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Not true! I just don't build a new PC but once every 5 years or so.
And also...DAZ shares some blame here for not making it appealing to KEEP using DAZ software when building an elite class system. Follow me for a second here:
Only DAZ Studio is updated with some regularity. Beyond that, only Cararra is 64 bit but still has a 1980's user interface that has very little appeal when compared to Blender's COMPLETELY CUSTOMIZABLE UI.
Bryce has been left to languish in the 32 bit era and has a kludgy network rendering option.
Hexagon 2 could be a superb "modelling only" tool, but is also 32 bit only, can't handle huge meshes, and suffers more crashes than a smash-up derby!
I submit to all of you that DAZ could do more to encourage hardware enthusiasts to take their game to the next level and make DAZ a centerpiece of that. But they're not, and so we sit.
And by missing opportunities with us hardware enthusiasts, I think DAZ misses business opportunities. Who has money to spend on new products? Us. Me. Guys and gals who drop $2,500 or more to buy or build a new high-performance system twice a decade. But we're not foolish either. Why spend money on dead software technology when more modern technology (Blender) is out there, is 64 bit, uses large memory, is completely customizable, and DOESN'T CRASH? And might even be economical (or free)?
DAZ, it's time to step up your game and bring out modern versions of Bryce and Hexagon. We hardware guys (and gals) will respond, and you'll see more enthusiasm in this area. Oh and please bring Cararra's interface up to modern UI coding and usage standards. Whenever I see it, I think of "Park Place" all decayed.
...I agree with several points.
Hexagon needs to be bought into the 21st century, Crikey even Silo has been resuscitated and already has a 64 bit version for Linux with an update for Windows on the way.
Bryce Also needs to be brought out of the Dark Ages cleaned up and given 64 bit support as well. I keep wondering why Daz continues to release products for but doing nothing to update core application. Crikey, I cannot even find Byce in the store (at least with how mangled the search routine has become).
I keep saying that if these two programmes were updated, Daz would have a powerful interlinked suite of applications (Bryce Hexagon and Studio) each with a specific focus yet each able to work with one another that would be like a Carrara on steroids.
However it seems that Studio is the only programme that is getting attention while the other two are being left to wither on the vine.
Daz is sitting on a bundle of applications that could be our "3DS" or "Lightwave", if they had even half the development resources of say an Autodesk.or Corel. Sadly they do not as they are a small company. So we probably will see little to no activity on the Bryce/Hexagon development front.
Blender is powerful, but until it gets a more intuitive UI which doesn't have it's own steep as a cliff learning curve, it will still tend to keep many potential new users from adopting it. I remember last year at the Blender Conference, the founder saying that it was not in Blender's best interest to attract new users (in reference to the debate over streamlining the UI) . That statement pretty much put me off as did the caustic reaction and immature responses to Andrew's proposals by many who consider themselves "professionals".
That's put me off on Blender as well, Kyoto Kid. I know there are people who get it, but their community should be more helpful like here. I did not know that they want to limit it. Makes me even more sure that I have been following the better path here for what I want to do.
I'll hazard a guess that the statement was in regards to making a really newbie-friendly ui? No matter how you look at it, CG is bound to be complex, you can only make things so simple before you start stepping on the toes of your power users. I think what new users they would be wanting to attract would be game/movie studios, and they won't do that with a simpler interface.
UI design is really difficult, I thought Blenders last overhaul was brilliant.
...Modo's UI is more intuitive for "new folk" such as myself to understand and learn compared Blender's, and it is used by the "pro circuit" as well.
It's just that I don't have 1,500$ burning a hole in my pocket right now.
It's also interesting that other software can accommodate both ends of the user spectrum quite nicely without stepping on either side's toes.
I finally got some time to test between my old computer with an i7 core and my new one with a 6 core Haswell. Same amt. of RAM (though faster speed due to DDR 3 vs. DDR 4) but the graphics card was better - 4GB instead of 2GB.
DAZ Studio - exact same images rendered in almost exactly half the time. I didn't use particularly complex scenes to test because I didn't want to spend a lot of time trying to match things up precisely. I suspect that with a lot of ray tracing and reflected surfaces, it would have been even better.
