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im thinking of upgrading, would like an opinion.

tyejoynertyejoyner Posts: 6
in New Users

hi there. im basicaly a newbie in that i just play around with it for my personal enjoyment as a hobby. i dont mess with many settings other than those i need to.  i just create my scene pose the charecters set the lights and hit render. (i have not ventured into animation scenes yet.)

right now im using a HP 27" all in one with a Ryzen3 (2cores). video is on board and to my knowledge usless. i upgraded it to 16 gigs of ram and a TB ssd, otherwise stock.

as of now and assuming all the work is being done by my cpu and not the onboard video, (iray)  im getting render times of around 2 hours for a 1080p picture.

ive read the other discussions but they all end up arguing over complicated munuta and $2500 videocards trying to get the best render time on the planet. dude, im ok with 30 minute renders and im used to not having a big video card. so maybe im asking the same question hoping for a difrent response, but will i expect to see an reduction in render time of my Iray renders that normaly take about 2 hours to the 30-45 minute mark if i upgrade to a ryzen 5 or 7, maybe a  core I5? and this is on cpu alone. i will probably eventualy get a 6-8 gig nvidia card later, but for now its just gonna be on board video.

im just trying to figure if its worth the $600-800 cost to build a new computer for the increse of cpu cores and performance or just suffer through 2 hour renders. by my understanding, having 6-8 cores vs 2 should speed things up 50-70% yes?

Comments

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,772

    Iray does make good use of extra cores, so increasing the core count should in principle help quite a bit. It might be worth looking through the benchmark thread, and trying the test scene, even though it is inecitably concentrating on GPUs rather than CPUs. Also, don't lose sight of the importance of system RAM - even with a good GPU the system still needs to have enough RAM to prepare the data for sending to the GPU.

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/341041/daz-studio-iray-rendering-hardware-benchmarking/p1

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,772
    edited October 2021

    I have a 12 core/24thread Ryzen so I just loaded the benchmark scene, set the max samples in Render Settings to 20 so as to get a quick result, and tried adjusting the CPU Load Limit (threads used) to different values - not a rigorous test but it should be somewhat indicative:

    2 threads - 2'42"
    4 threads - 1'22"
    8 threads - 0'41"
    16 threads - 0'28"
    24 threads - 0'22"

    The hyperthreaded cores seem, not surprisingly, to add less than the real cores but doubling real cores (2,4, 8) does seem fairly close to halving render time. 12 threads, which nominally matches the core count, took 33 seconds.

    In some ways I might expect a bigger improvement for addign real cores, as on your 2 core system all the other processes (including DS managing the Iray processes) are also needing CPU time, so at least one of your 2 cores is working less than full time on the render process. Ob mys system there were free threads to handle all the other things going on in all but the last, 24 thread, case - and we know from other tests that it is often quicker not to use the CPU and the GPU for rendering because that introduces some kind of scheduling conflict that actually slows the process down.

    Post edited by Richard Haseltine on
  • tyejoynertyejoyner Posts: 6

    Richard Haseltine said:

    Iray does make good use of extra cores, so increasing the core count should in principle help quite a bit. It might be worth looking through the benchmark thread, and trying the test scene, even though it is inecitably concentrating on GPUs rather than CPUs. Also, don't lose sight of the importance of system RAM - even with a good GPU the system still needs to have enough RAM to prepare the data for sending to the GPU.

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/341041/daz-studio-iray-rendering-hardware-benchmarking/p1

    yes i would be putting that 16 gigs into the new computer . thanks for the benchmark link that helps out a lot. 

  • tyejoynertyejoyner Posts: 6
    edited October 2021

    Richard Haseltine said:

    I have a 12 core/24thread Ryzen so I just loaded the benchmark scene, set the max samples in Render Settings to 20 so as to get a quick result, and tried adjusting the CPU Load Limit (threads used) to different values - not a rigorous test but it should be somewhat indicative:

    2 threads - 2'42"
    4 threads - 1'22"
    8 threads - 0'41"
    16 threads - 0'28"
    24 threads - 0'22"

    The hyperthreaded cores seem, not surprisingly, to add less than the real cores but doubling real cores (2,4, 8) does seem fairly close to halving render time. 12 threads, which nominally matches the core count, took 33 seconds.

