How I sped up 3Delight rendering x8

genius_3587271

Hopefully my experience on choosing a new machine might be useful to others...

I've been playing with Daz Studio for a few weeks now. For my project I'm using 3Delight, but was frustrated with the render times on my old machine (Intel i5-4670K based) which (for my typical scenes) was taking over 5 minutes per frame. I knew the problem was simply CPU performance bound - but I wasn't sure how to quantify the gain I might get from any particular setup. There are lots of comments in forums that speak about performance gains in general terms - but I couldn't find any actual figures. So I read up on various CPU-comparison websites & went for what seemed to be the best performance:cost ratio - even though I had to stretch my budget a bit. As a result, those same frames are now rendering in 42 seconds - approx. 8 times faster.

So, for reference, this is what I got:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
Cooler: Corsair CW-9060043-WW (2 x 120mm fan)
Motherboard: Gigabyte X570 UD
DRAM: 2 x 16G CorsVengLPX DDR4 3200
Case: Aerocool Klaw Mid-Tower TGCase with 3 x 120mm fans

I re-used my old GeForce MSI GTX 970 graphics card - the main benefit for graphics editting is being able to attach a 4K monitor.

I was concerned about cooling, but the attached screen shot (ambient temperature was 20C) shows the cooling is fine (I've rarely seen it go above 70C). Although you might need better cooling in a higher ambient