Fast Render Machine

[peepo]

Hi

Im using VRay and MODO, and very very happy with the results. I'd like to speed up render, as this seems to be the bottleneck. I'm currently based on 2 iMacs - I use the older one for rendering, while I carry on working on the other.

What is the best solution for another machine dedicated to rendering with VRay? Do I wait for the new Mac PRO, or upgrade my iMac with a fast GPU card? Or something else?

Your comments/advice would be very much appreciated!
Thanks

[BVA]

personally I feel macs have a great OS but hardware in the CGI environment is not that great. If you really want to work on mac do so but it will be a lot better to get a PC to render with. DR works perfect between mac and windows.

[pixelplume]

how much do you wan to spend? as a generalization you can get a much faster and likely cheaper windows box.

[Robert]

I got my an old dual 6core xeon MacPro.. it beats every i7.
PCs are much cheaper but they are much harder to maintain, especially if you use it remote only.
I have some windows boxes with 6core cpu, but I seldom use them. Windows can even shut down to install an update while you render.. nuts. You have to adjust the OS a lot till it works the way it should.. and speed wise its not faster.
Anyway I wouldn't wait for Apple, Apple is so much behind its not sure if they ever come up with a good deal at all. So Windows is sadly the future. Win10 may look at first like big improvement, but thats just the surface, behind it its the old system never changed since Win7.
I only wish we could render with a linux machine, which would lot easier in so many aspects.. but thats another problem.
However maybe wait a bit till AMD comes up with debugged Razyen CPUs.. maybe 12 - 16 cores will be very interesting. Also Nvidia has some interesting stuff to come up...

[pixelplume]

yes windows can be a hassle but that is all i have used for years.........depending on your budget....you can buy used Dell workstations up to dual 18 core! at place like this https://www.theitmart.com/

I have been buying used Dell Workstations for years and they have been pretty much bullet proof. In the past 10 years I have had one hard drive failure and one power supply fail out of 7 or so machines...

[Robert]

Just read AMD is coming up with 48 core 96 threats opteron CPU.
That will make CPU rendering strong again.

[Robert]

Thats a good idea. I sold a 6 year old MacPro for 40% of its original price. Guess thats what a Dell workstation costs after 2
years if you are lucky to find one to buy.

[GidPDX]

The AMD Naples platform (their server chip) will be an interesting one considering it will have the ability to have the CPU and GPUs working together and in a price point we'll probably be able to afford and use unlike the current Nvidia offering. Infinity fabric should also make for some really high performing multithreaded tasks (like rendering):

https://youtu.be/PN93G6Rg2ek


The Ryzen CPUs actually aren't needing to be debugged either- for the work we do they've been fine out of the box. The issues they had were with multi-threading and games- those have been mostly resolved. The 1800x currently represents the greatest CPU value for rendering IMHO. Just look at the Vray bench results and then price out a CPU+MB.

Most the Mac people I know who do a lot of 3D/compositing are using hackintoshes. They are sick of waiting for Apple to figure out what to do and not being able to purchase updated hardware (aka GPUs), while still loving the OS and would rather put up with any obstacles a hackintosh presents then wait around for Apple. If you want to stay on the MAC platform, I suggest asking around and find a good hackintosh builder to make you a custom system.

If you can wait 6 months I would though- the AMD vs. Intel battle brewing is going to mean good news for us!

[Muhammed_Hamed]

upgrade my iMac with a fast GPU card?

The GPU is built into the board,so it is impossible to upgrade. The only thing you can upgrade is the RAM for IMacs,even the storage upgrade is extremely hard..

Do I wait for the new Mac PRO

Nope. Personally Apple hardware is not a choice anymore. Many people left the platform for ever due to Apple's ignorance. Their Mac Pro hasn't got any updates for 4 years so far and for at least one and half more years to come. This trash can still runs the first Generation Intel Xeons CPUs and out-dated AMD cards (4 generations behind what is currently available CPUs and GPUs).

What is the best solution for another machine dedicated to rendering with VRay?

Budget?Do you plan on using it as render slave only on network?CPU rendering only?
My main machine has an i7 5930k @4.5 GHZ,64 GB of DDR4 RAM,1 GTX 1080 and 3 GTX 980 Tis Hybrid cards. My render machine has an i7 6950X @4.4 GHZ,128 GB of DDR4 RAM and a GTX 980 Ti Hybird card.

it beats every i7.

It doesn't..My i7 6950X has almost twice the performance of those 2 Xeons for single or multi-threaded perfromance...

[andycf]

The GPU is built into the board,so it is impossible to upgrade. The only thing you can upgrade is the RAM for IMacs,even the storage upgrade is extremely hard..



Nope. Personally Apple hardware is not a choice anymore. Many people left the platform for ever due to Apple's ignorance. Their Mac Pro hasn't got any updates for 4 years so far and for at least one and half more years to come. This trash can still runs the first Generation Intel Xeons CPUs and out-dated AMD cards (4 generations behind what is currently available CPUs and GPUs).



Budget?Do you plan on using it as render slave only on network?CPU rendering only?
My main machine has an i7 5930k @4.5 GHZ,64 GB of DDR4 RAM,1 GTX 1080 and 3 GTX 980 Tis Hybrid cards. My render machine has an i7 6950X @4.4 GHZ,128 GB of DDR4 RAM and a GTX 980 Ti Hybird card.


It doesn't..My i7 6950X has almost twice the performance of those 2 Xeons for single or multi-threaded perfromance...

Hi Muhammed,

How do you find your main machine vs your render machine? I'd imagine you main machine actually renders faster (with RT GPU!) than your dedicated render machine!