    In some ways I might expect a bigger improvement for addign real cores, as on your 2 core system all the other processes (including DS managing the Iray processes) are also needing CPU time, so at least one of your 2 cores is working less than full time on the render process. Ob mys system there were free threads to handle all the other things going on in all but the last, 24 thread, case - and we know from other tests that it is often quicker not to use the CPU and the GPU for rendering because that introduces some kind of scheduling conflict that actually slows the process down.

    thanks i appreciate that... im gonna try that test scene just to see where i stand... i can only wish i could get my renders down to less than 5 minutes lol like i said, id be happy with 25-30 minutes...

    Post edited by Richard Haseltine on
  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,772

    If you have only 8GB at the moment it's quite possible that it is being exhausted, in which case stuff will get swapped to disc and that will slow everything down by a huge amount. Of coruse it would be frustrating to upgrade the memory on your current system and find that it didn't help, or not much.

  • charlescharles Posts: 845
    edited October 2021

    It depends on the type of scenes you are planning on doing. If your just going to do some simple ones with or two characters in them 8GB should be ok. But if you can get whatever NVIDIA card you possibly can afford with the most RAM also invest in RAM in your PC itself. Also invest in a  SSD. The speed of the card doesn't matter as much IMO then if you can even start rendering the scene because you don't have enough memory to do it. It's also not a matter of just how many objects or character are in that scene, but how much textures you have and the quality of them. Daz Iray will compress them in your Advanced settings you can adjust that and being able to render out the textures at a higher resolution makes a HUGE difference in the quality of the final render.

     

     

    Post edited by charles on
  • tyejoynertyejoyner Posts: 6

    Richard Haseltine said:

    If you have only 8GB at the moment it's quite possible that it is being exhausted, in which case stuff will get swapped to disc and that will slow everything down by a huge amount. Of coruse it would be frustrating to upgrade the memory on your current system and find that it didn't help, or not much.

     

    8gigs of what? all in one has onboard graphix and its radeon to boot, so they are not contributing to the iray render... just the cpu cores, there is no graphix card.

  • tyejoynertyejoyner Posts: 6

    charles said:

    It depends on the type of scenes you are planning on doing. If your just going to do some simple ones with or two characters in them 8GB should be ok. But if you can get whatever NVIDIA card you possibly can afford with the most RAM also invest in RAM in your PC itself. Also invest in a  SSD. The speed of the card doesn't matter as much IMO then if you can even start rendering the scene because you don't have enough memory to do it. It's also not a matter of just how many objects or character are in that scene, but how much textures you have and the quality of them. Daz Iray will compress them in your Advanced settings you can adjust that and being able to render out the textures at a higher resolution makes a HUGE difference in the quality of the final render.

     

    all my renders take roughly 2 hours at the minimal settings i use, which i mostly just adjust lights and poses, i do not adjust render settings at all. stating that im assuming a 6-8 core cpu should bring that number down significantly. i have no dedicaded video card so that is out of the mix. my renders are fully being done by the cpu and whatever the onboard video does if any. even when i get the 6-8 core cpu, there will be no video card other than onboard video. still if im taking 2 hours for them to render on 2 cores, the same renders should take less on the bigger cpu? yes?

     

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,772

    8GB of system RAM is not much, it may be filling up during the render and forcing the system to swap stuff from memory to disc - which, even with an SSD, slows the whole system down enormously. If that is the case then just improving the GPU would'nt necessarily help so it's worth checking.