PS plugins that I use were between 50% and 300% faster depending on the size of the image - the larger images had the biggest speed gains. I think the overhead of loading the plugin is what skewed the results.
...currently running with a Blomefield LGA 1366 i7. Yeah, not in the position at the moment to step up to n LGA2011 board.
Better to take the time to research and save up the money and work towards a dual Haswell Xeon 8 core build.
My current ad-hoc figure of merit for system comparison is to take the number of threads and multiply by the memory speed. I'm not surprised a 6-core Haswell with DDR4 is faster than a core i7 with DDR3. You probably got 1.5x just from the number of cores, and another 1.3-1.5x from the memory speed. The video card should make no difference to render times.
Many thanks Crescent for doing these tests and posting the results. Exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. There are so many variables that can affect the speed of renders, and I don't think it was absolutely necessary to do an 'exact' comparison of identical set-ups.
Basically, you knew what your old machine was capable of, and can now see how the newer one compares, and that was exactly the type of reply I was looking for.
Just out of interest, do you use 'Reality' with Luxrender for any of your Daz Studio renders ? I am interested to see how the new I7 5820K behaves regarding render times. I know we decide when a Luxrender picture is 'ready' and finished, so there will always be a variable, but again, I am sure it is something that we would recognise if a scene was rendering quicker.
Much appreciated, and please add any further comments or data as you use your new system. I have not yet ordered the parts for my new computer build so I'm still interested to hear of any developments.
Cheers :-)
"Core i7" is a marketing term that has little technical meaning.
The 3.00Ghz x8 core 5960X is a Core i7.
The 1.07Ghz x2 core 620UM is a Core i7.
Unfortunately, without knowing the particular processors involved, and the speeds they are running at, anecdotal comparisons are meaningless. A 5820K (6 x 3.3Ghz) could reasonably be expected to render just under twice as fast as a 920 (4 x 2.67Ghz).
I doubt at this early stage of development that DDR4 has any significant speed advantage over DDR3. Again, meaningful comparisons will require information about particular RAM sticks and settings (and motherboard info). Certainly, if the quantity of DDR4 is 24Gb (see first page), it won't be operating at full potential.
I use https://www.cpubenchmark dot net/
to get an idea of what the processors should perform at.
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am still drawing up specs for either a dual server or if the new i7 and x99 configurations really see 16 gig sticks and I can find a mobo with 8 slots...
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I have 24 gigs
my thanksgiving FB cover took this to render
System 1.9 gigs
Daz3d with characters and one uber light set
19.9 g
which brought it to 21.8
and then the rendering used 1.6
so a total ram usage of 23.4.
I only had to tell windows 7 -64 pro to not close Daz once.
and it finished.
but I am definitely aiming for some thing with room to expand as I go.
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If the picture is a little fuzzy, I did set the size down to 900x300 instead of 1800x600
It would be interesting to see some render time comparisons between 4, 6 and 8 core systems rendering a standard scene in Studio and/or Carrara, on comparably equipped Z97 and X99 systems. Although these would likely just track benchmark numbers already available for other multi-threaded rendering apps, at least relatively speaking. For example at Tom's, Blender Cycle test, the 5820 (6 core) was reported only about 12% faster than the 4-core 4790.
I just built a Z97 system with an i7 4790. The system came in at about $1500, including California sales tax, for 16 GB RAM, a 512 GB SSD and 2 TB HHD, DVD drive, case and Z97 M/B, not including a Nvidia GTX 660 and 750 W PSU I had laying around.
Initially I planned to go for the X99 system and the i7 5820 six-core for about $280 more (not including an upgraded CPU cooler) for the extra cores, DDR4 memory and upgrade path. The more I looked at it, it did not seem like the best choice for my particular situation as a mere hobbyist. A certain amount of computing power is needed to make the hobby more enjoyable, but does not allow me to produce income faster. I don't need a fast computer for my job or for surfing the Internet, etc. I am not a gamer and don't need a super fast Graphics card, if any at all. In fact I have been using an i7 3770 with no card for several years with few complaints, and believe that the 4790 would also be quite usable for my purposes with no card.
So the 4790 is more economical. Plus:
1) The faster clock speed of the 4790 makes up for its fewer cores, to some extent, and in single-threaded applications it is actually faster.
