3dsmax 2008 rendering (gfx/cpu)

Psypher5

Psypher5

Psypher5

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Hi there, having a chat with a few mates and wondered:

does the gfx card help render times? I have a quad@3ghz and my animation is taking circa 60 hours (1000 frames) (23 hours in and ~4/5's done, but the render per frame was from 6mins to 11, itll hit the heavy rendering at the end pushing 20mins a frame or more.)

that using daylight with mr sun, mental ray rendering, final gather @ 400 and samples up a bit.

This is fine as it looks all shiney etc, but I was wondering any way to increase rendering performance by letting/forcing the gfx card? I've seen numbers of some tests where the 8 series nvidias beat quadro FX1500's etc. How are they testing this etc?


spec in sig, also using 64bit ver of 3dsmax 2008.
 
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I had a mahoosive 3d labs gmx graphics card in an old dual PII Xeon machine that I'm sure used to be involved with the whole rendering workload.

I'm not entirely sure they still make cards, I guess the market has changed since then. Someone like Matrox might be a good place to ask and see if they've got anything specifically for this sort of thing.
 
I don't think it's possible at the moment, I think it's just the way the architecture of a GPU is different to that of a CPU, which is why there seems to be a lot of research done into the GPPU (general purpose processing units?). Renders times often go up towards the end of an animation for me as well, sometimes it's because i'll have motion blur on and a a lot of movement which causes render times to sky rocket, or if I zoom in. Usually the further away the camera is from the action the quicker the render times are. Could also be that you've run out of ram and max is using your harddrive instead which is massively slower. My 8800gtx doesn't like max, i'm using 3dsmax 9 x64bit SP2 and there's no dx10 driver option. On a recent project I had a scene with about 200k polys and around 2-3k objects and the viewport was hovering around 2FPS, which is messed up to say the least, especially with a q6600 @ 2.4 and 8GB ram.

Also, did OCing the q6600 make a lot of difference to render times? 60 hours for 1k frames with FG at 400 samples sounds pretty fast.
 
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Usually when you start using mental ray you take a hit on render times, seems a good excuse to start building a render farm :)

If you have some spare cash build a cheap dualcore/quadcore rig with integrated graphics and use it as a slave to help render times.
 
gpu's - no help at present except in viewport, quadro's (or ati firegl) are best here.
however with mental ray being bought by nvidia I would say cuda will be integrated eventually and it will be made to work with maxtreme drivers (quadro only)

There are some specific raytrace cards out there for use with 3ds max etc but they are very expensive for what they are.

So we're stuck with long renders for a while longer I'm afraid.
 
not sure on the render times to be fair, ill do a comparison when its all done to check. Its getting a bit hot though, reaching 70 degrees now (it has been on full load with 60% fans for 2 days so..) but the chip can do 3.6/3.8 so i might go for that aswell in a comparison test. Pretty sure it has helped a bit though, things just seem that bit faster :)


dx10 mode messes up BIG time for me in viewports, my scene is around 500k polys but with fewer objects (far fewer, like 50 or so lol) and likes to die when i get to close. Unfortunatly the animation is a walktrhoguh so has to be close up -.-

Times pushing up aswell, done 33hrs and im 47% through the ani, 45hrs estimated remaining. THis is on 640x480 res too :x

I might add motion blur for a still image render with more FG points and samples, but the passes of MB (10 or 12) x1k would be too much for me ;)

Ohwell, more OC and sooner renderings it is then :D
 
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