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You can build a system with 4x16 core AMD Opteron processors. (64 true, not virtual, cores.) It isn't even that much more expensive, which, as far as I know, is the most you can put on a single mother board at the moment.
Since Lux can use network rendering and is free, I don't see the point worrying about what a single motherboard can handle for Lux, though it will make a difference with 3Delight or Carrara.
Remember you can get an AMD 8 core running at 4.7ghz, out of the box, plus cooler for just over $300 but the Broadwells should be better, though more expensive when they are released.
And there are other factors for render speed besides pure CPU speed and number of cores. (Temp file location for example amount of Ram, etc.)
This becomes more of a discussion about energy efficiency. Yes, you can network multiple machines for Lux, but one 'big' machine with modern multi-CPU configuration will generally consume a fraction of the power of running multiple older/single-CPU machines.
For someone at home with only a couple machines, it probably doesn't matter too much having one big machine vs a few smaller ones. But as you start to scale up in number of machines, the power and cooling starts to become a significant factor.
Here's another chart: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-fx-9590-9370_6.html#sect0
11 seconds difference in 3DS Max on that chart between an i7 4770K and an AMD FX-8350. Of course, there are power consumption differences and AMD is more affordable than Intel for a comparable CPU (around $160 - $170 difference in price). They are both great processors. I have the 8350 and have no complaints, and it helps heat my apartment rendering away when it's cold! I also have an easier time installing AMD CPUs compared to Intel.
You will need at least 16 GB of memory if you are going to do big scenes using lots of textures with DAZ Studio/3Delight, so budget for memory.
Some lights and skin shaders like wowie's can come real close to or better in DAZ Studio/3Delight than what some people have been getting with Octane, of course it depends on what you are trying to do and what textures, etc. you are using. The more you throw at Octane, the slower it will render as is true with any renderer. With IPR in the new DAZ Studio 4.7 beta, that takes away some of the fast feedback advantage of Octane. So you might be able to wait until the price comes down on the Nvidia cards, or wait for the new Intel processors. I might be wrong, but I don't think anything brand new is coming from AMD soon.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21611/P750/
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21611/P735/#701250
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21611/P690/#686456
If the community had a test scene to render and post times/stats on it would be kind of helpful. There's always the factors of heat, OS, other processes, etc, but with enough people putting numbers in the bin is should be enough to get an idea of what hardware can do what. (It might even help people who find their times are way off compared to similar configurations).
If the community had a test scene to render and post times/stats on it would be kind of helpful. There's always the factors of heat, OS, other processes, etc, but with enough people putting numbers in the bin is should be enough to get an idea of what hardware can do what. (It might even help people who find their times are way off compared to similar configurations).
You guys want a benchmark? Let me see what can be done for the release after the 4.7 release.
You guys want a benchmark? Let me see what can be done for the release after the 4.7 release.
I don't know enough about about how all this works under the hood, but an ideal benchmark scene should have enough types of rendering tasks to tap different low level CPU functions. Even-ish playing field for different cpu types, et al.
The intel should be ahead in the bench. But not twice as fast. So the question is rather : are you willing to pay twice the price to get at most 20% speed gain?
One of the advantage of the Intel processor is that it has AVX2 instruction set. These are not a lot used yet in applications but if they are in the future, they could bring some speed gain, especially in rendering apps. AMD won't get that before next generation Excavator Processors
Now for 3D rendering your best option in the long term may be to build a dual CPU (Opteron or Xeon) workstation if you have the money
About waiting for next gen CPU, either it is Excavator or Broadwell, I'm not sure that is a good idea. New shiny thing always come out pricy and you'll have to wait at least till mid 2015 to get them. It is also said that Broadwell won't last long as Intel should come up with Skylake short after
The Benchmarking is a good idea. It should be done one a scene that anybody has. For that purpose one of the built in DS scene would be a good choice.