  • charlescharles Posts: 845
    edited October 2021

    tyejoyner said:

    charles said:

    It depends on the type of scenes you are planning on doing. If your just going to do some simple ones with or two characters in them 8GB should be ok. But if you can get whatever NVIDIA card you possibly can afford with the most RAM also invest in RAM in your PC itself. Also invest in a  SSD. The speed of the card doesn't matter as much IMO then if you can even start rendering the scene because you don't have enough memory to do it. It's also not a matter of just how many objects or character are in that scene, but how much textures you have and the quality of them. Daz Iray will compress them in your Advanced settings you can adjust that and being able to render out the textures at a higher resolution makes a HUGE difference in the quality of the final render.

     

    all my renders take roughly 2 hours at the minimal settings i use, which i mostly just adjust lights and poses, i do not adjust render settings at all. stating that im assuming a 6-8 core cpu should bring that number down significantly. i have no dedicaded video card so that is out of the mix. my renders are fully being done by the cpu and whatever the onboard video does if any. even when i get the 6-8 core cpu, there will be no video card other than onboard video. still if im taking 2 hours for them to render on 2 cores, the same renders should take less on the bigger cpu? yes?

     

    This is all overly simplified, even at 2 hours I would doubt the quality and scale is very good, or as good as it could be off the CPU.  I could ask what size images you are rendering, number of iterations, what's your compression at, but the scene, lighting and everything also matters. If your doing portraits it's probably all good, if it's any type of complex shot with lots of light sources, objects and textures I dunno so it's situational. But hey if it works for you, then go with it.

    But if asking for recommendations here, I'll always say go with the most video RAM over anything else.

     

    Post edited by charles on
  • tyejoynertyejoyner Posts: 6

    ok, i bought a ryzen 7 laptop.. i was puzzled why it still took 2 hours to render a picture. however the picture is a lot cleaner and detailed. untill now i never really noticed what this iteration really meant.

    so maybe this makes sense. my first computer was doing aroung 300 iterations in those 2 hours. my new laptop is now doing 1800 iterations in that 2 hours.

  • tyejoynertyejoyner Posts: 6

    charles said:

    tyejoyner said:

    charles said:

    It depends on the type of scenes you are planning on doing. If your just going to do some simple ones with or two characters in them 8GB should be ok. But if you can get whatever NVIDIA card you possibly can afford with the most RAM also invest in RAM in your PC itself. Also invest in a  SSD. The speed of the card doesn't matter as much IMO then if you can even start rendering the scene because you don't have enough memory to do it. It's also not a matter of just how many objects or character are in that scene, but how much textures you have and the quality of them. Daz Iray will compress them in your Advanced settings you can adjust that and being able to render out the textures at a higher resolution makes a HUGE difference in the quality of the final render.

     

    all my renders take roughly 2 hours at the minimal settings i use, which i mostly just adjust lights and poses, i do not adjust render settings at all. stating that im assuming a 6-8 core cpu should bring that number down significantly. i have no dedicaded video card so that is out of the mix. my renders are fully being done by the cpu and whatever the onboard video does if any. even when i get the 6-8 core cpu, there will be no video card other than onboard video. still if im taking 2 hours for them to render on 2 cores, the same renders should take less on the bigger cpu? yes?

     

    This is all overly simplified, even at 2 hours I would doubt the quality and scale is very good, or as good as it could be off the CPU.  I could ask what size images you are rendering, number of iterations, what's your compression at, but the scene, lighting and everything also matters. If your doing portraits it's probably all good, if it's any type of complex shot with lots of light sources, objects and textures I dunno so it's situational. But hey if it works for you, then go with it.

    But if asking for recommendations here, I'll always say go with the most video RAM over anything else.

     

    the pictures are 1080 size i was getting on average about 300-350 iterations in those 2 hours.   i just bought a ryzen 7 laptop with 36 gigs of ram. its 8 cores are now doing same job in 2 hours but with about 1800-1900 iterations. again, graphix card is not a factor as it has radeon on board.  honestly after about 800 iterations it looks crisp and detailed enough for me, so im gonna limit it to 800 and play around with it

     

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