topic Rendering comparison Maya 2017 Windows and Mac with Arnold Renderer in Maya Forum

Rendering comparison Maya 2017 Windows and Mac with Arnold Renderer

sbest58 — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 11:25:18 GMT

Render comparison using Maya 2017 and Arnold renderer.

iMac (Retina 5K, Late 2015)

OSX 10.12.3

4 GHz Intel Core i7

32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3

AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4096 MB

Render Time: 3:18

Dell Alienware R5 - Late 2016

Intel® Core™ i7-6700K (8MB Cache, Overclocked up to 4.4GHz)

Windows 10 Home 64bit

Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition with 8GB GDDR5X each (NVIDIA SLI Enabled)

64GB Quad Channel DDR4 2133MHz (16GB x 4)

Render Time: 3:33

How can I get Maya to use the GPU’s for rendering in Arnold?

Is it Windows 10 that is slowing this down?

Re: Rendering comparison Maya 2017 Windows and Mac with Arnold Renderer

Stephen.Blair — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 11:51:46 GMT

Post the render logs please.

Arnold is a CPU renderer.

Re: Rendering comparison Maya 2017 Windows and Mac with Arnold Renderer

sbest58 — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 13:37:26 GMT

Both machines have same CPU, Windows machine CPU is running 10% faster than the Mac but is 15% slower to render

Re: Rendering comparison Maya 2017 Windows and Mac with Arnold Renderer

Stephen.Blair — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 14:08:03 GMT

15 seconds isn't 15%

Post the logs. You can redact any confidential information, like file names.

Maybe it's the same hardware (can't tell without seeing the logs), but it's different supporting libraries.

Re: Rendering comparison Maya 2017 Windows and Mac with Arnold Renderer

mspeer — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 14:47:30 GMT

Hi!

Render Speed or System Speed of a Computer is related to many components and not only the pure CPU Clock Speed.

To go into detail would go beyond the scope of this forum, but about 10% or even 20% difference is nothing to worry about or to spend too much time about it.

There may be some things that could be optimized but this would be time and cost intensive and should be done by a professional system builder. Even then there is no guarantee about the result, except that you know with this special hardware and software it can't be configured to be faster.

But if you want to invest this time maybe someone will be willing to help you further on this.

Re: Rendering comparison Maya 2017 Windows and Mac with Arnold Renderer

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 16:25:37 GMT

What you are discovering here is a long debated argument over the performance of Windows vs Unix based operating systems. If you just do a couple of google searches for 'Windows vs Linux/OS X in <application or task>' you will find countless discussions going back up to the early 2000's talking about this.

I won't get too deep into it but the thing to understand is that Microsoft, compared to the Linux community and Apple, did not make Windows the most resource efficient OS on the planet. Comparatively, besides gaming (where they hold the crown), Windows has been shown to suffer a bit when used for rendering and simulating workloads, due to it's poorer implementation of memory management (especially when hitting swap or paging), disk IO, and thrown away CPU cycles. I'm not saying it doesn't perform well, it does, but for strictly heavy CPU/RAM/Disk tasks it's not quite the same.

Some numbers that usually get thrown around is about a 10% - 30% increase in render speed when using Unix systems, but keep in mind this really only starts to show on long term renders. IMO, that's anything above 30 minutes (especially ones going into the range of hours). The difference you see below 10 minutes should be relatively similar, as you have seen in yours. Besides system administration and pipeline automation, it's a (depending on the studio) minor/major reason why larger studio farms typically run Linux.

As previously mentioned, Arnold is currently a CPU render engine. They are working on a sibling GPU engine, which they demoed late last year (Siggraph was it?). We have yet to see whether it will become a production capable engine, or fall the way of VRay RT and be more for look-dev. I may suggest (at least for your Windows machine) looking into production GPU rendering engines, such as Redshift or Octane.