Rendering and Ram Disk

[1bdchristian]

I am attempting to setup a ramdisk to help with rendering. What is the proper way to set this up for autocad to benefit from the ram disk. I have 32 GB ram and have created a 24 gb ram disk.

[dgorsman]

That would seem to be counter-productive, leaving only 8 GB for the operating system, program and model (both are already loaded into memory), and render output.  Drive access time should be a non-issue (relatively speaking) when it comes to rendering.

[NeutronStar13]

When you reduce the amount of RAM available, it decreases the ability of the program to process images and information.

I would think a better video card would be more productive, and more bang-for-the-buck.

The next step after a new video card is a SSD hard drive as the boot drive to increase basic system performance.

Then, you can increase virtual memory by creating a second swap file on your old drive.

[stevetamplen]

What are your system stats, RAM, RAM speed, CPU, HDD, etc?

Also, is this a desktop or a laptop system?

What OS are you using?

[1bdchristian]

Here are my specs / Ram = 32G / Ram Speed = PC3-12800 DDR3 SD / CPU =  intel(r) Core(TM) cpu @ 3.40GHz / System = 64-bit operating system / Operating system = Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 / HDD = 1TB

[1bdchristian]

In addition I am working on a desktop and have a Nvidia Quadro K2000 Video Card.

[stevetamplen · Accepted solution]

DISCLAIMER: The below are my own opinions, based on my years of experience as an OEM system builder and game enthusiast, and not those of Autodesk.

I would like you to have a look at this page please:

Videocard Benchmarks

You will see your card benchmarked against other video cards (mostly Nvidia), for both performance and value.

As you can see, there are a lot of other cards that will give you better performance, some of which are even less expensive than your current card.

Additionally, if you have room for more RAM in your system, I recommend increasing to the max for your board, making sure to fill all the slots with memory that is identical in size, speed, manufacturer, and part number (for best performance).

I would not consider running a RAMDISK unless you have 64 or more, and even then, I would not take more than 20% or you will see degradation of performance from your applications, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Your CPU is fine for the job.

For future planning, if performance is difficult to obtain in a single processor environment, you may want to consider a multi-processor system, as those typically allow you to split processing to different CPUs to increase performance for larger applications (or for running multiple applications simultaneously), plus they usually have room for a boatload of RAM. The RAM in multi-proc systems is typically split into sections, each section dedicated to its own processor.

[dgorsman]

I should add a caveat to that: multiple, multi-core processors are only beneficial for processes which support multi-threading.  For rendering this requires knowing which engine is being used as some of them are GPU based, not CPU based, so those extra processors may not provide the desired cost/performance benefit.  It should also be noted performance depends not just on hardware but how much data and how well it is organized; a small scene with massively complicated textures/lighting and extremely detailed objects will tax even a high-end system.