What kind of pc do you use to render photos? (Iray)

Countryboyasa

I am currently using a alienware alpha computer and here are my specs: Windows 10, Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4130T CPU @ 2.90GHz, Installed Ram: 8.00 GB, 64-bit Operating System, x64-based Processor. I try to render photos at 3x4, 1080x1440 dimensions and it takes honestly anywhere from 12-14 hours to render a photo at the size. Unfortunately I can't upgrade my Processor on my pc because it is soldered in place. Any suggestions on what I should do to minimize render times? Or should I just get a new computer all together and if so any suggestions would be great. Thanks. Photo attached is my pc specs.

barbult

For fast Iray rendering you need a fairly recent Nvidia graphics card and much more system RAM than the 8 GB you have. You probably need a new computer. There are several existing forum threads on computer advice. 

Richard Haseltine

What are your scenes like? Enclosed spaces can be hard to light, and so take a long time to render. High contrast images, with areas in deep shadow, can also be very slow as what light there is has to bounce along just the right path to reach the nooks and crannies. There are ways to modify the lighting and the tone-mapping settings to address some of those issues.

Countryboyasa

Thank you for the information barbult,Richard I usually do enclosed spaces such as hotel scenes and indoor scenes.

Countryboyasa

Are these good system specifications to run daz3d smoothly? (Attachment has the specifications) What specifications do you all seem to have success with?

Richard Haseltine

Merged the threads since the one on the new system is a continuation of the original.

16GB os system PAM may be a bit limiting with an 8GB card, as there is a lot of pre-processing in system memory before the data is passed over to the GPU for rendering - if the budget would stretch to 32GB you might do better. 1TB isn't an enormous disc, once you start amassing scenes, but I assume you have an idea of that from your current system - and external drives are easy enough to add. The CPU, on the other hand, may be overkill - especially if you are able to do more renders in the GPU.

One obvious question is does it have to be a laptop? You will generally get more for less with a desktop system, and (should supply ever settle down) desktops are generally easier to upgrade.

By the way, you can take screen shots within Windows using the Snip and Sketch tool, rather than taking a photo of the screen.

Richard Haseltine

countryboyasa said:

Thank you for the information barbult,Richard I usually do enclosed spaces such as hotel scenes and indoor scenes.

I assume you light with local lights in the room? Using an outside light (an HDRI or distant light) is very inefficient. If you find that shadowed areas take a long time to covnerge (lose the speckly noise) then it may be worth adding one or more ghost lights (planes with the emissive shader preset applied and a very low, but non-zero, Cutout Opacity setting in the Surfaces pane) to fill in, then turn down the exposure and perhaps gamma in the Tonemapper Settings node to compensate for the extra light in the render.

Countryboyasa

No it doesn't have to be a laptop, I am just looking for a well balanced computer that will render better than what I have now.. the computer I use now takes a good 12-14 hours to render a 3x4 1080x1440 photo.

alan bard newcomer

basically ... a good video card ... my gtx Titan X will do a 4000x2000 in an hour and the sample scene here has a hdr night sky and all the rest of the lights are literally the iray emitters in the scene.  This one took 47 minutes. 
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I have hefty processors but they aren't used. However, it does seem that even with rendering on the gpu daz will use an extra 20g of mobo ram while rendering...  I have 64g so I can still work with at a scene that starts at 5g system 25 g daz and then another 20g being used for the render. 
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but even looking back to my old machine... i7-920 with 24g  in 3dl .. I could still render a scene that used 20g for system and daz to render in an hour or so.