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best CPU for 3D rendering?

wesley

wesley

wesley

Soldato
Joined
29 Jul 2003
Posts
7,683
hi

a mate of mine is getting fed up with his PC taking AGES to rendering the 3D image. his last rendering job took 4 hours! his spec is P4 3.4ghz, 1GB ram, X600 graphic card. here the PIC. I'm not sure if 4 hours is normal

he would like to upgrade his PC soon and asked me which CPU is best for 3D rendering, the software he mostly use is 3D stuido MAX.

his budget is £2K

conroe or better cpu?

thanks

ps, anyone remember a guy here who built a beast rendering machine with 9 x 1300mhz duron? cant find it anywhere? thanks again
 
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Not being a major 3DSM user Im not sure whether it uses multithreading but i think it will.

Im not sure whether your friend is on a budget and if he overclocks ?

If he overclocks then get a E6300/6400 with a gigabyte mobo

If he doesnt overclock much then get an E6700 or if money is no object an X6800


But be known most E6300's are reaching/bettering x6800 speeds with simple overclocks.
 
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Have him get the fastest Conroe he can afford then overclock the snot out of it. He'll thank you later. :)

If the program he's using is multithreaded (I don't know) it might be worth it to step up to dual Woodcrests.
 
Dual core is the way to go, as max's mental ray renderer(As well as most of the other major renderers such as final render, brazil etc etc) will process two buckets at the same time using a seperate core for each. In laymans terms, it means that it will literally be twice as fast. If he can hold out for the quad cores next year, then that would be the way to go. Another option(And IMO the better option) would be to build one or more seperate rigs as a render farm. This way he can carry on working at the same time as the scene is rendering. Old P4's would be ideal for this as the hyperthreading helped a lot on rendering time over other cpus.
 
He might want to have a read of the following article;

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1815797,00.asp

It shows that hooking lots of cheaper cpus together can yield some very impressive results. Tbh, even with Conroe(Although it will be a decent improvement) Don't expect miracles when rendering a scene like that. That much grass and decent lighting is going to stretch most cpus. The best way to speed up the rendering of a scene is to use little cheaty ways of achieving an effect without needing the processing power in the first place.
 
Apple is coming out with an Intel replacement for their quad G5 workstation. They'll announce its final specs this Monday morning. They're calling it the Mac Pro and at the top end it will sport dual Woodcrests. He would be able to run Windows XP if he does so desire. It will be an extremely fast machine for video rendering as it is essentially two Conroes with a faster FSB (1333 MHz) and fully buffered memory.

Add to that the fact that it comes with a dandy full factory warranty and comes in a gorgeous alumin8um case and I think he can't go wrong.

Much of the benefit from self-building comes from the ability to overclock. If he's not interested in overclocking I would point him to a quality pre-built system.
 
Not a bad suggestion BillytheImpaler. I would still seriously consider a seperate render farm though. And I be the Mac Pro is going to cosy a fair whack when its released. Ive just got 2 new G5's at work and they certainly weren't cheap. Look gorgeous though.
 
Firstly,I doubt an Intel MacPro worth having is going to cost less than £2K.

Secondly, I would expect that you could almost build 3 dual core render nodes for £2K. Single core with HT are poor value in this respect. Unless you are considering Conroe then AMD x2 is the only sensible option.

Thirdly, Without being rude, the render shown should really be possible in well under 4 hrs. A lot less. I don't have Max but I have Cinema4D and as a little test I set up a scene not too different to your mates and it take under a minute to render a similar scene. I didn't use GI but it's not far off.

Anyway time for bed.
 
I like to do a bit of 3d rendering and at the mo I have an x2 4400, i also had a spare pc (opty144 @ 2.7ghz) and my dads pc as a small farm. I found the farm to be pretty in-efficient sometimes and have since sold the opty.
It also took up a bit of space which i didnt really have , not to mention all the cables,etc
I`m now going to hold out for a quad core cpu and this should be more than sufficient for me

as for your friends render, I did a very similar type scene a while back and it only took about 10 mins or so. maybe he needs to optimize his scene a little
 
i dont have a clue how to render but that pic looks awesome, bet i could make a pretty cool background, ill go check that out!

sorry i cant be of any help :( do what he says ^^^
 
wush said:
Some quality settings seriously need tweaked if that took 4 hours. :p
Click to expand...

I expect its the grass. Its probably done using some special effect plugin, and they are notoriously slow. If you are doing a lot of rendering a dedicated rendering machine or two is the most cost effective way to do it. Queue up jobs to it as you model away on another machine.
 
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wouldnt have thought a still image like that would take 4hours, ive rendered a clock animation with background, table, lights, shadows etc in under an hour, and that was 20seconds long
 
That image would probably take that long because it's using hair and fur for the grass, which will certainly add time. He's probably got far too many poly's in the sign too. Add global illumination and you're waisting yet more time.

Rendering a 20second animation in under an hour? Sounds like it's not that complicated and not that high a resolution.

Personaly I'll soon be buying a Conroe system and a e6300, then when quad cores are out I'll switch the cpu. Multiple cores are good for rendering but apparently they don't help with the viewscreens yet, which is a shame as thats where slowness gets most frustrating for me.
Plenty of RAM will help if you're using a lot of lights. Graphics cards don't help unless you go for the Quadro type cards.

Max 9 will be out in October, which is 64bit compatible, so a switch to XP 64bit will be helpful.
 
Yeah, ram is what you need for the viewscreens, altough for complicated scenes you should really be using layers anyway. The longst render ive done took 4 days for a 1 minute animation. I so wish I had a seperate render farm then, as I couldn't do any other work.
 
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