2) Lower TDP of the 4790 compared to the 5820 means a cooler, quieter, more efficient system.
3) The included graphics processor in the 4790 provides greater versality for system reconfigurations down the road because it can be used with or without a graphics card.
In the 3 or 4 years before I would consider dumping serious money into an upgrade again, it may almost be possible to plug a smart phone into a monitor and do it all that way, or perhaps buy a 64-core system, or some other fantastic improvement will be available. My upgrade paths tend to become obsolete before I want to make use of them.
...same with my build. At the time, for Daz 3.1A it rocked, As I mentioned in another thread, once Daz released 4.0, my monster became that much less "monstrous". Now I have to consider doubling my memory to 24G (that's a much as the MB will support) as Reality has been returning a high memory usage warning every time I send a scene to Luxender. While DDR3 memory is relatively cheap these days (a 24G kit costs about 140$ less than the 12G Kit I originally purchased), I also have to upgrade to Win7 Pro, (premium only supports up to 16 G) and that additional cost makes it expensive again.
I wouldn't touch 8.1 with the ISS's 15 m long robotic manipulator arm.
Having just installed Win 8.1 on my new system, I agree with Kyoto Kid - I would have been happier sticking with Win 7. Not a disaster, just a LOT of unnecessary UI differences to get used to.
You make a good point about personal line-drawing with regards to spending on computing power for hobbies. We all have to rationalise it one way or another.
However, in the context of your move from a 3770(K?) system to a 4790(K?) system, that extra $280 might be seen as pretty good value. Strictly in Blender Cycle terms you dropped $1500 for a 15 - 20% performance boost.
Ahh, if only that were true. Catastrophes and miracles notwithstanding, we can see that far ahead in computing. Sadly, it isn't vastly exciting. A bit like the improvement between 2010 and now; worthwhile but, c'mon!
In the decade I was born we had B52 bombers, jumbo jets, supersonic passenger airliners and had landed on the moon. Now, [censored] years later we're still flying the B52s and the 747s, but have exchanged the moon and mach1+ for the capacity for 3 billion people to simultaneously exchange views on someone who is famous for having an improbably large arse.
That's progress, I guess - but I'd prefer the flying cars that were promised back when the future was fab.
...I was born back when we still had B-36s, Lockheed Constellations, the B58 Hustler was the fastest plane in the air, Sputnik was the first man made object to obit the earth, and we had this newfangled thing called television.
The only one of those still around is the last one.
I still have an old Win98 Pentium 233 box. Works great for Office 97, as well as playing Doom, Duke Nukem, Civ II, and Madden '98.
As I mentioned, my 4GB 32 bit notebook (which I'm on right now and serves me well for Net browsing as well as writing and working on spreadsheets) could barely render a simple bare bones scene in Daz 4.0.
Yes, both of these old computers still work, but I wouldn't try rendering in Reality4 on them.
Thanks Peter. I should add that the 4790 I purchased was a 4790K. I checked the Tom's benchmark (the one by Chris Angelini dated 29 August 2014) that lists the 4790K vs the 5820K. The reported speed increase is 17%, so I stand corrected.
Certainly X99 is the way to go for better rendering performance and a more robust upgrade path, but it's not that clearly worth the premium if you don't render for a living, IMHO. Upgrading from the six-core to an eight-core processor with all the PCIe lanes is not going to be cheap anytime before there is some superior alternative in the market anyway, so if you do this for a living you may as well invest in the 8-core now, enjoy the benefits right away and spare yourself the extra cost of upgrading later.
In my case my old i7 3770 will replace an even older AMD Phenom as a second computer and the difference there is fairly stark. If I was not starting to get annoyed at the Phenom rendering performance and other limitations I would not have purchased the new z97 system at all.
I was exaggerating, admittedly, regarding anticipated future developments. Desktop processor advances have not been that dramatic since Pentium was replaced by Core, maybe because most the development emphasis has been on lower power consumption for portables during that time. The future often brings unforseeable changes in the market though, and it is hard to predict what the optimal system for my needs will be 3 or 4 years from now. So purchasing what seems like the best value today without much thought towards upgradeability seemed like the most reasonable choice for me, right or wrong I won't know for a few years.