Advice on hardware

[Anonymous]

Hello All

I'd like some insight into some hardware advice I've been looking to get a new mobile workstation and was wondering what would be the ideal configuration to produce high quality automotive renders (exterior and interior) quickly.

My options for graphics cards: (please keep in mind that these are mobile cards)

NVIDIA GTX 980M, NVIDIA GTX 980M SLI or NVIDIA QUADRO K3100M

I know that the 980 has a newer Maxwell architecture, would this be benificial and how does VRED handle SLI?

Should I focus more on the CPU power over GPU power considering ray-tracing is handled by CPU? 

I am currently running a Geforce GT750M 2GB GDDR5 with an i7 Quad 2.3 GHz base clock, ray tracing on this machine takes very long but running in Non-raytracing mode is very snappy.

Thanks on any tips!

[michael_nikelsky]

Hi,

if you are mainly using raytracing, then the CPU should be as fast as possible. On the GPU-Side I would personally go with a single 980GTX although only Quadro cards are officially supported. The being said, the Geforce GPUs usually perform better than the Quadros due to their higher clock speed. SLI currently does not perform well in VRED although we are working on that. But very often your OpenGL performance will be limited by the CPU anyways so a second GPU will not give you any speedup.

Kind regards

Michael

[Anonymous]

Hi Michael

Thanks for your quick reply.

You mentioned SLI is currently unsupported and is being worked on. Do you have any idea as to how much of a performance increase it is targeted to deliver?

Also I use Autodesk Alias and Adobe Photoshop heavily, considering these softwares as well, would you still recommend the single GTX 980M?

Its a laptop so upgrading the GPU in the future would be near impossible therefore I want to make sure I'm purchasing something that would last a while.

My current card (GT 750M) seems to run VRED fine in OpenGL mode with no lag in the viewport, do you still think that the GTX 980M would give additional performance boost, if so what kind?

Thanks again!

[michael_nikelsky · Accepted solution]

Hi,

in theory SLI may nearly double the performance. However, there are a lot of factors playing into this that can limit the benefit you will see from SLI. Sadly even a simple thing like attaching a GPU monitoring tool can completely disable any performance benefits from SLI, so can a too slow CPU.

If you are using other Tools like Alias or Photoshop going with a Quadro GPU might be a better option. There are some driver specific accellerations for these applications that may give you some benefits. VRED is more like a game engine in the way it handles OpenGL so a Geforce GPU will run just fine. Many other professional applications are not however so special driver tweaks in the quadro drivers might give you better performance.

If your GT750M runs fine for the scenes you use there is probably little benefit from updating to a newer GPU. So spending the money on a faster CPU is probably a better investment.

Kind regards

Michael

[Anonymous]

Hello

Thanks for your advice, seems like going for a single 8GB GTX 980M or a single Quadro is the way I'd go. At CES, Origin PC announced a laptop with a desktop CPU so that seems to be a good option for ray-tracing benefits.

Thanks for your in depth explanation on the softwares, it really helped me make my decision.

Thank You

[Anonymous]

Hello

Sorry from diggint this thread back up but I just have a quick question regarding CPUs.

I am thinking in between the Intel Xeon E3-1240 V3 up to 3.80 GHz Quad Core or the Intel Core i7 4790k 4.0 GHz.

The i7 has the higher clock speed but is there something in the Xeon's architecture that would help in ray-tracing in VRED?

They are both Quad Core models.

Thank You

[michael_nikelsky]

Hi,

there is not really a difference in architecture between these two Processors so it basically just comes down to price. I would go with the 4790K because of the higher clock speed since it will be a bit faster. I am not sure if it really is noticeable though. On the other hand, even if you probably won´t need it, the 4790K comes with a graphics unit (in case you might need backup) and it can easily be overclocked.

But again, this is my personal opinion and I personally would only use Xeons when I want more cores and multiple CPUs.

Kind regards

Michael

[Anonymous]

Great! Thanks, The 4790k it is then. The price for both of those comes to be pretty much the same give or take a few quid.

