Hardware recommendations

[cgarness]

What is the best way to speed up rendering using Vray for Sketchup?

I am using a P4 3.4Ghz with 2 GB of RAM and an nVidia GeForce 7600 GS graphics card with 256 MB of RAM. Vray uses 99% of my CPU when processing a rendering? which means there is no way to work on anything else, no matter how non-CPU intensive, in the background. A fairly simple 2048x1536 image takes about 7.5 hours.

Would dual or quad cores help? More RAM? Or is a dedicated machine for rendering a better solution?

thanks,
Gunnar

[fluke73]

Hardware recommendations

Hey buddy!

It will always use all the processor power - im using a Intel Core 2 Duo 2,13 Ghz with 2 GB of ram. Even rending an image 640x480 slows down the mouse and everything.

But if you want to use the computer and not in a hurry with the rendering. Then press Ctrl-Alt-Del and then go to the Pocesses tab and sort after mem usage. Right click on Sketchup and set priority to Below normal.

Though i think your time sounds long - i can depend on tons of reasons like if you have alot of emitters and blurry reflections.

[cgarness]

Hardware recommendations

The floor in the scene has a slightly blurred reflectivity to it, there are some translucent surfaces and and there are about 20 light sources in the scene so 7.5 hours doesn't seem as bad as you might think.

Our office has up to this point avoided messing with in-house 3-d rendering because of the time constraints and the steep learning curve of software like Viz . We are looking at buying a number of seats of Vray for Sketchup because we like the integration and the relative simplicity use.

But clearly we will have to rethink how we work. Rendering at night isn't always an option so I am guessing that a dedicated machine just for rendering might be a good idea?

Gunnar

[tjboys_cg]

Hardware recommendations

We've got a computers for rendering and DTP software. It doesn't have monitor and expensive video card and any user in intranet can use it at his seat w/ MS remote desktop software which is bundled w/ XP pro. It works! :P

[cgarness]

Hardware recommendations

That is a great idea. Just spend the money on a box and leave out all the extras and control it remotely. We'll give it a try.

Thanks,

Gunnar

[cgarness]

Hardware recommendations

Does anyone know if will VRay take advantage of multi core processors? Would a quad core or multi processor dual core machine with a couple of gigs of ram make a difference in rendering time?

Gunnar

[joe_b]

Hardware recommendations

Does anyone know if will VRay take advantage of multi core processors? Would a quad core or multi processor dual core machine with a couple of gigs of ram make a difference in rendering time?

Gunnar

The number of buckets you see during a render is a direct correlation to your processing power. A dual core HT processor would yield 4 render buckets - one for each processor. Now keep in mind this is once the render begins - the parsing of the scene on my end is a single-threaded operation, but once the rendering starts V-Ray takes full advantage of any and all processing power of the machine.

[joe_b]

Hardware recommendations

It will always use all the processor power - im using a Intel Core 2 Duo 2,13 Ghz with 2 GB of ram. Even rending an image 640x480 slows down the mouse and everything.

Checking "Low thread priority" in our global options will also tell V-Ray to not eat up all of your machines resources - it will still bog your system down a bit, but it should be less intense than if it was unchecked

[cgarness]

Hardware recommendations

Thanks Joe.

I assume each "bucket" is comprised of the two square brackets that crawl around each quadrant of the scene? So a quad-core processor would render all 4 quadrants at the same time?

Also, will the difference between say 2 GB and 8 GB of RAM make a huge difference on the render speed?

Gunnar

[dalomar_cg]

Hardware recommendations

First of all the more processors or threads you have will lead to a quicker rendering, so a quad core would essentially be twice as fast as a dual core. That being said then you have the problem of memory. Each bucket is going to require a certain amount of memory, so if you have a quad core you will need twice the memory to have the same memory available as a dual core. There are however some limitations with this as far as OS memory issues and motherboard issues. With Windows xp the are limits to the maximum amount of memory that can be addressed. The new 64-bit operating systems that are out there do allow for more memory to be available to be used. As far as motherboards go you've got to make sure that they can support the processors and the amount of memory that you need. Almost all of the new motherboards support dual cores, but there isn't too much out there for quad cores yet. Most motherboards should support at least 2 gb, but it would definitely be advised to put in more if you can. Graphics cards won't actually help with the speed of your rendering, but they will have an effect while your working on you model. So even though they don't speed up rendering (yet) it is eaisier to work with a more capable graphics card.

[joe_b]

Hardware recommendations

I assume each "bucket" is comprised of the two square brackets that crawl around each quadrant of the scene? So a quad-core processor would render all 4 quadrants at the same time?

You got it

Also, will the difference between say 2 GB and 8 GB of RAM make a huge difference on the render speed?

Not on a 32bit system. 32 bit machines have a 2gig limit - 64bit has a much larger amount of addressable memory space. I'm not sure if Sketchup has a 64bit version or not. Memory generally only makes a difference in terms of how big a scene your machine can handle - but it can also provide speed increases because if your machine has too little memory it will have to swap to disk often, which is a very time consuming operation.

[kyle150100]

Re: Hardware recommendations

32bit systems have a limit to 3.4GB RAM 64bit systems can go a lot larger

I'm using a dual Xenon Quad core 2.88ghz with 8GB ram on XP x64 with a Quadro x3600, much improvement over what I used to use which was a P4 dual core 2.66ghz with 3GB ram on XP Pro.
My renders where taking around 18-24 hours but now they take about 2-3 hours, much better!
The Quadro doesn't help during rendering but improves Sketchup 10 fold.

I think what everyone is saying including me is get the fastest quad core CPUs and as much memory you can afford.

[EmilioB]

Re: Hardware recommendations

Im running on an AMD athlon 64 3200+ with 2.5gb of PC3200 DDR RAM, and an nvidia 7600GT and my renders are coming out lovely

tbh, i think some of the rendering time depends entirely on the visopt as well, so you could google about and get a proper nice visopt built for the scene your rending, for example and exteior or an interior visopt

RAM for a newer PC is so ridiculously cheap its incredible, for now if i wanted some PC3200 DDR RAM, (its not that cheap for some reason, even tho its old :/) it would still cost me the same as it did like 3 years ago, no idea why!

its got a nice clock speed also

andddd im running on vista ultimate and my comp will play a lovely bit of trance and progressive with on msn and rendering at full thread priority

i must have a good set up

xx

[edonk]

Re: Hardware recommendations

With the current memory limitations of Sketchup, I advise you to get the best processor you can afford.

[JHuman]

Re: Hardware recommendations

With the current memory limitations of Sketchup, I advise you to get the best processor you can afford.

That can get spendy. I stopped at the 2.5ghz Xeon since the next jump up was about $800.00, and I have to buy two of them.

My Dual Xeon (HT Quad), 12gb, 10,000rpm HD, dual PCI(e) 1gb HD ATI cards runs them pretty quick. Although since I built the machine, I have been running a lot higher resolution renderings than before, so its about the same

Although some processors are able to devote certian cores to certian tasks. I have only successfully done it a couple of times on my machine. For example, I have 16 cores, and I want 14 of them to go to rendering and 2 to be left over for general computing, worked pretty sweet, could still do photoshop, email, web, SU, video editing / rendering, music, etc, it was just getting a little warm in the room, and loud from all the fans! Hope this helps.