found the results interesting due to the difference in render times between Windoze and Linux. I have been looking at linux, but it tends to make my ears bleed when trying to add graphics drivers not currently in the repository (or more precise, it makes me bang my head against a wall, which then makes my ears bleed)

Regards,

- Stem