And yes the backup onboard graphics would be good, hadn't thought of that.

Thanks!

[millerml_USC]

Hello Michael: Are the drivers to assist with running Revit and Bldg Design Suite Ultimate with a NVIDIA GTX 980m? I am also using a GTX TITAN X graphic adapter for a Dell Alienware 15, 32g Ram. The Autodesk website recommend setting the display at 150% 1680 x 1050 which is creating a tiny revit start bar (almost unreadable). The Dell display settings recommend 300% 3840 x 2160. Also the active workset and active design option box, flicker and cannot be selected in either display mode. Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

[michael_nikelsky]

Hi,

I think you might be on the wrong forum. I don't know anything about revit. VRED does support HighDPI displays up to a 250% scaling at the moment so you can setup your display pretty much as you like for VRED.

Kind regards

Michael

[ajewitt]

I am doing research on specifications for my new machine and was hoping we could update this forum with 2016 hardware. While I don't really have a budget, I'd like to keep it reasonable (under $15k).

It seems like the Intel Xeon E5-2600 series CPUs are the way to go and I'm leaning toward a NVIDIA Quadro M6000 24 GB GPU. My current workflow (in VRED) consists of raytracing large images (over 4k) and some short animations (under 10 seconds). I also work with some very large model assemblies in other software so my machine must handle that as well. With the new machine, I'd like to be able to shorten my raytracing render times and have the ability to render out longer animations efficiently.

Does anyone currently use a Xeon E5-2600 series CPU or the Quadro M6000 GPU? If so, how is your experience? If not, what do you run?

Any recommendation, suggestion and/or other applicable information is more than welcome!

[michael_nikelsky]

Hi,

there are actually different versions of the E5-2600 series around. V3 is the Haswell based generation which supports AVX2 and gives you additional performance in some cases so I would at least get one of those. The latest version is V4 based on the broadwell architecture. It does give you a slight performance advantage on the same clockspeed but at the moment the chips are not yet available so pricing is still a bit unclear. From what I have seen so far at several online shops it might look like you get more cores with a slightly lower clockspeed at roughly the same price as the haswell based cpus. Therefore, unless you are really in need of a new machine, I would consider waiting a bit longer until you can actually buy a broadwell based CPU.

Aside from that, the Intel CPUs work great and the combination with the Quadro M6000 is perfect if you can afford it. Regarding the sweet spot of price/performance I would try to get something with about 14 cores per CPU (haswell based, not sure yet about the broadwell but I would guess 16 cores should be a good choice) and as high as a clock speed you can afford. More cores can get you more performance if your scene is computational expensive. The system with the most cores we have tested so far had 72 Cores/144 Threads and VRED scaled really well on it on these heavy scenes. However, on lighter scenes, maybe with motion blur, it is difficult to keep all these cores occupied so less cores with a higher clock will give you faster results.

Hope this helps

Michael

[Anonymous]

Hi Michel,

very god information about processor cores vs clock. What questions I have to ask to my engineering team to identify if their task will have faster performance with more cores or clock ? We are planning to buy a workstation with 2 procs  Broadwell with the higher numbers  of cores. But now reading your post maybe we have to evaluate again. Another question, in which kind of task Vred will take advantage of a Quadro M6000?

thanks in advance ! 

[michael_nikelsky]

Hi,

at the moment VRED only uses the GPU for OpenGL rendering (and some minor postprocessing stuff in raytracing mode). So whenever you want to use something like the Vive or the oculus rift you will need the most powerfull GPU you can get. If you are mainly want to use OpenGL during data preparation you can probably get away with a smaller card. For the best experience the scenes you have should fit into GPU memory but it is not a strict requirement for this case. If you only want to use raytracing anyways any somewhat recent Nvidia or AMD card should do just fine.

As for the CPUs: Simply multiplying the number of real cores (without hyperthreading) by the base clock of the CPU gives a quite good estimate on raytracing performance you can expect for comparisons.

Kind regards

Michael