Is this system good enough?

stormqq

I already have 8GB RAM ,a new skylake supported motherboard with a dual core pentium processor and a old nvidia graphic card. I am gonna upgrade this to

Intel Core i5 6500 and Gtx 950 2GB graphic card, I am wondering how much of a boost I can have from my existing system. I don't plan to render very high detailed scenes or plan to use it for animations. I simply want to make simple scenes (yeah for my adventurous visual novels), indoor scenes and probably some scenes with few tress. so can I use iray with this graphic card ? how long will it take to render a scene like this (this is just a sample) with iray ,luxrender and 3delight with ubersampling? it took me nearly 30 seconds to render this scene (default settings in 3delight). it has few lights ,no ray tracing since it takes nearly 1 and half minute, but I used deep shadows for above light. 

mjc1016

It's hard to say....

But DeepShadowMaps are not something to base a comparison on.  How fast they render has no bearing  on anything else.  It's like comparing a scooter and a Porsche in Manhattan during rush hour.

If you aren't going for a more photorealistic look, then the video card doesn't matter.  A 2 GB card isn't going to allow a very large scene to be rendered...and depending on the textures used, that scene above could be pushing the 2 GB limit, especially if it is the only graphics card in use, so it wouldn't be used for the render.  

Iray in CPU mode would take several minutes to over an hour; Luxrender several hours and 3DL with raytraced shadows with the 'raytrace hider' (the faster full raytracing mode) enabled about the same as Iray.  But all of those would be in CPU mode not GPU (video card).

SickleYield

What size is the image?

It won't be 30 seconds in any of them with decent lights, and it's going to go 3Delight (fast), Iray (slow), Luxrender (SLOOOOOW) in most cases.  Iray will be fastest in a scene involving lots of water or metal.

Tottallou

You will not be able to get much on a 2GB graphic card when using Iray  -  I doubt the scene you attached would fit into the 2GB especially if the card is also being used to power your monitor so it would render using your CPU

Perhaps you can squeeze a 4GB card  & another 8 GB of Ram out of your budget if you shop around

 

 

 

 

 

nonesuch00

Do you already have a skylake supported CPU or just the motherboard? You need minimum 4GB nVidia 960 and 16GB or 32GB RAM rather than a newer skylake CPU if you already have a skylake CPU. Since I've recently looked at the prices of nVidia cards you probably don't want to spend more than a 4GB nVidia 960 video card costs (between $180 - $230).

stormqq

nonesuch00 said:

Do you already have a skylake supported CPU or just the motherboard? You need minimum 4GB nVidia 960 and 16GB or 32GB RAM rather than a newer skylake CPU if you already have a skylake CPU. Since I've recently looked at the prices of nVidia cards you probably don't want to spend more than a 4GB nVidia 960 video card costs (between $180 - $230).

already have a skylake processor. g4400 dual core. 

stormqq

SickleYield said:

What size is the image?

It won't be 30 seconds in any of them with decent lights, and it's going to go 3Delight (fast), Iray (slow), Luxrender (SLOOOOOW) in most cases.  Iray will be fastest in a scene involving lots of water or metal.

thanks. if luxrender is slow, I will go with iray path. means I will focus on the graphic card more than the cpu. I checked the pricess of the 4GB graphic cards, they look so expensive, but I can go to max gtx 960 2GB (it's 241 USD here). I am wondering if I used this gtx 960 card for rendering purposes, can I render the above scene so quickly like with 3delight? will it hang my computer during rendering? like I said, I don't want photorealsitic outputs, I simply want some quality images for my visul novel. I also want it to render the scene as quickly as possible, like within 30 seconds or less because I want to produce large amount of images ,not just one or two. 

stormqq

SickleYield said:

What size is the image?

It won't be 30 seconds in any of them with decent lights, and it's going to go 3Delight (fast), Iray (slow), Luxrender (SLOOOOOW) in most cases.  Iray will be fastest in a scene involving lots of water or metal.

1080p with default settings in 3delight. 

actually it only took 30 seconds with deep shadows to render this scene. yeah Skylake processors are quite fast. I am quite sure, it will be like 1 second in 3delight if I rendered the same scene with the aforesaid Core i5 processor. 

I used like few lights ,but only one light enables the deep shadows. 

prixat

That i5 is essentially the same processor with the number of cores increased from 2 to 4. It should get the render time down to about 15-20 seconds.

I don't think Iray can compete with your 'less than 30 seconds' requirement.

Iray has permanent GI, its more like 3Delight with UberEnvironment at high settings. If you don't use 3Delight/UberEnvironment you don't need Iray. 

stormqq

prixat said:

That i5 is essentially the same processor with the number of cores increased from 2 to 4. It should get the render time down to about 15-20 seconds.

I don't think Iray can compete with your 'less than 30 seconds' requirement.

Iray has permanent GI, its more like 3Delight with UberEnvironment at high settings. If you don't use 3Delight/UberEnvironment you don't need Iray. 

thanks for the reply.