Should I get upgrade GPU or CPU for renderings?

[Anonymous]

I've bin researching the web and every forum, source gives me different answer. Using Fusion 360 Ultimate and Im doing more and more renderings lately. What's more beneficial for faser rendering, GPU upgrade or CPU upgrade?

Right now I running Haswell i5@4.2Ghz 8gb ram and GTX 760 2GB, Win 8.

What would be more beneficial: Upgrading to  i7 (and will overclock to ~4.5GHz + HT benefits) or getting GTX 970 4GB (3.5gb really). Or both lol?

I dont have big assemblies but I noticed (specialy with design history) that sometimes even small operations take some time (one the history gets long).

Hoping to get some definite answer. Thanks a bunch.  

[Phil.E]

It sounds to me like you would want both.

Timeline calculations would be CPU and rendering is going to be most dependent on GPU RAM. So 4GB is better than 2GB for your GPU.

Thanks,

[dunderhead]

Your 8Gb RAM is not a lot these days if you're running more than one high-powered graphics app -- I've seen Fusion 360 grow to 5Gb, not sure if memory leak or not. If you're not careful closing tabs, then your browser may gobble up at couple of gigs as well.

I'm wondering whether editing complicated T-splines (alt-3, smooth mode) is GPU or CPU bound? If GPU bound is it GPU-RAM?

I have only 1G video RAM for two monitors, there's big difference between alt-1 and alt-3 mode, but I don't know what the bottleneck is.

Timeline updates seem CPU bound -- to just one core. So whether you have 2, 4, 8, 16... cores doesn't matter. It would be fantastic if the cad engine could be parallelized but that's a probably a tall order.

[Anonymous]

Phil.E  Base on what you said, sounds like 6gb 8gb quadroo would be better for that. But isn't quadro more beneficial on OpenGL platforms?

[chengyun.yang]

Hi,

When you said "I dont have big assemblies but I noticed (specialy with design history) that sometimes even small operations take some time (one the history gets long)", do you mean the modeling commands/operations take time or the view navigation(e.g., rotate/pan) becomes slow? For modeling commands/operations, it is more CPU bound while for view navigation, it is more GPU bound. 

You can refer to this post for some more discussion about Fusion system requirements:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/general-fusion-360-questions/fusion-360-system-requirements/m-p/547979...

Thanks

Chengyun

Fusion Team

[Anonymous]

Chengyin.yang So you are sying that rendering (ray tracing) if more CPU or GPU dependant? Seems like more cores would expedite the tracing.