PS : We may be throwing out a 8TB Fiber Channel Disks SAN server with 5 dual Intel CPU blades in March. I'm thinking of getting that at home instead but I'm not sure because of the space it takes and power consumption etc...tough decision
Actually Dragonslayer should be a decent benchmark scene.
Hi, I´m using a AMD 8350 - 16GB RAM - SSD for C: partition but "my Library" on a normal harddrive.
Windows 8.1 - Daz3D 4.6
Loaded Dragonslayer - no changes made - used provided render settings
dimensions 1280x720 16:9
bucket size - 32
max. raytrace depth - 1
Pixel samples - both set to 4
shadow samples - 10
gain - 1
gamma correction - off
shadingrate - 2.00
rendering on all 8 cores it was finished after 1 minute 33 seconds
edit - in DAZ3D 4.7 beta rendering on all 8 cores it was finished after 1 minute 24 seconds
Gwendolyne you can alter the Bucket size to suit your hardware. Its a performance setting not a quality one.
The Intels with fewer but much faster cores like those big bucket sizes.
Our AMDs with more but slower cores work more efficiently with smaller bucket sizes.
Try a bucket size of 16 and you should cut the render time by about 20s.
Thanks for the info, is good to know this.
1m 28s on a 4 year old AMD X6 1055t, (a few seconds longer on the beta)
Desktop AMD Phenom II X4 955 : 2 min 03 s
HP Notebook i7-2720QM 2.2GHz : 2 min 56 s
All with Bucket 16
OK
I did it again with bucketsize 16
it was 4 seconds faster on 4.6 and on 4.7 it was also 4 seconds faster than before with bucketsize 32
I'm getting different render times... 1 minute 6 seconds, 58 seconds another time, 53 seconds on a second render after a previous load and render (images already optimized).
AMD FX-8350, 8 core, not overclocked, 16 GB Ram, Windows 7 Pro 64, DAZ Studio 4.6, 3Delight - see image for settings which appear to be the same.
That's more like the numbers I was expecting from a chip with 2 more cores than mine.
I must have run this render about 20 times and discarding the optimizing run the rest have been very consistent at 88s +/- 1s
(I also noticed that Gamma Correction on (at 2.2) seems to shave off another 2 seconds though its too close to that margin of error to be sure.
Another 50 renders should clarify things.) :-)
Wow! Thanks a lot for the benchmarks, guys! I didn't expect that! :)
A couple of tests by people with Intel CPUs would be nice, as well.
Well, for me it is simply a hobby, so it wouldn't worth the money.
According to the benchmarks posted so far, it seems that the AMDs do the job very well. If I used the PC only for rendering, maybe I'd go for them. On the other hand, since my PC will be used for a number of tasks (3D gaming, retrogaming, photo editing, maybe video editing, office etc.), I think I'll go for an i7. But I haven't decided, yet. I admit that AMDs benchmark results are impressive.
BTW... where can I get the file used for the benchmark? I'd like to evaluate the performance increase I'd get with the change of PC.
The file is one of Studio's example scenes, you can get to it via Smart Content / Ready to Render.
i7 920, 12GB RAM, Windows 7 Pro 64 - 1 min 35.77 seconds (on the second render, to exclude the TDLMake processing).
I just realized that the Smart Content requires the Content Manager Service installed. I removed it a year ago or so for some sort of conflict with other proprietary software/drivers in my PC (Win Seven Home Premium 64) and I had to proceed to a clean-up of the register in order to restore the previous situation, so I'm not eager to install it again.
Could someone make this file downloadable in an alternative way? If possible, obviously.
Thanks.
Smart Content and CMS are not connected with downloading files. Downloading is done either with DIM or by going to My Account / Product List and download manually. The Ready to Render scenes can be found through Studio's Content Library tab under DAZ Studio Formats / [your library] / DAZ Studio Tutorials.
Ok, many thanks. :)
Dragon Slayer Default settings, after TDL Make has run.
