Processor upgrade for rendering Reality 4 / Luxrender?

brianwhitcher

Hi all,

Firstly, I'm a novice who only recently got into 3d as a hobby. Not making a living out of it just yet, just messing around for now, but hope to get into it more seriously in the near future.

Along with Daz3d I'm currently toying with Reality 4 and I gotta say, I'm liking what I am seeing so far. I prefer it to using 3delight and Iray but as far as I understand it's more suited to CPU usage at the moment.

I'm a gamer first and foremost so I've always had a fairly good computer as a base with an i5 4670k, GTX980ti SC 6gb and 16gb Ram. Render times are good in Iray due to the 980ti, and are what they are to be expected on the CPU in Reality 4 (GPU messes things up for me in Reality unfortunately). I prefer using Reality though and I'm looking to boost render times a bit in Luxrender and just wanted to find out if ditching my 4670k and coughing up extra for the abovementioned i7 4790k (hyperthreading) would be worth it.

Would it make that much of a difference in render time?

Any advice is much appreciated.

cwichura

A quick Google shows they are both quad cores.  I wouldn't expect to see a significant difference; the way you really speed up CPU rendering is adding additional cores.  (Assuming your renders don't exceed physical memory.  If they do, that will seriously impact render performance and you're better off upgrading to more RAM.)  Larger cache on the chip will help, but you'll still see a bigger performance boost from moving to more cores.

Lux supports network rendering, and that might be a cheaper way to add more cores than upgrading the CPU in your current computer.  Of course, additional computers, especially if they are picked up for cheap because they are a couple generations older, means more power consumed and more heat generated.  So it's a tradeoff.

FWIW, my main Luxrender node is a dual deca-core Xeon with 64GB of RAM: http://fav.me/d8kb9h1