How Much Would This PC Speed Up My Render Times

kocammy

Hello,

My current machine is a dog - I realize this.  Its an Intel Celeron N2840 2.16GHz Processor with 4GB Ram.

A fairly simple render - 2 characters - Uber Environemnt - a Single Spotlight - Background prop set (like a bedroom for instance) takes over 2 hours to render using 3Delight.

I'm looking at an Intel i5 Processor with 8GB RAM and a 4GB INVIDIA GTX 1050 card w/ a TB hard drive for $699 - (I need a laptop)

I realize I could spend a lot more, but this is a hobby for me and I don't want to spend a $1,000 plus.  Would this configuration give me a good performance boost?  I'd also like to switch to iRAY.  Again, I kow there are better machines out there but this seems like a good value for the price and am really interested in how much faster it would be than what I have now.

Any comments or insight would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Cammy

ebergerly

That's a tough one...

3Delight uses CPU I believe, and Iray uses GPU, but Iray is a lot more compute intensive because it's more realistic. So it's anyone's guess if a faster and less realistic renderer on a slow CPU is better or worse than a faster GPU and more intensive and realistic renderer.  

One good thing about the new PC is it has a lot more RAM. I have a laptop with Win7 and only 4GB RAM and it's absolutely painful. So I'm guessing the 8GB will make everything much nicer. Personally, I think for most stuff the CPU won't have much effect, though 2GHz is kinda slow. And clearly it's affecting your 3Delight renders in a bad way. 

My hunch is that the 1050 and Iray will be a nicer experience overall. But you'll need to watch your GPU VRAM usage and make sure you don't run out and dump to CPU rendering. Or you'll be back to 3 week renders. 

Sentinel-3

I bought a Dell last year for about $800 from Office Deopt with a core i7 6th generation and 16 GB of RAM. I fully intended to buy more RAM, but found I didn't need it.. I have an SDD on it now, too, but that only speeds ou save and load time. Not rendering... Kills my previous computer. Smokes it. Renders that used to take me about 3 or more minutes per frame to get what I wanted. In this deleted scene from my movie, at the point where she says "You  make them seem so violent," the jepegs in the image series show to be saved a little under one minute apart. It was painless to render it. In fact, I had rendered hundreds of frames, not knowing she was smiling inappropriately, and just re-rendered while watching TV.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1V9BjgkgHlgOpvFjTXqB2EkNcYQJexKOE