Tolerable render times for Archviz?

[Morne]

Hi all

What in your mind is a tolerable time on a single PC for an image for an actual project?
at these specific sizes:
720 - ?
1080 - ?
4K - ?
12K - ?

[AlexP]

Why only a single PC?

[Morne]

Let's just say it's a "unique" situation and leave it at that
If you usually use DR for a single image, just state that next to your times. If you don't mention DR, we will assume you mean a single PC

[AlexP]

We only render animation frames on single PCs, so roughly an hour for 720 is what I would tolerate in most scenarios.

[Moriah]

Animation only here. 720p - 40-50min, 1080p/2k - 1h-2h max, 4k - not enough computer power for that

[glorybound]

For me, I am rendering 4K in 2-3 hours on exteriors. You can do the math and either multiply or divide by 4 to get the other relative times.

[Neilg]

for images we render everything at 5-6k. anywhere from 6-12 hours is within the norm. (always 20 strips, aiming to average 30min a strip)
Animation we try and keep a 1080p frame around an hour.

[3LP]

Highly depends on the pc cpu. We have 2600k render node but also dual xeons 2680v2...
Stan

[crazy homeless guy]

Agree that this conversation is pointless without referencing how many cores a machine has. It also highly depends on the scene but in general here is what I consider reasonable:

6k on 32 core machine 4-7 hours.
1080p on 32 core machine 30-50 minutes.

[VelvetElvis]

It depends on the intent of the render as well. If it is more for a design level rendering then you want speed over everything else because by the time you hit render, you'll already have to change something. If it for marketing level renderings, you have to balance out speed v. quality, but quality should generally be the driving factor.

It also depends on if this single machine is also my working machine. Can I afford the downtime for rendering or do I have to limit the render time maximum to the time I'm sleeping.

At home on my single 6700k, I would say 4k should take no more than 4-6 hours. Animation would probably never go higher than 720 as it's a single machine doing the work, so I would say 20-30 min max per frame. Though I would push the client to do more of the Ken Burns moving still look to ease of the sheer number of frames one machine has to process.

At work, with a 22 computer DR (mix of various 4 core hyperthreaded i7's) system set up, 4k should take around 1-2 hours at most. We rarely do animations, though if we do it's on a fast turn around so we tend to use cloud rendering solutions to get everything back within the working day. So due to that, we push our render times down as to not have to purchase butt loads of render credits.

[tzaar]

It's not completely pointless to talk about this without knowing how many cores etc. I think it's interesting to know how long people will wait for a render, from a workflow perspective (or patience!). No matter what kind of render power they've got access to.

For stills, with only one computer
720: 10 min. If I render this size it's only as a test or preview. So that's how long I can patiently wait, or can tolerate for fear of things becoming unmanageble when rendering in larger resolutions.
1080: 15-20 min. Same situationa and reasons as above.
4K: 1-2 h. This is closer to what we usually render for our arch viz stills. We tend to end up between 4 and 5K.
12K: For us, this would be a "special order". And we would just say that it'll take "over night" or how ever long it takes. Requests in this size are rare. Maybe two-three a year, and two of them are because someone in the chain of communication got hung up on 300 dpi even for super large prints that will never be viewed up-close.
But maybe we will render more in that span in the feature if we start doing more (stereo)spherical stuff.

Usually though, we render with DR on a small farm. And if I don't have a render under 30 min I get worried.

We don't do that much animation. But the times we have, I really want to stay under 10 min for 720p if it's possible.
Those of you who will tolerate an hour per frame in 1080. Despite what kind of render power you have, what kind of work do you do? And how many frames does a normal job consist of?
Last time I did an ambitious "fly-through" of a city plan (not in one long disgusting spline path if that's what you picture now , more like 10-12 cuts/scenes) it was 3000 frames at 25 fps. And then due to time constraints, I kept renderings down to 4-6 min at 720p. So pretty noisy. But we don't have the kind of clients that complain about that

[Oleg_Budeanu]

At home on my Lenovo Y50-70 4k images are around 8-12h for finals - mostly static.
At work 5k images with DR (about 8-9 slaves) are usually around 1-2 hrs , 1080p animation 1-2 hrs also but on one machine.
You can check images by checking Pikcells on Facebook
Animations - usually interiors so we need to maintain quality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYGseW6mEmA this is our latest work , but it is 480p on youtube for some reason Rendertime was about 1h 30mins per frame , don't really remember amount of frames. Just multiply length of animation by 24. Everything was rendered in one pass.

[Mokiki]

To add to those random statistics:
3x24core machines rendered an interior @20k resolution in around 46 hours. :P

[digitalx3d]

Wow... some really long render times on here!! I'm most in line with tzaar. I believe there is really a point of diminishing returns with render quality. So I try to keep render times to a minimum. For 4K exteriors, I RARELY exceed 1 hour. Most are around 30 minutes. Some render in as little as 15 minutes. This is using 1 2600K i7 and 2 dual xeon slaves with DR (these machines are going on 5 years old, yikes!!). So a total of 40 buckets. I supposes you could roughly multiply by 3 if you want to know how long 1 machine would take. Interiors take longer. 4K will usually be around 1 to 1.5 hours. I very rarely have to render anything over 6K wide. Forget about 12K. But I guess it depends on your clientelle and specific industry. The bulk of my work is arch-viz- commercial interior/exterior, industrial exterior, and multi-family residential exterior. Getting back to my point of diminishing returns, at least for my clients... past a certain level of quality, they can't tell any difference. So it makes no sense to crank the IR samples to 100, or the AA past 2min, 5max, and try to achieve perfectly noise free images. They are completely unaware of that level of quality, and if they were, wouldn't believe it to add any real value. I do believe the quality of my work is great, but I try to cap it off where it no longer pays.

[glorybound]

For me, displacement is the time killer. I just rendered a 4K exterior in less than 1 hour, but it doesn't have any displacement. A project with displacement usually takes 3-4 times longer.