Total Rendering Time: 46.94 seconds (From the DS Log :) )
Intel i7 4790K (Quad core) @4.0ghz, 32GB RAM, 64 bit DS (With this content and temp folder on SSD)
Note due to specific tests I run the base content, and a few items are on an SSD, while the rest of my content and programs are on a 2TB hybrid drive.
Assigning your temp file to an SSD reduces render times as well as load times and other things.
Intel Core2Duo @ 2.4Ghz, 8 gigsoram
Dragon Slayer scene, left at default.
Total Rendering Time: 2 minutes 18.33 seconds
Core2 Quad Q6700 @ 2.66GHz, 6 GB RAM
2 minutes 2.73 seconds (second render, bucket size 16)
1 minute 58.88 seconds (third render, bucket size 32)
Since my future PC config should be more or less like DAZ_Spooky's one, it seems that I'm going to more than halve my rendering times.
AMD is fine, anyway. The difference from the i7 isn't as large as I thought.
EDIT: my fifth rendering test, with bucket size 32, took 2 minutes 27.28 seconds. Mah...
Home system, I thought it was a faster chip, time to upgrade :),
AMD 8150, 3.6 GHz (8 cores), 16GB RAM, no SSD.
Default load after TDL make is done, 1 minute, 13.36 seconds.
You can sell me yours, then. ;)
For me it'll be a material improvement, given the system I'm coming from.
The Graphic card will be a GTX 970. Is there any chance to exploit CUDA in Daz Studio?
I you are on a budget, get an AMD 6 or 8 core processor. Best value. Only downside: they can run hot on their stock coolers (heatsink/fan). Example: the temperatureof my FX 6300 processor reaches 138 degrees Fahrenheitor 58.8 degrees Celcius when I render. Games are less demanding.
Daz only uses the videocard for OpenGL preview, no CUDA. Octane Render uses CUDA. Not sure about Luxrender; I don't want to give you the wrong information.
Hi Folks,
Firstly, many thanks gioloi for this interesting topic and so nice to see DAZ_Spooky's comments related to Daz Studio performance, and others giving their computer specs and render times.
I too am thinking about building a new workstation for my 3D rendering needs having previously used an intel i7 4770 CPU. This worked nicely but, render times in Luxrender ran for hours (usually left overnight) on most of my scenes until I felt they were finished. Daz Studio and Poser renders were certainly much faster, but obviously different in time to Luxrenders.
My online research suggested that more cores with more threads was the way forward. I noticed that some artists were using Mac Pro machines with 8 cores and 16 threads for "light speed renders"
Others commented similar to what DAZ_Spooky had said earlier, that on older computers upgrading your hard-drive to a SSD decreased render times and others said that a Solid State Drive and adding more ram too would be the answer.
However, I use Daz Studio, Carrara , Poser Pro 2014 and Vue 10 and only use Luxrender for Daz Studio and Poser. Quite a mixed bag of 3D applications, and I am not sure they all need the same 'blanket' of high-end machine specification.
I see DAZ_Spooky mentioned the new x99 chipset motherboards that take the new Haswell CPU's with DDR4 memory and 6 core-12 thread or 8 core-16 thread processors. These are said to be lightning fast for video editing or rendering....BUT do I/we really need something this fast and expensive for the 3D programs I/we use. I believe at the moment AMD has nothing to match Intel's new CPU's but does that matter with the 3D applications I/we use ?
Sorry for the long post, and I hope this has not gone slightly off topic, because I really would like to know if a cheaper AMD CPU would suffice until this new i7 processor and DDR4 memory come down in price. However, I noticed that there have been quite a few threads about "what is best" regarding computer versus laptop or one processor versus another, so it is nice to see people here saying what system they use and how it affects their render time workflow.
Sadly, a lot of Youtube videos have sprung up with people building these new x99 chipset 'monster' machines for video editing but nothing showing them being used for Daz or Poser.
Many thanks, and I hope this thread continues to grow because I am sure there are a lot of us who want to upgrade our machines, wisely and economically with the best results for our software and hardware choices.
Kind regards :-)