Best renders without an Nvidia graphics card.
My current setup is a little lacking in the pc power department. I am running a laptop with a Radeon graphic card. No where near a gaming pc. It does a good job but the render times are sometimes long. Like 5 days long. Is it even possible to configure this thing to do great renders without a Nvidia graphic engine and maybe cut back on the render times?
Comments
What are the exact specifications? What sort of scenes are you rendering?
When I first downloaded DS I had an HP laptop with no graphics card. If there is nothing difficult in the scene (dim lighting, atmospheric effects, geoshells, etc), I could usually set up the image in the daytime and let it render all night while I slept and it would be done in the morning. I think it was a 4 core Intel I5. All the extra effects can really add to the time. That was back with Genesis 2 and maybe Genesis 3 characters. Genesis 8 and the heavy mapping of newer products probably slows things down as well.
I am using an Intel core I5 at 2.6 Ghz with 8 Gb ram and running windows 10 64 bit. With a standard HD Graphics 4600.
I don't really want to do anything fancy but I would like to produce some professional images with out having to go by a 2500.00 new rig.
Yes, but images of what - portraits? Environments? Interiors? Single figures or multiple interacting figures?
It's possible if you limit the amount and complexity of the objects in your scene. Also, limit the amount of lights and reduce texture sizes when needed. You might also look into doing basic renders then taking them into photoshop and postworking the crap out of them.
Basically, any PC can render any scene. It's just a question how long this takes. Without an nVidia GPU, hours become days.
5 days is extreme, though. Your 8GB main memory (maybe 5 free for iRay) isn't a lot. If iRay starts swapping textures and reloading from disk, that's probably a performance desaster. I'd check if that's the case, and avoid swapping at all costs. Reduce/reuse textures or render items seperately if needed.
8GB is quite low, so I would look at resizing maps (Scene Optimser in the store will help) and using some of the tricks from the MMX Resource Saver Shader set 9the promos have some good hints). You might also want to try rendering the setting as an image, then loading it as a background image (Window>Panes(Tabs)>Environment) as a backdrop for the figure render.