Render Times

Started by Caramel, March 16, 2007, 11:43:33 PM

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cyphyr

I have both versions installed seperately and I tried the benchmark on my system and there was no appreacianle differance, might have been a couple of sec faster. I do think we might need a differant benchmark however. I'm not sure how these things work but I would assume that the calculations for haze, reflection and populations for example use differant approaches and therefore differant systems might score differantly ie one king of architecture would be quicker at working out reflections that another of equal "power". Idealy a benchmark should have examples of all types of processing chalenges in it.
Richard
www.richardfraservfx.com
https://www.facebook.com/RichardFraserVFX/
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Ryzen 9 5950X OC@4Ghz, 64Gb (TG4 benchmark 4:13)

king_tiger_666

For what it is. all things being equal the benchmark does give a measure of how fast your pc is at doing a render. Though I would agree, a benchmark that has water "reflectivity"? /3d clouds "with ray tracing"?, maybe a population of grass/ 1 tree or more would test more areas of terragen.
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3DGuy

Confirmed on my machine. Rendertime increase of about 67%  :-\ From 232s to 389s

gradient

Thanx 3Dguy!
It is certainly not the direction I had hoped things would go.
I will not waste my time with the update then.

king_tiger_666

i just ran the benchmark on the new version and previously had a render time of 6mins 06seconds now my render times 10mins 47seconds:(  so much of optimisation?

i have  P4 2.8ghz northwood so it looks like it affects both intel and amd
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3DGuy

Yeah seems bad. It maybe AMD specific. I don't know what CPU cyphyr is running, but he says he sees no difference. So if that's an Intel that might be an indication.

I'm going to try one of my own scene's tomorrow, one that requires a bit more time and see if it's exponentional or just a fluke in this particular scene.

gradient

I'm really sorry to say this....but if what you guys are experiencing is truly an indication of update render times....I think that is really poor work from Planetside.....especially after all the threads concerning excessively long render times in the original version.

I didn't notice anything concerning render time optimization in the docs...so, I didn't really expect any...but to see it go 60-70% higher is, to put it very mildly....a dissapointment.

I'll reserve final judgement until more folks have compared....

digidon

I tried another landscape comparison between the two TG2's (1.8.64.0 vs 1.8.76.0) and saw a 28% slower render time by .76.0.  Of course there will be diferent degrees of difference in relation to the number and type of parameters chosen.  But, more files should be used in the comparison of the two versions.  And please mention which processor, or better still, complete computer configuration.

king_tiger_666

I've kept a record of all my render times for tg2 renders so i may go back and revisit some... though if it is a indication then my clouds and Atlantis renders will be taking over 106hrs to about 115hrs respectively:(


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Caramel

Hmm, I think I have the older build of TG2 (got it ~ the day it came out and haven't updated yet). Yes, I know the RAM is causing it to be slow, but to change that I would have to get a new motherboard (it's ancient!), new video card that supports PCI, etc.

From what I can tell by the other render times, it's on the slightly slower end (42 faster, 29 slower).

Also, the render was a fairly decent time, so I'll try adjusting some settings on my scene and see if it improves the render time.

Oshyan

Although RAM will have some impact on render speed, generally speaking faster RAM isn't going to make a very appreciable difference in render times. Perhaps a few seconds in a 3-5 minute render, but not much more. Amounts of memory below 1GB would have a greater effect, as of course would the CPU.

Setting up benchmark scenes is a tricky thing. Ideally you want as many people as possible to run it to get the widest basis for comparison, but many people are impatient, so a quick benchmark is desirable for that reason. On the other hand the faster the benchmark the greater the margin for error, especially when time is being measured in seconds. To illustrate this, think about the difference between a 50 second render and a 100 second render - the 2nd is twice as long. Now let's imagine the impact of starting another program, even a simple document editor or email program, while the render is happening. Let's say it slows down the render for about 10 seconds as the application loads. That's going to have an impact of as much as 10% on overall render time! But now imagine the imapact of that 10 second slowdown on a 1000 second render - it's only a maximum of 1%. So the longer your render, the more such small and usually inevitable CPU spikes are minimized in terms of their effect on the overall render time. In this particular case the render times are fairly short - I would have aimed for something more like 20-30 minutes - so accuracy may be suffering as a result of that. There are also often processes that are difficult or impossible to truly get rid of before rendering - these would include antivirus scanners and other security software. Depending on the configuration of your security systems this may have a significant impact on render time. Finally remember that the results here are reported by individuals and subject to human error and possible embellishment. It's useful to have a wide variety of results from similar machines to get an average, in case someone is misreporting for some reason. Never assume an unusual result is simply someone who knows how to optimize their system; it's more likely an error.

As far as the increased render times, although some changes to the rendering engine were made in this update, you should not be seeing significantly increased render times in most cases. As noted in the change log there were some accuracy improvements in cloud rendering that may result in slightly slower render times, but the numbers being reported here are unexpected. We will certainly look into these potential issues. It may be useful if people continue to report their results here in this thread so we can get a better idea of whether this is affecting everyone the same. We've already seen at least one person saying they can't duplicate the issue.

- Oshyan

DiscoBall

Quote from: Allegro on March 18, 2007, 06:00:46 PM
Quote from: DiscoBall on March 18, 2007, 12:22:22 AM
Heh, look at the list, there's a guy with 6 Gigs of RAM and Quad core :P
Somehow, he/she has a Mac..interesting lol

That's me :D
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

Heh lol, I wonder how you fit so much? :P You only have 4 slots...right? :P

4 slots..did you get like 2 2 GIG sticks of ram and 2 1 GIG sticks of ram...fits out to 6 gbs of ram :P

Nice...but do the extra 4 do any extra good? lol

cyphyr

OK I gave the benchmark a re test and I guess I must have remembered wrong, big differance first render on TG2 1.8.64.0 came in at 5.31 min and the seccond on the new update, TG2 1.8.76.0 came in at 8.45min. Thats nearly 60% slower (I think, pardon my math) I think I stick with the first release for now. Also comparing the two images there is a definate differance in the clouds, The new release (lower pic) has more defination/contrast in the clouds.
Richard
www.richardfraservfx.com
https://www.facebook.com/RichardFraserVFX/
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Ryzen 9 5950X OC@4Ghz, 64Gb (TG4 benchmark 4:13)

king_tiger_666

the never dells support up to 8gb so its not hard to see how one can have 6gb installed and it probably helps if they are into multimedia design... or the like...
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Moose

#29
Here's mine:-

amd athlon 64 3800+ @2400
via K8T800 Pro chipset
2Gb PC3200 DDR RAM
Quadro 4 900xgl w/ driver 9.1.3.6
Win XP Pro (fully updated)
Classic Theme

With each version I ran the benchmark with as much shut down from the Task Manager as I could.

TG2 1.8.64.0 - fastest time 4:04, slowest time 4:11

TG2 1.8.76.0 - fastest time 6:30, slowest time 7:02

Edit: - Deep + Anim