Render Times

[Caramel]

I don't know if it's just me or not, but my renders seem to take a long time. My average render for a simple scene is about 2-5 hrs, depending on render settings. Here's an example of one of my render's.

It's done completely in Terragen2, here are my render settings:
resolution: 800*600
detail: .5
Anti-aliasing: 3
GI relative detail: 2
GI sample quality: 2

Here's my computer's hardware (it's old):
cpu: Athlon chip over-clocked to 2.11 GHz
memory: 768 MB RAM, but really old (either DDR1 or before, I can't remember)
Video card: Don't know if this matters, but NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP8X

[child@play]

it really depends on the quality settings, especially when you got several cloud layers i think.
right now i'm rendering at same resolution and .5 quality and GI 1/1, 50% rendered after 4 hours, 3 cloud layers at quality 1, that's roughly 400 samples for the closest-to-cam-layer.

my specs are

amd64 sempron 3000 @ 1.8Ghz (no o.c.)
2 gig ddr 400 samsung ram

[cyphyr]

I'm guessing its your hardware, your render settings sem fairly standard. Follow this link http://tg2bench.kk3d.de/index.htm for a benchmark test, that will let you see if its your system or not.
Happy Rendering
Richard

[DiscoBall]

GI = 2 = maxed out render time.

Usually GI > 1 means long renders..but high quality...

[king_tiger_666]

yeah run that benchmark and it should give you a rough estimate of how long your renders should take .. the list has gotten quite extensive too

[reck]

It's interesting to see how people with the same systems can have such a big difference in times. For instance I have an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 running at 2.4ghz with 2GB of RAM. So I took a look at the table to get an idea of where my system would fit in. Sure enough there I see 4th from top a guy (Christian Petrik) with the same processor, same amount of ram, same type of ram and same chipset as me - time to render 0:03:34. So to compare I download the test file and open in terragen, close all other applications, open task manager and close all non essential processes and render the image. Time to render 0:04:58!! How can two systems differ so much? I thought there would a couple of seconds difference between 2 systems of the same spec. Anyway I went into my BIOS and overclocked my system to 3Ghz so now my system has the same chipset and amount/type of memory but is running 700mhz faster. I render again and this time get a time of 0:04:24. So even overclocked that time would put me down with the Athlon 64 systems. I guess there must be some setting in my BIOS or windows that's really clogging my system up, although I'm not quite sure what could be making such a big impact, especially with all the processes shut down etc.

So just to summarise, that chart doesn't necessarily give an accurate picture of what speeds you can expect to get as shown above.

[rcallicotte]

I agree.  There needs to be a better benchmark testing against what matters to the core program, which I thought someone said has to do with the CPU core and maybe the amount of RAM.

[DiscoBall]

Heh, look at the list, there's a guy with 6 Gigs of RAM and Quad core
Somehow, he/she has a Mac..interesting lol

[Caramel]

Alright, here are the results of my render: 5:42

It's slightly slower than faster than this:
Intel Pentium D 840, 2 cores, 3200 MHz, 2 GB Dual DDR2, Nvidia nForce4 SLI, Windows XP Pro SP2, 0:05:47
but slower than this:
AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (Barton), 1 core, 2167 MHz, 1024 MB DDR, Nvidia nForce2 Ultra 400, Windows XP SP2  , 0:05:36

Not bad for such an old system! So, it's not my computer that's slow (at least, not entirely I think). I think it may be just the scene.

Oh, I ran CPU-Z and here are the specifications:
CPU:

Motherboard:

Memory:

Cache:

[child@play]

it's your ram, only sd, the other guy got ddr

[3DGuy]

Hmm that scene with those settings should render in a few minutes. Did you turn on raytrace shadows? If so, that's probably the culprit, turn it off. I don't see a reason for raytraced shadows in this image.

[Allegro]

Heh, look at the list, there's a guy with 6 Gigs of RAM and Quad core
Somehow, he/she has a Mac..interesting lol

That's me
It's not a Mac, it's a Dell.  Got it in November as I'm about to graduate and intend on doing visual effects work.

Edit:  I didn't notice the mac one previously... mine is the other 6gb ram quad.... the 1866 MHz one

[digidon]

To check the render times of the new release(1.8.76.0) vs. the previous version(1.8.64.0) I used the bench test( http://tg2bench.kk3d.de/index.htm ) file in both versions.  To my shock the new version was 63% slower than the previous version.
My computer is as follows: AMD 64 4200+, 2.2 GHZ, dual core; 2 GB DDR-400  ram; XP+SP2.
The bench time for the previous version was 4:33, similar to the times for this computer configuration in the bench test table.  But when I ran the bench file with the new version( TG2 deep+animation 1.8.76.0) the time was 7:25.  That's 63% increase in time.  I ran the tests three times and got the same results.
Both versions were licensed TG2 deep-animation.
This can't be possible.  Does anyone have an explanation?  Has anyone run this simple test?

[king_tiger_666]

i will try this test and see if the newer version changes my render time.... if it ends up being longer than it previously was

[gradient]

@digidon.....I hope that is not the case with the new version.  I have not yet downloaded it.
Can others here confirm this?