What to use for rendering

manchine

My bro is working on an animated film and is doing a serious amount of rendering. He's got an Dell machine at the moment that's about a year or so old (a 8300 I think). There's an extra 2GB of RAM has gone into it which has helped a lot but he's looking to maybe get a second machine purely for rendering.

So...the question is what should he look for in such a machine? Since it's for rendering and not gaming would he get by on just the horsepower of the processor or would he need a serious graphics card too?

projectmayhem

good graphics cards help for rendering, quite a bit. but a good processor is just as important. if he's buying a machine for nothing other then rendering he'd be better off getting a new Mac (the new intel ones are a godsend for stuff like that) rather then buying bits for an uber PC

satchmo

I don't think a graphics card is going to help at all for the actual rendering - that's all software-based, so the CPU is doing all the work. I'll admit though I don't do much offline rendering so I could be wrong - the GPU can be used for extra acceleration, but I don't know if it's actually implemented yet in MAX, Maya etc. Only last week RTSquare was announced, which is a MAX plugin for using the GPU to speed up rendering.

At the same time I'd expect the next versions of all the major packages to have some sort of GPU support for ray-tracing, so your brother would do well to upgrade to at least a basic DX9-class at some stage. An extra machine would help too, he could set up a mini render-farm and use both machines to share the load for faster rendering.

manchine

Think he's using MAX for a lot of it. So basically, it's the processor that's more important.

Ta for the answers.

po0k

I've never touched rendering myself, but I would imagine that a decent card would be useful in real-time rednering of the scene or a model as he's creating it on the workstation before sending to the offline renderbox/renderfarm

happy_acid_face

A Dell XPS would be worth a look. Seriously powerful machines with Dual Core Proccesor's and the lastest nVidia graphics cards.

I ordered a XPS laptop last week so fingers crossed it should be here this week. I use 3D studio Max and Cinema 4D so ill check what kind of rendering abilities it has and post it up here.....

satchmo

SyxPak wrote:

I've never touched rendering myself, but I would imagine that a decent card would be useful in real-time rednering of the scene or a model as he's creating it on the workstation before sending to the offline renderbox/renderfarm

Well that's very true, it does help in the modelling part. At the same time, I've found that people who work with MAX alot tend to hide all the models in a scene apart from the ones they're working on, so a high-end graphics card isn't as necessary as a good CPU on the whole.