CPU upgrade. Is AMD a good solution?
Dave McH
Posts: 49
Hi everyone.
I'm thinking of upgrade of my pc. Usually people here concern about rendering speed but I want to do it because it takes long to prepare a scene.
When you press "render" button it may take up 3 and even 4 minutes to start rendering, but usually about 2. Also some scenes may be overloaded so it takes time to even move an object.
Currently I use i5 7400 4 cores cpu and 16gb ram. The best I can afford at the moment is AMD ryzen7 2700 with 8 cores.
And my question about if AMD is good for our rendering purposes? As I know Radeon GPU useless for rendering with iray. Don't want spend my money and then discover that Daz uses only one single core or anything like that.
And of course if this is good upgrade in general or perhaps I should wait for better prices/parts?
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Comments
Hi! I have an Core i7, (7700K) and thought it would be good with more cores, BUT, daz is only using two cores! If you want speed from the CPU (when not rendering) you should focus on having the highest clock frequence with just two cores. I e an overclocked cpu with watercooling.
In my opinion you don't need a new processor but the scene optimizer addon. Trying to overcome the daz/iray limitations with brute force cpu/gpu will not work.
These problems may be related to the drive Daz or your assets are stored on. If not that is an issue with your CPU. It is a very slow part with very few cores so it may just be over worked.
BTW you would need a new motherboard if you switch to Ryzen. Your best bet for more performance on a budget is to get a i7 7700, which can be gotten pretty cheap on eBay.
This is very weird. i7 6700HQ (laptop) here. When using 3Delight, DAZ uses all 4 cores / 8 threads, with 99.8% CPU time. It must be something wrong with your system or CPU. Also, overclocking is not always recommended - it all depends of your MOBO + CPU + RAM configuration. Sometimes, after OC'ing too much, you might see performance drops rather than gains.
Btw I'm also thinking about Ryzen 7 2700X, so all comments appreciated.
Daz Studio only uses 2 cores unless you are rendering so upgrading the CPU to have more cores would only help if you were also using it for rendering. I went from a 4 core i7 (8 threads) to an 8 core i7 (16 threads) and it made no difference at all.
(I use 2x GTX 1080Ti's for rendering). I also have all my content on a seperate PCIe 4x SSD (The operating system is on a seperate PCIe 4x SSD)
If you want to improve performance a higher clocking CPU would help. (If you going to overclock a CPU you need to go for water cooling but be warned you can shorten the CPU's life if you are not careful with its temperatures)
My i7 CPU allows you to assign processes by name to the fastest cores (I can't remember what Intel call it) but I could never prove it was working. If anybody did manage to make that work I would love to hear from you.
Daz Studio's 2 core limitation is it's biggest problem. You can help by storing the OS and content on SSDs but at the end of the day that's the limitation.
Note that rendering using IRAY (I don't use 3DL) is not limited by available cores, I don't know dForce is also limited to 2 cores.
Sorry if my reply is a bit jumpled I've got a man head cold.
Best Wishes
S.
I would agree about Daz only using a few cores... but Daz seems to have addressed that to some degree with 4.11. I have seen all cores of my Threadripper hit 100% after clicking render, and it does seem to start rendering a lot faster.
Unless you're only going for a 2700 because of cost, go with the 3rd gen Ryzen. AMD really upped the per core operations and speed. 2nd gen Ryzen same cores and clocks the performance crown would probably go to Intel. With 3rd gen, could very well be AMD now, and they are cheaper to boot.
Yes there has been an improvement in 4.11 but we don't know if that's because they sorted some skanky code out. Loading content still takes an age, maybe I need to fire procmon up again to see what it's doing. The earlier version appeared to take multiple passes through the content directories structures when loading each item maybe they sorted that out and that's where the speed improvement came from.
S.
Many processes do not lend themselves to multi-threading. Rendering does, and has usually been found to scale fairly smoothly with core count.
I see there is such a thing for sale. Padone, you buying? I might have to check that out.
I vaguely remember creating characters in Maya a few lifetimes ago. I would toggle a smoothing feature on and off. I'd add vertices, move them, toggle - observe, toggle off, move vertices, toggle on - observe, etc, etc. Nice feature. Not sure anything like that is available in Daz Studio but some brilliant anti-aliasing tech implementation could free up resources and keep poly counts low.
OP I say go for the AMD Ryzen 3000 series then don't think about CPUs for 2-3 years, though who knows what new vulnerability mitigation microcode is going to be needed with either AMD or Intel in the future. You can get 12 real cores for around $500 tonight. There's not much you can currently purchase for $500 that will last as long as that CPU. If $500 for a CPU you'll use almost every day stings too much spend some time shopping on audiogon. When you return to purchase the CPU magically it won't seem expensive.
No I don't use that plugin because I mainly export assets to blender so I don't need it. But occasionally I do the same as the plugin does to fit scenes to the gpu when I want to use iray. Using the plugin is just easier and faster than doing things by hand.
I would but now it seems has no sense. If it doesn't utilize all cores 8, 10, or even 16 not really matter as it uses only two. I render in iray with my gpu and thinking of adding one more.
The highst clock speed I see is 3.5-3.7 Ghz, which not that much bigger than my current 3 Ghz.
I need performance in creating scenes, all rendering PC does when I sleep. All my drives are SSD btw. Maybe adding a bit RAM would help, but not reall sure about it.
"Hi everyone. I'm thinking of upgrade of my pc. Usually people here concern about rendering speed but I want to do it because it takes long to prepare a scene. When you press "render" button it may take up 3 and even 4 minutes to start rendering, but usually about 2"
It shouldn't take that long. The rig I'm typing on has the first gen Ryzen 8 core and with both boxes checked in the Advanced render settings I see 16 cores shoot to 100% and the rendering process begins in a few seconds with a full interior, interior lights, exterior HDRI shining light in through the windows, draw dome, environmental bloom or whatever, dForce hair, and a couple figures with clothing - jewelry etc. In fact even when I don't use the CPU I can't think of a time when it took that long.
Consider puting a distro on a USB stick and checking your RAM. There's only 16 GB of b-die RAM at 3200 on this rig. Rotating a scene that large is a pain and the lag is real even working in wireframe, as is expected, but I don't have any long scene rendering initialization times.