Reason I ask is that I think I'll be moving from Mac OS soon (as much as it pains me!) to Windows-based hardware for Modo and V-Ray, with the idea to use RT GPU so curious as to how that setup performs. Looking at a Ryzen-based workstation with extra GPUs for a nice Modo vs rendering performance.

The Mac platform is just too far behind and too slow now and is getting in the way of production. (I've got a 2009 Mac Pro 2 x 3.46 Xeon (12 cores total) 64gb RAM and a 980 Ti SC 6gb so hardly a slouch but just isn't cutting it!)

Cheers,

Andy

[Muhammed_Hamed]

andycf True! RT GPU is faster on my main machine as I don't use distributed rendering with RT GPU..I use it sometimes with bucket production renderer,but RT GPU is fast enough,so I don't use DR for it. Also,I plane on doing a hackintosh on my render machine when I have time. So I didn't move the rest of the cards there yet. But most likely I will not have time for this in the near future.
And yeah Apple intentionally did this to huge part of their pro users :I their Mac drivers came after one year of Pascal release :I
The move to windows is worth it now and windows 10 is OK..Although I love Mac OS more. Ryzen performance is really good so far. It is a good value for what you pay,but you will be locked to 3 GPUs only..2 running on PCI gen. 3 and one running on PCI gen. 2 ...If you don't mind this limitation go for Ryzen. I recommend the 1700,because you can easily OC it and get almost same performance of 1800X or 1700X..And get RAM that is meant for Ryzen platform and OC it to the max you can get. This RAM OC for Ryzen is essential for pure CPU performance unlike Intel. an OC of 2933 is the least you can get with normal Ryzen RAM.

[peepo]

Thanks for the great replies. For me personally, I've been a MacOS user for such a long time, and love the simplicity, but am also aware of getting something different as a render box.

Im thinking that maybe get a second hand MacPro, until the new ones are out, then see what they are like?

I basically want the performance without the maintenance if possible. Im very happy with my Mac set up for modelling, RT rendering and photoshop.

[andycf]

Muhammed_Hamed Yeah, I think GPU is definitely the future so my next machine is going to be built around that - it's just a shame that can't be a Mac but platform can't get in the way of work unfortunately! I've been running Windows 10 on a Bootcamp'd Mac Pro and it isn't all that bad. Some things I need to get use to but nothing I can't adapt too. Much better than I would of imagined to be honest.

Machine-wise I may wait until the end of the month to see if we hear more about Ryzen Threadripper, which depending on price, maybe a better option and more of a Intel Socket 2011-v3/X99 rival (more cores, more PCIe lanes, quad channel RAM support, etc) which should make it a better platform for what we do. Hopefully as well the PCIe layout will be different than Ryzen so we can fit 3 dual-width graphics cards inside standard (7 expansion slot) case, just as you can with the 2011-v3/X99 boards that you're using, which might be another option but it is a fair bit pricier... (Probably would be easier to Hackintosh as well vs AMD.)

peepo I'm the same. I come from a graphic design background, so a very big and avid Mac user. I've ended up slipping in 3D/CGI a part of my job, which has now took over from the design stuff so unfortunately I feel like I can't stay on Mac anymore. As I've said above we run 2009 Mac Pro's with 2 x 3.46ghz 6 core processors (so 12 cores/24 threads total) in the office and in mine I've got 64gb RAM and a Nvidia 980 Ti SC 6gb graphics card and I have to say I feel like it's showing its age, even if the specs would suggest otherwise. Modo doesn't run particularly well, lots of crashes, more so than when I Bootcamp'd a lesser spec'd Mac Pro for a while. We've tried super fast M.2 PCIe SSDs and everything. I don't even think it's just a hardware thing either, not sure if Mac OS is cut out these days for more advanced 3D stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if there's stuff missing from it, or that's outdated compared to Windows for the type of work we do. (Open GL version/support???)

As far as these machines go they're as fast as we can make them and even if we committed to maxing out one of the newer trash can Mac Pro's it would only be very slightly, marginally faster due to them only having one CPU vs the 2 in ours, not to mention the cost of that! (And no V-Ray GPU rendering as AMD graphics cards only which I don't believe are supported?) Just not worth it when looking at PC alternatives. Plus, you can only have one decent GPU in the 4,1/5,1 Mac Pro's and it's recommended to have at least 2 for V-Ray GPU (one for monitors that isn't used for rendering and at least one other for your CUDA/V-Ray RT GPU stuff). Shame! Apple just seem to have forgotten about Pro users.

[peepo]

andycf Many thanks Andy - that's really helpful. Im not too up on specs or Windows really (having exclusively used Mac's for the last 10 years).

The goal though, is to have a fast and low maintenance render machine, so I could definitively live with a Windows solution, if that's the best way to go to achieve this.

Is this how it works:

1) model in MODO, texture with Vray
2) send to Vray standalone to render on the fast (possibly Windows) render machine

Im not really building my own machine that I have to install drivers etc and have all those tech admin type of jobs to do - I'd personally prefer to buy something pre build in a box (Windows if that's the better option) that I could then just run VRay standalone on.

I tried googling and contacted Boxx-Tech in the UK but they have not got back to me.

Are there any other manufacturers of custom fast render boxes that people would recommend?

[andycf]

peepo No problem at all!

I'd really recommend Scan. I've used them quite a bit over the years for buying parts and they are based locally to me so I've been in their store too. As well as selling PC components they also produce 'ready to go' machines under their 3XS brand. They build, test, configure and even stress test the machines for you, sell them with a warranty and support, etc so sounds like exactly what you want. They have a range of pre-configured systems to choose from that can be customised to your liking or if not, you can talk to them and they should be able to create any spec you like. https://www.scan.co.uk

Overclockers are another who have a similar set up. Online component store and now do custom PCs. I've not dealt with them personally but they've got a good reputation online. https://www.overclockers.co.uk/pc-systems