Workstation? Cluster? or hardware rendering cards???

[Billow]

Hi everyone!

I would like to know if anybody has some real life experience on this matter!!?

i'm a 3ds max and autocad "user" and after some difficulties on getting nice quality renders, i've made some improvements using Maxwell (lol i didn't improve really! eheh render engine is really easyer to work with hopefully), but the problem are the render times...

Can't get enough preview quality in "real time", and waiting a couple hours before making new adjustments on texturing and lighting is a complete bore!


So... what u guys recomend for investing a few bucks???
would i go for a workstation with a pro graphics card? a hardware rendering card, like those from art vps??? or simple buy a couple of machines and try to set up a small cluster for distributed rendering???

thanks alot!

PS. - Forgive my bad english!

[TheAllusionist]

First off, video cards do not improve rendering time unless you are using a special program like RTsquare that uses the GPU on the card to help render. They do help for real time display and panning and moving around your scene as you are working, they just don't affect rendering time. Secondly, I believe currently that Maxwell doesn't support network rendering, you can render out on multiple machines setting the 'seed' numbers to be different and then combine the MXST? (not certain on the file extension off hand) files and supposedly get a higher Quality rendering, but that is multiple computers with multiple copies of Maxwell rendering independantly and then combining the information.

Networks and rendering farms, personally I don't get consistant results, they will work and then they won't, I think if you have a dedicated server that they are reliable, if you have several computers networked together with no deidicated server, it seems problematical.

My personal opinion, invest in a fast Quad (dual dual-core) machined strictly for rendering and don't load a bunch of junk on the machine, just your 3D software and resources and let it be your dedicated rendering machine. I would get a system with the Vista upgrade option with 4 gigs of ram and open ram slots leftover so that you can dump more Ram in once you have the new operating system installed. This way you aren't using any proprietory rendering cards or dealing with network rendering, a self contained beast to do your bidding.

Realistically if you don't like waiting around for renderings, then don't use Maxwell, on a dual cpu Xeon machine, I still leave it to render for 48 hours for final images, I bet a super computer at Nasa would still take a few hours for a good rendering of a semi-complicated scene. If you think a render farm, rendering card or super fast computer is going to render out of Maxwell fast, you are kidding yourself.

Of course these are just my opinions

[Billow]

1st of all thanks for your post!

i've already seen a couple of articles talking about GPU based render engines... i didn't explained myself correctly, cause i already knew that a better graphics card will only help me in the modeling process...

about the "power machine" u mentioned....

i was thinking on a tyan motherboard with dual quad-core support with 1 cpu and about 4 gigs ddr2 533 FBDIMM (for now...)...
what would u recomend for Graphics Card??? can't afford to buy one High-End Quadro based card... and tyan is offering motherboards with dual pci-express slots i think... so i could run an SLi based system (not sure about benefits under max...) for a cheaper price... what u think this would perform?

i dont intend to have quickly rendered scenes.... just "15 minutes nice previews" for adjustments

Thanks a lot again!

[TheAllusionist]

I haven't kept up on hardware lately, it only gives me the wants. I think I read somewhere that Tyan is producing a pretty good dual cpu board for AMD processors, so you are probably good to go. 4 Gigs is the max ram you should invest in at this time (comment about empty slots is because computer makers like to fill them all up with smaller sized chips, so upgrading is wastefull), Windows can only recognize 3 Gigs I believe, but I think there is a swithch in the boot 'ini' that sets aside 1 Gig for applications and the rest (3 Gigs) for memory purposes. Video cards, well I tend to notice most software seems to recognize Nvidia boards in a more prolific fashion than ATI FWIW. I would go with something that has dual monitor capability, I have really become enamoured with dual monitors, even if a lot of software can't take advantage of it. Floaters on one panel and full working area in the other is great! I think I have seen Nvidia 8900's for less than $200, I would go to Tom's Hardware and check out the reviews before I purchased anything.

www.tomshardware.com

Good Luck!