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Upgrading my comptuer... more hardware or less software?

4 REPLIES 4
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Message 1 of 5
Anonymous
135 Views, 4 Replies

Upgrading my comptuer... more hardware or less software?

Hello Fellows, first of all, I must admit I'm kind of new to this, I've been playing with 3DS Max 2009 for a while now, and I have some questions regarding hardware and OS. First of all let me tell you what my computer is made out of:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Intel Motherboard
NVidia GeForce 8500 GT 256MB
8 GB of RAM DDR2 667Mhz
320 Samsung HardDrive 7200RPM.
and so on...


I've installed Vista Ultimate 64b and everything is running smoothly but it seems that my rendering times are not improving dramatically after building this rig... I used to have an Athlon x2 whit 2gb of RAM rurning XP Pro...and it didn't change all that much.

I'm currently using VRay 1.5 SP2 as a rendering engine and I'm thinking that there might be some setting up issues here, since I can't find a way to improve the rendering times and a full detailed (high res) render takes anything between 1.5 to 9 hours, i was wondering... am I missing something?
Is it an OS related issue? should I go back and install XP 64b?
The other question is... would my rendering times get lower if I purchased a NVidia Quadro FX370 (256MB) ? that is really all I can afford right now and where I live it's around 240 bucks... so it dosn't come cheap and I don't wan't to waste all my money... can you experts give me some kind of advise? if you could elaborate on this particular matter I'd be more than glad!

Thank you for your time!!!
4 REPLIES 4
Message 2 of 5
dongray
in reply to: Anonymous

Your video card makes absolutely no difference in rendering times, it only renders the viewport not the final output file.
Render times with your render engine will vary on scene complexity, GI settings, reflections/refractions, output size
and any additional elements. I don't think you'll see much difference in actual render time if you go back to XP.
If a scene preparation seems to be taking a long time before it actually starts to render it could be a single threaded process so all your processors
would not be utilized for that particular stage of the render preparation. You could post your scene file here or on the VRay forums for others to help
you optimize your settings.
Message 3 of 5
Anonymous
in reply to: Anonymous

Thank you very much for you answer Ron, I'll put a scene here as soon as I can since right now I'm not at home... now, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but I heard about some driver and/or software from NVidia that would improve the processing power of my CPU by using the GPU as a kind of "afterburner" is that right? could I take advantage on that software if in deed it exists? and another question since you seem to know what you're talking about, how would I know if it's a "single threaded process" and how could I make it a "multi threaded process"if that's possible? Again thank you very much! -. Ignacio
Message 4 of 5
companioncube
in reply to: Anonymous

can you post a screenshot of your scene, and details of your vray set up. sometimes theres not much you can do about rendertimes except for get more machines and split the render over several computers. 1-9hours is pretty normal, i'm waiting for a night time exterior shot to render at the moment at 3000px and its taken about 11 hours so far, and has about 8-12 hours left, thats due to the size and about 20 lights. you can try mess with the raycaster parameters to speed up your renders or other settings but it depends on your scene.

if its a single thread process theres not any you can do to force it to be a multi threaded process unless you are a genius and know how to hack software etc, hopefully vray 1.5 sp3 will have a whole load of improvments and optimizations.

don't know about this Nvidia afterburner thing, think you getting it confused with something else, if it was out there i would be using it lol
Message 5 of 5
dongray
in reply to: Anonymous

Like Companioncube referenced, a process that is not multi-threaded is most likely something on the Max side and isn't going to change soon,
unless the developers find it high on their list of things to do with Max.

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