Does a better computer improve renders

chanansiegel

I am  rendering only in 2D.

  Would an improve  computer  effect the  quality of the 2D rendering or would a better computer only

effect the speed of the rendering?

Thank You!

LosingSignal

For the most part, it's going to effect speed.  You can make a high quality render with an older machine, you just have to wait a week for it to finish.  That said, more RAM means you can fit more objects into your renders before seeing some of that horrible slow down.  If you have a mid- to high-end NVIDIA card, you'll be able to render in Iray at decent speed as well (limited by that VRAM of course).  But technically, no, I don't think it improves the quality of the render.  That comes down to technique and patience with the software.

L'Adair

@chanansiegel, Depending on the hardware improvements, they would increase the speed of the render.

I'm guessing you are using default settings at this point. If so, you are rendering with the Iray render engine. There are a number of ways to increase both the speed and quality of Iray renders without investing in more hardware.

1. Iray renders better with more light in the scene  If your image needs to be dark, set up the scene with more light and darken it using Tone Mapping in the Render Settings. Look for Exposure Value, click on the little padlock icon to unlock the setting, and increase the value. I suggest no more than +1 at a time. Do a test render, either by setting the Draw Mode to Nvidia Iray or clicking on the render button.
2. For test renders, set the image size as small as you can and still see enough detail to verify the exposure. If you have to scroll to see the whole image, it's too large for a test render. You change the dimensions in Render Settings -> General.
3. For the final image, set the image size to twice the dimensions you need. Save the finished render and size to 50% in your image editing program.
4. Daz Studio 4.11, still in beta, has a denoiser setting which improves quality early in the render. If you have the beta installed, be sure to try this setting. If you'd prefer to wait for the next release, leave yourself a note about the Denoiser.
5. This next bit is going to sound really odd: Turn the Quality Enabled setting to Off in the Render Settings -> Progressive Rendering.
   • With Quality Enabled, the software uses an algorithm to decide which pixels, (the lighter ones,) get render priority, and also determines when the image is finished. Your eyes are usually a much better judge of when the image is good enough.
6. Now set the Max Time setting to 0, (zero.)
   • This is the only setting that will do this, but setting it to zero effective turns off the timer. The software is no longer checking to see how long the image has been rendering.
7. If you've completed 5 and 6 above, the only parameter that will stop the render automatically is Max Samples.
   • For test renders, you can set this low. After a while, you'll have a good idea how many samples work for you, but I suggest you start with 100.
   • For final renders, you can set this to any value, though the default limit is 15000. If your machine is slow, you can do like I do: set the value high, (I use 15000,) and set the image to render overnight while you sleep.  The next morning, you can hit the Cancel button at any time, whenever you think the image is done.
8. With the above Progressive Rendering settings, the pixels in the image all have the same weight, so you won't have an image that looks fine in the lighter areas but grainy in the darker areas.

The final image quality is the same, whether you render in CPU Only or with the Nvidia GPU. Regardless of your settings an image with 2000 iterations will look the same whether rendered CPU Only or with the video card/GPU. It's just going to take longer in CPU Only, which may lead to stopping the render sooner.

Give these tips a try and see if you like the results.

In the end though, only you can decide which to spend: time or money.